Victor Davis Hanson predicts the future…
..in the past.
I happened across this 2010 interview with Victor Davis Hanson. I’ve cued up two short segments that I found impressive. Here’s the first part, which is about Russia and Putin:
Here’s the second part, which is about the choices the United States faces:
This is Hanson in his neocon days when he was a big Bush supporter. Does he think the same now?
no he was never a neocon, that wasn’t what animated him, he is a jacksonian, hence he lost patience when the mission was not swift and sure,
VDH certainly supported the neocon cause in the 2000s. I’m sure he has his criticisms of Bush 43, but I’ve never noticed him repudiating his stance during the Iraq War.
Which may be inconvenient to those current conservatives who consider support of the Iraq War as indisputably stupid.
This is Hanson in his neocon days
Dr. Hanson’s publications prior to 2001 were in scholarly journals, university press books, and trade books. He is not known to have been a member of the Committee for the Free World, the Committee on the Present Danger, or the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. He was not associated with the Project for a New American Century either. He does not have any history with policy shops, and social networks in Manhattan or Washington. He’s central California born and bred and he’s been associated with the state college at Fresno, the Hoover Institution, and the Claremont Institute. He placed four articles in Commentary during the period running from 2002-04. That’s about as close as he’s been to the ‘neo-conservative’ social nexus. NB, the actual neo-conservatives had different priorities and personal histories than did conventional Republicans in the ideas business, but they were not dissenters on policy during the period running from 1985 to 1992. Their associates were not 15 yars later.
VDH certainly supported the neocon cause in the 2000s.
There was no ‘neo-con’ cause in 2005. The neo-conservatives were after 1992 conventional Republicans with some signatures in their biographies. It was a distinct segment of political discussion from about 1975 to 1992, not before and certainly not after.
Which may be inconvenient to those current conservatives who consider support of the Iraq War as indisputably stupid.
Why is it ‘inconvenient’? You have differences of opinion as a matter of course in intramural discussion.
what I fault neocons is that they forgot that military action is the last resort not the first, because it is an exceedingly blunt weapon,
I think hanson argument was with facile critiques that afghanistan was about a gas pipeline (that was moore and ted rall) but also howard yeargh dean, or that iraq was about oil exclusively,
Peter Robinson, of the Hoover Institute, suffers the same sort of liberal disorder affecting most of the intellectual class– their blindness to understanding that people make decisions that at times seem irrational.
The entire interview is worth the time. Sensible argument for a defense of cautious American projection of power around the world.
According to Hanson, we’re headed to serfdom.
Why is it ‘inconvenient’? You have differences of opinion as a matter of course in intramural discussion.
Pope Deco:
Of chourse.
However, if one insists or implies, as you often do, that any other opinion aside from the one you hold, is stupid, it’s incovenient to point out that yours is an opinion too and not some absolute indisputable truth to which you are happily privy.
In this particular case I am thinking of MBunge.
what passes for conventional wisdom is so insane, if you told people twenty years ago, they would lock you up like bruce willis was in ’12 monkeys’ of course he told brad pitt, and he created a self fulfilling prophecy,
I was looking at a 2016 interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvEXjWJoV-Y
VDH is deeper than the cartoon NeoCon, Bush/Hitler, Tucker Carlson neo-isolationist view of foreign policy and international conflicts. Curious (not at all) that VDH recognized the malice that was obvious in Putin back during the exalted reign of BHO when Brandon was the Vice, and HRC was the Sec. of State.
But the technocrat social engineers are determined to make equity a reality for all. Some are more equal than others still is their underlying rule.
tucker originally was for the iraq war, so was trump,
who here was with answer, the neostalinists who were organizing the rallies across the country, probably no one, or the likes of jeet heer who divined bizarre
motives from strauss,
it’s a question of means and ends, the ends were laudable, the means were insufficient and sometimes down right wrong, putting maliki in power who was an iranian pawn, one might argue whether debaathification was necessary and to what degree, to what degree afghan culture could return to the period before 1979 when everything went pearshaped,
now we spent 5 years worth of afghan appropriations in one year with ukraine, that moves the needle but should we be involved to such a degree,
miguel:
Tucker then is not Tucker now or haven’t you noticed? Vlad hasn’t changed much though, and the war in Afghanistan is much the same as Vlad’s war in Ukraine?
Oh, is Vlad fighting Nazis too?
yes its’ called a learning curve, we know how this movie ended don’t we, with thirteen dead at the bastion gate, and the same people responsible are now helming this enterprise, while they pretended that there was a GRU led Taliban hit squad, as if the Taliban needed motivation,
much like based on the experience in the 80s, that they argued for intervention against qadaffi, thirty years later, presumably by the people who had learned the lesson of iraq, in this case actually using al queda fighters,
so you look at the able officers that were discarded like senior chief gallagher,
generals flynn and bolduc, vs the ones like milley and austin who punched tickets and seem not to have learned any lessons,
twenty years on, we discovered most?? of those same officers, found nothing that needed to be salvaged from the cities under a proxy guerilla war, but a rowdy waterbuffalo party is ‘insurrectionary’
who would have thought large parts of the entire apparat would be turned against the law abiding, god believing patriotic portion and leave the criminal malcontents mostly untouched, that the basic facts of biology would be contested, and institutions be torn down,
However, if one insists or implies, as you often do, that any other opinion aside from the one you hold, is stupid,
Your issues are not my problem.
Art Deco – here’s a chap who thinks neo-conservatism is very much up to date:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/neoconservatism-ukraine-russia/
If I click on the second video I get a repeat of the first one. Eh?
It seems that some people are labeling VDH a neo-con as though that were a bad thing. For starters I don’t think he is a Neo anything. His philosophy and world view are rooted in intense study of the past, projected into his views of the present. If anything, I would call him a “classio-con”, or a “retro-con”.
A thought about some of the pebbles thrown at GW in this thread. At most you could say that GW made two big mistakes. He either deliberately, or due to false intelligence used the specter of WMD as a pretense to oust Sadaam. That backfired. No pretense was really necessary. Further, once the military objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan were achieved, he turned the peace over to the State Department and Colin Powell/Richard Armitage. Then they embarked on the futile task of building democratic nations out of tribal entities; while dragging our military along. Not to say that a lot of career military were not happy to have a venue in which to make their mark. Of course, Obama let those projects drag on in fits and starts for his eight years as well.
On the other hand, since we all opine from limited information, much of what I outlined above could be wrong. It may be that Bush, and Obama as well, were driven by the perceived necessity to stay in the region to forestall Iranian hegemony from developing. If so, that effort largely failed for some of the same reasons that we failed in Vietnam. We are just not good at limited war, or against ruthless insurgencies. Oddly, considering the duration of our commitments, we faced adversaries who were more committed and infinitely more patient.
miguel, who can’t acknowledge that Vlad is still the same, eh, whatever, talks about a learning curve, and then dives into all sorts of other equally malign issues. LOL
The “Pope” thing is past its pull date.
Oldflyer: “We are just not good at limited war, or against ruthless insurgencies. Oddly, considering the duration of our commitments, we faced adversaries who were more committed and infinitely more patient.”
People defending their homes don’t give up easily. Especially in under-developed countries where the people are used to living in difficult conditions. Hoping to plant the seeds of democracy in such places has turned out to be a fool’s errand.
The Commie North Vietnamese were more committed to their goals, much as Mao and Kim Il Sung were committed to theirs. Communism/socialism is a very attractive myth. So much so that millions have died in its pursuit.
Vietnam today is doing okay economically, but it’s still divided. The southerners still hate the Commies in Hanoi. They are becoming a lot like China. Kind of a fascist arrangement between government and business.
I have a Vietnamese friend here who has a successful landscape business. We talk occasionally and he fills me in on what he’s hearing from the coconut grapevine.
Islam is a tribal religion, which is very much based on the “Big Man” type of rule. Atatürk had to kill a lot of people to de-Islamize Turkey. That’s what it would take in Iraq or Afghanistan to do the same. And Ataturk’s Turkey is now Islamic again. 🙁
George W. opined that Muslims were dreaming of freedom and democracy. It’s an opinion that proved to be wrong. Heck, I’m not so sure how many Americans under 30 are dreaming of freedom and democracy these days. As VDH says, we’re sliding toward a DEI, equal outcomes society. Seeing that interview was in 2010, I would say we are much further along the path now.
It seems that too many in our society are convinced they don’t want/need to work. A universal guaranteed income will solve all their problems. That way lies self-inflicted poverty. It’s been tried before and never worked. But we don’t learn from history. Sad for coming generations.
@miguel cervantes
As one of those few who still will hold the label today without turning coat or betraying America First, I think people tend to underestimate the degree to which the US tried diplomacy ad nauseum. We spent more than a decade trying to get Saddam Hussein to get back in line, and even longer with the Taliban and increasingly more desperate attempts to get them to extradite Osama Bin Laden, which they denied on the justification of even more and more threadbare lies that they had him in custody and thus extradition was somehow not necessary.
What is remarkable is that the US issued yet final attempts at diplomacy with both, even after 9/11, only to get given the middle fingered salute. With the Taliban this was particularly egregious since they refused to turn him over, though they did make a great deal about how they would transfer him over to some undisclosed third party who would then extradite him to us… in the miracle he didn’t just “mysteriously escape” from that third party custody.
For obvious reasons even Dubya “religion of peace” Bush and Foggy Bottom could recognize when they were being played in such a fashion, and so they moved in.
I have grown increasingly cold towards the Bush Dynasty, especially given the rank ingratitude they showed to those of us who bothered defending them from the No Blood for Oil BS and other stuff, but I do think people legitimately underestimate the degree to which the “NeoCons” and the Bush Policies were a deliberate reaction to the 1990s style failures in foreign policy towards the Middle East. And while one can make a non-insane argument that Saddam’s sins did not warrant a military response or at least not a full scale invasion and occupation, I find that to be pretty much a nonstarter when it comes to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The American people justifiably wanted blood even if they did not know the full history of “diplomacy” with the Taliban, and those who did were generally even more livid.
Art Deco – here’s a chap who thinks neo-conservatism is very much up to date:
The ‘chap’ is Norman Podhoretz’ son. He is 61 years old and, bar Michael Lind, about the youngest person ever to have been on the membership rolls of the Committee for the Free World.
I have grown increasingly cold towards the Bush Dynasty, especially given the rank ingratitude they showed to those of us who bothered defending them from the No Blood for Oil BS and other stuff
Agreed. And their retainers as well.
It seems that too many in our society are convinced they don’t want/need to work. A universal guaranteed income will solve all their problems. That way lies self-inflicted poverty. It’s been tried before and never worked. But we don’t learn from history. Sad for coming generations.
There isn’t any secular decline in the employment-to-population ratio and number of TANF beneficiaries has fallen to 1.8 million. (AFDC beneficiaries in 1992 were about 12 million in number).
and norm is very dissapointed in him i’m sure, the publication he brought to life, has become blanc mange, I was speaking more of libya and other places where they went along with the forcing out of authoritarian regimes, armitage ended up the hedge of erdogan’s bazaar since he was untouched by pat fitzgerald, who crushed conrad black because he could, an early victim of lawfare
now powell who was too responsible to prince bandar for his career advancement was too facile with his ‘pottery barn’ expression, saddam’s tikrit clique had wrecked the country over 25 years, but solving the problem was harder, chalabi so wanted his country back he made compromises that were unwise, (see how diplomatic I can be) in the end, his fate was like those in those deleted portraits surrounding stalin, the question of iraq policy was split between state who wanted the old regime, the company that wanted the old baathist generals and defense that wanted the exiles, bremer split the baby and ticked off everyone,
we are undergoing an itijihad a cleansing of our society, it escalated from 2000 on, commentary was rather blaise about this whole era, blaming orange man and the waterbuffalo jamboree,
VDH covers the playing field about the elements of success as a nation, but for our rich natural resources and the quality of our human capital. If we do not drastically improve the product of our educational establishment, the rest will make no difference.
indeed the software is as important as the hardware,
there have been two projects of reform and revolution that failed in Russia, it created the oligarchs and the siloviki, in Iraq it birthed the shiite death squads and gave new life to the sunni islamists,
JJ i agree with most of what you said. I, too, have opportunity to interact with a number of Vietnamese ex-pats/refugees; or their offspring. They appear for the most part genuinely devoted Americans. Strangely, to me, also appreciative of our mostly failed efforts. Of course they are the survivors.
I do not follow your statement about the Bushs turning their backs. I suppose you refer to Trump, who alienated the close-knit clan so gratuitously; as he did with so many people. I wonder if Trump ever sat down with the “establishment” to lay out his vision and invite their cooperation? No, I don’t really.
I was a Bush supporter, and I still am although I do not see him as perfect. Unlike many folk’s perception of Reagan.. Most of us are appalled at the treatment that Trump has endured; but, so many seem to overlook that which tormented “W” from the day after election until the end of his tenure. Of course during his first term he had to cope with the enormous and far-reaching fall-out from 9-11. And for reasons, whether valid or invalid, felt that he had to take action against Sadaam. The latter decision, which among other things cracked the door for an Iranian/Shia surge toward the vacuum left by Sadaam’s fall, defined the course of his second term. In addtion, he still had the Democrat-media Cabal of election deniers who fought him tooth and nail. .
In an ironic twist of fate, I suspect that the street carnage and mortality in the nearly 14 years since Bush’s departure have exceeded all of the losses endured in Iraq and Afghanistan; and has had a more deleterious impact on our society.
Miguel. I would like to follow your thoughts. Sorry, but I can’t. Maybe some punctuation would help. I don’t know.
what part is unclear, in retrospect iraq seemed to be a better prospect then afghanistan, but it was no longer the relatively sectarian regime it was in the 90s,
the corruption exemplified in the oil for food program, the sanctions indifferently applied hollowed out the society, and sunni islam filled it, even the nasquabandi sufis that made up the officer corps paid lip service to it, the demographic reality of shia and kurdish dominance, was untenable specially in the western part of the country,
the itijihad, it’s a turkish term applied to the armenian genocide, thats how they referred to the debaathification, chalabi became a scapegoat in that process, as he upset the applecart in london as well as washington’s political establishment,
Further, once the military objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan were achieved, he turned the peace over to the State Department and Colin Powell/Richard Armitage.
I was also a supporter of Bush, more on Afghanistan than Iraq. When Bremer took over, I knew all was lost. For a good view of what happened in Afghanistan, read Gary Berntson’s “Jawbreaker”.
Once the “Big Army” came in and told all the SF guys to “shave and get into uniform,” the thing was lost. The “Big Army” is what we have running DoD right now. Carter Ham kept his mouth shut to save his pension and I don’t blame him but that story should be better known.
in Iraq it birthed the shiite death squads and gave new life to the sunni islamists,
Provinces in Iraq have a population of about 2.2 million on average and have sufferred about 35 civilian deaths from political violence (on average) in the last 12 months.
Ulster’s population during the years running from 1977 to 1999 averaged about 1.5 million and the number of civilian deaths from political violence therein averaged about 35 per year.
Iraq is suffering from a security problem, not a civil war or insurrection.
much as with vietnam, small unit warfare had kept things on a slow boil, until halberstam basically panicked the company to get rid of diem, it went pearshaped from there, long before the marines landed at pleiku, moyar is key to understanding this, of course halberstam’s pulitzer would be at stake, as with many others, who misunderstood the story,
Here’s my prediction. Trump is indicted and convicted within 12-18 months. DC jury.
Ron the Second runs and wins, in part, based on his promise to pardon Trump.
DeDantis then appoints Trump as Special Counsel to investigate how the Biden Crime Family amassed millions in Bitcoin and why the FBI did nothing about it despite knowing about it the entire time.
It’s pretty clear that Russia is looking out for Russia. Which not a bad thing per se. The trouble started with repeated US interference in Ukraine. Meddling in the affairs of Ukraine, which has been, and will continue to be nearly as Russian as western Russia. The Minsk agreements are out the window. The CIA installed a puppet president that favored the West. Western arms have been going to Ukraine for at least ten years now. And they been used against ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine. I don’t fault Putin for trying to protect those ethnic Russians.
The situation in Ukraine is the result of faulty western diplomacy and intervention. Somehow I don’t think Trump would have gotten Ukraine in this mess.
The trouble started with repeated US interference in Ukraine
It didn’t.
The CIA installed a puppet president that favored the West.
They didn’t.
I do wish you, Geoffrey, et al could discuss this issue without predicating your responses on witless fictions.
Yawrate tries the Geoffrey Britain method of defending Vlad? Or maybe he forgot to use a “satire” flag.
If it is satire, good job. LOL
If it is serious, sad really sad.
Yawrate:
Here’s some things for you to consider, Vlad won’t approve though
Wagner Attacks Bakhmut from All Directions! 20 Nov 22 Ukraine Map Update -army combat veteran reacts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pprOLahWMss
Ukraine’s Kherson Campaign – Lessons & Implications of the Southern counterattack – Perun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxR1jmZTLew
Or just say Ukraine was liberated by Roosia, to remove Nazis, Satanists, CIA toadies, NATO aggressors, or WEF/Davos subhumans. Your choice Yawrate, Geoffrey. You be you.
Roosia is looking out for Roosia which is not a bad thing per se, if you align with Roosia. That is an interesting view or more satire. Who do you align with? Is it like a gender thing?
America doesn’t look out for it’s own interests, look at the pirate crew, that is still in charge, almost exclusively bought off by xi, hence they are silent when his complicity is clear in the deaths of millions across the world
Focus miguel, he was speaking of Roosia and Roosian interests. The Brandon junta’s focus is mostly on its crotch.
Oldflyer: “I do not follow your statement about the Bushs turning their backs.”
I said that Bush had the opinion (probably from talking to Muslim expats) that rank-and-file Muslims were dreaming of freedom and democracy. I wanted to believe the same thing. “The Pentagon’s New map” was a big hit in 2004. It was written by Thomas P. M. Barnett who had been an intelligence analyst at the Naval War college and had developed a grand plan for bringing the lesser developed nations (The Gap) into the modern world (The Core), and thereby creating a world with much less friction and violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map
It sounds quite reasonable on paper. My wars were Korea and Vietnam. Our goals had been to keep the parts of those countries that wanted freedom and democracy in a position to achieve that goal. It worked with Korea. Why not with North Vietnam? IMO, it was the gradualist approach, Nixon’s being embroiled in Watergate (Operations Linebacker One and Two had the North on the ropes, but Nixon was too embattled at home to see and seize the opportunity.), and the eventual betrayal by the Democrat controlled Congress. (“Historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid. Without the necessary funds, South Vietnam found it logistically and financially impossible to defeat the North Vietnamese army. Moreover, the withdrawal of aid encouraged North Vietnam to begin an effective military offensive against South Vietnam.)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/31400
I believed from my personal experience that what was lacking was a clear plan (There was never a clear plan, except gradualism, in Vietnam) and the will to execute it. It seemed that Bush and his advisors knew what they were getting into. “The Pentagon’s New Map” was the clear plan. At the time I had little knowledge of Islam. Today I believe that Islam and Islamic nations can only be reformed from within. The Sunni – Shia split, the various subsets (Salafi/Wahabi/Sufi/Alawite/Druze/etc.), and the ingrained idea that there can be no separation of government and religion all make Muslim dominated countries difficult to bring into the “Core.” I think the West needs to recognize that and follow policies that recognize that reality.
I supported Bush even during the Obama years when he was mute about all the outrageous policies being followed and the blame being laid on him for so many things. However, when he joined the attack on Trump, I decided he had really jumped the shark. I even wrote him a letter telling him how misguided I believed he was. No answer, of course.
Art: Statistics can tell you certain things. They can also mislead you. There is now an open push for a universal guaranteed income.
https://www.povertylaw.org/article/guaranteed-income/
Seven million able bodied males have dropped out of the work force.
https://theweek.com/articles/659245/mystery-americas-missing-male-workers#:~:text=More%20than%207%20million%20men%20between%20the%20ages,age%20was%20either%20working%20or%20looking%20for%20work.
The work ethic is dying among many Americans.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-american-work-ethic-dying-11620858123
Make of it what you will.
@Yawrite
This would be a hell of a lot more convincing if the Russian government didn’t do things like trying to squelch open discussion of and agitation about things like Russia’s endemic
STD, drug, and birth rate problems. Or giving Kadyrov an increasingly free rein in Chechnya. It has gotten to the point where Kadyrov has turned the state into a somewhat more pro-Federation version of Dudayev’s dictatorship and is prosecuting Orthodox Russians with the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin. I can scarcely think of a larger slap to the face of all the Russians who died in the Chechen Wars after the Soviet Union, and it clearly represents how “Russia” is not “looking out for Russia” but for the power of the Russian political cliques in charge of the country since it shows them undermining Russia’s long (and even intermediate) term interests in favor of their own.
Admittedly the Kremlin’s leadership is hardly unique in this regard; just ask Brandon’s handlers about the illegal issue. But it does make a mockery of the idea that Putin’s regime represents some kind of Russia First mirror or the Trad champion of Christian values.
Absolute poppycock.
The idea that Ukraine prior to “repeated US interference” (whatever the hell THAT is supposed to be, and I doubt most of the people peddling it can explain) was some kind of beacon of stability or good things under the tenure of people such as Yanukovych is an active insult to the historical memory and flies in the face of basically reading it.
Moreover, as far as foreign interference in Ukraine goes no nation has a worse record than that of Russia. It has no competitors in post-Soviet history, and the only competitors it has in the grand scale of things are (Ottoman) Turkey and the Poland/Lithuania Tag Team, especially not when the Kremlin sanctioned Yanukovych’s attempt to take power through fraud and either masterminded or at least gave succor to the attempt to assassinate Yuschenko – at the time leader of the opposition and a Presidential candidate.
Firstly: Poppycock. That is barely true of the Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine like Crimea and the Donbas, let alone all of it.
Secondly: If people like you had historical self-awareness, you would realize that this would make Ukrainians MORE hesitant to get in too tight with Russia even outside of things such as the darker parts of their shared history precisely because the similarities leave it exposed to influence attempts and plays that would possibly weaken it, and which the Moscow Kremlin has had a long history of exploiting (as the Khmelnitskys learned; and if you do not know who the Khmelnitskys are or at least their patriarch Bohdun is, it’s probably be best if you stopped talking about this RIGHT now and started researching Ukrainian history).
In much the same way as the deep ties and enduring similarity between the North American societies that would become the US on one hand and their British Mother Country ultimately bred revolution at what they saw as bad treatment and then somewhere North of a century of bitter hatred and rivalry in order to avoid being re-absorbed. This is made worse because while the British at least more-or-less respected the peace treaties they inked with the US and stopped making grandiose claims against its independence, the Kremlin nakedly violated almost all of the treaties it signed with Ukraine from Budapest to Minsk II, and has been overt in denying the existence of a separate or independent Ukrainian nation.
Ya think this is going to make Russo-Ukrainian relations more generous?
And WHY do you think that is?
The Minsk Agreements wouldn’t have been necessary at all had the Russian government not invaded Ukraine upon nakedly fraudulent pretexts with disguised units of the Russian Federation military.
But even beyond that, they would’ve at least had a Chance to hold had the Russian Government not nakedly violated them.
https://cepa.org/article/dont-let-russia-fool-you-about-the-minsk-agreements/
https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2016/02/bellingcat_-_origin_of_artillery_attacks_02-12-15_final.pdf
(Yes, I know it is Bellingcat, but I have yet to hear anybody come up with a good rebuttal to this document).
Simply put, Russia is and always has been an artillery army, and in recent decades it has become even more dependent on ranged fire support, as Grozny can attest.
Moreover, the nature of the fighting in the Greater Donbas Rust Belt meant a mixture of nasty city sieges and positional warfare in the countryside, both of which put a primacy on artillery fire.
So the Russians ramped up artillery support to their little Donbaschukuo “separatist” forces in increasingly hard-to-deny ways, making a mockery of the idea that Russia had ever respected the Minsk Accords. But without this artillery support and other violations of Minsk victories like the siege of Luhansk Airport would’ve taken even more time than they ultimately did and the Russian/Separatist troops would’ve fared even worse.
“The CIA installed a puppet president that favored the West.”
No, no it didn’t. And I am tired of this ignorant meme.
Even if we pretended that the CIA had “installed a puppet President”, this would ignore the fact that “Yats” (he who is famously talked about in the much-balleyhoed Nuland phone call which supposedly dictated the composition of the new Ukrainian government in spite of how it didn’t really) led a series of increasingly ineffectual caretaker governments pending a proper election – said caretaker governments collapsing AT LEAST ONCE only to be reshuffled in order to at least keep limping, and which were thoroughly undermined by the unprovoked Russian invasions in 2014 and propping up of armed separatist terrorist groups – before he was replaced by someone different, namely Poroshenko. Who was in turn replaced in 2019 by Zelenskyy.
In reality what happened was that the democratically elected Rada removed Yanukovych from power legally on the grounds of incapacity to carry out his constitutional duties (since he fled the country rather than answer the Legislature’s questions about his cabinet’s crimes and atrocities, including a dynamite allegation – later proven true – by the military stating that Yanukovych had tried to order them to illegally massacring any protest group) and implicitly his assorted crimes and violations of the Ukrainian constitution. What is ALSO notable is that the Reda that did this was elected alongside Yanukovych and was actually DOMINATED by his power bloc, the “Blues”, under the leadership of his personal Party, the Party of Regions.
So this would be akin to the Democrat Congress impeaching Obama and Brandon over their violations of the Constitution and denouncing them explicitly for tyranny. Which to be fair was probably at least partially greased by assorted Western-financed bribes or horse trading but still paints a VERY favorable picture of the “corrupt banana republic in Eastern Europe” in comparison to our own Shining City on the Hill.
After Yanukovych’s cabinet was removed from power, a caretaker government was appointed in order to prepare the way for democratic elections within a few months. While these were destabilized by the Russian invasions of Crimea and the Donbas timed in order to exploit the interregnum, they ultimately went forward and ushered in the Petro Poroshenko Bloc.
While these governments were significantly Pro-Western, they were by no means “puppets” of the West, nor were they established by the CIA. Even a cursory look at the fights over bits of foreign policy show that.
As is ABSOLUTELY APPROPRIATE both in light of US and other Western interests and the LAW, in light of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Astana Declaration of 2010. The former being particularly relevant since it involved the US and UK explicitly guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence and borders and promising to provide support if it were ever aggressed upon in exchange for Ukraine giving up its share of the Soviet nuclear stockpile to Russia (which turned out to be not that great an idea in hindsight)
Oh Humbug Nonsense. Let me count the ways..
Firstly: *ZELENSKYY IS A RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN CITIZEN, AS ARE MANY MEMBERS OF THE UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT.* The “ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens” those weapons are being used on are (outside of a few illegal atrocities by Loyalist units like Gaidar) overwhelmingly armed rebels waging war against the Ukrainian government. But they are getting weapons used on them because they are rebels, not because they are ethnic Russians, as shown by the use of Western weapons on non-ethnic Russian rebels fighting with the DPR and LPR, as well as the prevalence of ethnic Russians throughout the Loyalist ORBAT, even in freaking Azov Brigade where they form at least a strong minority.
When ethnic Russians feel secure in joining up with Neo-Fascist Ukrainian ultranationalist paramilitaries, it is pretty safe to say this is not fundamentally about ethnic strife.
Secondly: Putin is not really protecting ethnic Russians. And we know this because we know the regions that are most active in persecuting ethnic Russians today, and have been for the past decade or so.
And those are Kazakhstan and Kadyrov’s Chechnya.
The Kadyrovites are so justifiably infamous and well-known on this score they SHOULD need no introduction and I won’t belabor them here.
But Kazakhstan has seen the largest case of state-backed discrimination against ethnic Russians in the world, well in excess of what Ukraine is accused of doing. Ethnic Russians have been leaving the country (often times the country of their birth) in the dozens of thousands for years in the face of what amounts to affirmative action gone mad and aggressive Kazakhification efforts that – while not genocidal – are openly discriminatory.
https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6ad6588.html
https://thediplomat.com/2016/02/why-are-russians-leaving-kazakhstan/
So what has Putin done?
Not much.
Because the Kazakh governments have historically had very good relations with the Kremlin and supported the Putin government diplomatically and economically.
So rather like a certain migratory Austrian in the South Tyrol Options Agreement told his ethnic kin in South Tyrol to either return to the Reich, Drop Dead, or become Italian in the face of Mussolini’s prosecution while banging the drums of war over far milder sins in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Putin sold his ethnic kin up the river.
But please, Please tell me again how Putin is supposedly looking out for Russia.
No, it is a result of faulty RUSSIAN diplomacy and intervention, as well as Kremlin egotism and abuse of nations in its “near abroad.” Nor was this some kind of arcane part of reality.
Putin’s Russia has historically had very dysfunctional relations with the nations in its “Near Abroad”, including staunchly pro-Russian/Kremlin regimes like that of Lukashenko’s Belarus in the form of decades long tariff and pipeline wars. Ukraine was no exception, and this dragged on for years and years, to the point where even Yanukovych only secured election in 2010 by promising to triangulate between Russia and the West by seeking to negotiate an EU Association Agreement.
Which led Putin to REE and arm twist Yanukovych into abandoning in a rather humiliating fashion, which sparked Euromaidan.
Ultimately, the vast majority of problems in Eastern European foreign relations can be chalked down to a Russian elite that views international diplomacy as a “My Way or the Highway” game, refuses to abide by its obligations under either the law or international agreements, and prefers to tear countries and societies apart rather than face the prospect of having them slip out of its orbit due to said brutality and incompetence.
But Ukraine is not Georgia or Moldova, and it looks like this country is one a bit too large for the Kremlin to easily digest.
He didn’t. Ukraine was in this mess well before he was as a result of Putin’s policies, and there is a reason Trump supported Ukraine and indeed inaugurated lethal aid to it.
too much minutae, our country is being hollowed out, disenboweled 100,000 dead due to fentanyl poisoning, thanks to xi, the pla ruling councils like general chi haotian might see a certain irony, as compared to how china ended up under the concessions,
what part konnech played in orchestrating last week’s outcomes in unclear, but there is an element in this, otherwise gascon would not have dropped the charges, then there is the impact of the xi directed biological attack upon our country and the rest of the world
9/11 happened on GWB’s watch. My impression is that his Administration’s focus before that was “immigration reform,” i.e. amnesty for illegal Mexicans.
he was also listening to grover norquist who in turn was listening to khaled saffuri and sami al arian, both islamist infiltrators in the political system
Statistics can tell you certain things. They can also mislead you.
They haven’t mislead me. You’re just bound and determined.
@miguel cervantes
I can’t agree. Ba’athst Iraq was still a brutally, bitterly sectarian regime. It had cooled down somewhat since the bloodbaths of the 1980s and 1990s, but that was less due to reforms so much as exhaustion, and while many sectarian groups like the few Arab Christians benefitted better it still seriously undercut whatever legitimacy it had by marginalizing groups like Arab Shiites and Kurds.
I can’t really agree. What hollowed out society far more than corruption – let alone the sanctions – was the totalitarian, highly personalistic nature of the Hussein government. Granted, Mesopotamian governments have been highly authoritarian and overly-centralized for something like 3 or 4 thousand years and Saddam was far from the worst, but for some reason Ba’athist governments seem particularly prone to it (since the original Ba’athist “thinkers” complained, and we see similar developments across the border in Syria), but the mixture of the reliance on Saddam’s personality coupled with the toxic relations he had and the coming succession crisis did not help.
This was made worse by Saddam exacerbating the internal divides in Iraq, to the point where I have often compared the relations in the country during his time to the Norman conquests in Britain and the Mezzogiorno or the Mamluks (especially in Egypt). Where the rulers are “foreign” in some way (in the case of Iraq mostly still Arab but Sunni) and rule over a population that views them as oppressors and possibly foreigners holding court in fortified areas (castles or cities).
Saddam’s regime was largely a Sunni Arab interest group predicated on him and besieged by many “others”, particularly different flavors of Shiite, and kept aloft by extremely brutal and high-handed sectarian divides like in the Iraqi Military (which is one reason we disbanded it; it was both so fatally corrupted by its history as a tool of the regime but also had captured enlisted mugging their officers or worse in POWs).
So in the absence of a “secular’ totalitarian alternative, the Sunnis by and large bought in with a religious totalitarian alternative from their co-belligerents.
Agreed.
There’s something I find absolutely disgusting about that, because I think it says plenty about the kind of superiority and hubris the Iraqi Sunni Arabs had. It is particularly galling given how many of them were dynasties lasting for a couple centuries, and who had played a role in things like the brutal sectarian cleansings in Iraq during its mid and early century (such as the butchery of Assyrians) and – as loyal agents of the Porte- in the actual Armenian and Kindred genocides of that era.
But on the other hand I cannot entirely say they don’t have a point. The Sadrs have been a known factor for decades (as have many others) and the fears that Sunnis have of being victimized by Shiites and others or even wiped out is quite real.
But at the same time, the Armenians were bayoneted en masse, impaled on bayonets, and herded either into caves that served as proto-gas chambers or into Deir-ez-Zoir to starve to death as their bodies consumed themselves in what was supposed to be a campaign of extermination. The Sunni Arabs saying this conflate being brought down to equality with their supposed co-nationals (and they are supposed to be co-nationals because while the borders were drawn by the British and French the urban Sunni Arab elite spent oceans of blood – mostly others’ – and treasure to force it) is “genocide.”
I can think of very few better or more clearcut examples of “Your speech is violence, our violence is speech” being posited – however implicitly- than this. It also I think underlines how sectarian the regime ultimately was and how the foundations for its power hollowed out Iraq far more than else.
On this much I can’t entirely fault them. Chalabi was a frankly ludicrous and comic figure and for very bad reasons, but the Coalition shares much of the blame. But at least Iraq is still a united and moderately reformed government, albeit one that I fear is increasingly under Iranian and Shiite supremacist hegemony. We’ll see how it goes from there, but at least it is better than what happened in Afghanistan.
“9/11 happened under GWB’s watch.” Followed by an assertion of something that might have been planned but never happened.
Ding, Ding, Ding we have a winner! Such profundity. We are not worthy.
and Saddam was far from the worst,
Nope. Pretty much the worst. The pre-Baathist military regime (1963-68) and the Hashemite regime (1920-58) were about normal for the region and not notably disruptive in the regional state system. The Kassem regime (1958-63) was similar to the Nasser regime in Egypt.
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria had the worst economic performance of the countries of the Near East, North Africa and South Asia over the period running from 1958 to 2003. Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, and Cyprus had the best if you bracket out those places where advancement was attributable to the development of fuel and mineral exports.
@Art Deco
To which I respond: Shamshi-Adad the First, Hammurabi, Tiglath-Pileser the First, and Hulagu Khan have entered the chat.
People who not only tried to genocide entire societies or conquer an empire across the Middle East as Saddam tried, but who succeeded. It is no coincidence Saddam glorified in Iraq’s Babylonian heritage.
Granted, the fact that I have to go back to the Medieval era or the Bronze Age to find people worse than him and not all of them were that (for instance, the famous Sargon of Akkad was probably far more humane in spite of also ruling a minority dominated occupation government) says a L O T.
Agreed, though I was focusing less on economic performance than humanitarian ones. In which Saddam does rank up there even among the ancients but does not really come into the top tiers.
Unfortunately, VDH has degenerated into yet another shill for the Ruling Caste, much like Walter Russell Meade. He should stick to writing about his neighbors in rural California, if he hasn’t moved.
If it wasnt for chalabi saddam would still be in power a fact people pretend of course nahim aouchi baathist bagman deploys lawfare to cover up his corruption involving the italian government and other parties
Re w he drew capital from the bin mahfouzes the pharaons and other parties from his business all of these were parties to the golden chain who in turn staked al queda
The neocons want cheap labor and are not really that keen on assimilation if one looks at where there focus on which is ironic because new immigration is least likely to be sympathetic to jews
See sahib omar and the squad
I think Hanson wrote this one ESPECIALLY for you, Bob!
(“On order”, so to speak…)
“The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left “—
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/20/the-strange-morality-of-the-bay-area-billionaire-left/
(As far as Hanson “[shilling] for the Ruling Caste”, heh, I knew you had a few “issues”—you always seemed to enjoy making them amply clear—but who knew you were this twisted….?)
In any event, I suspect that your animus towards Hanson and Meade is SOLELY because they support the ZIOs.
Fair enough…but why that should skew your entire sense of judgment, gosh, heaven only knows…
I didnt bring the rise of islamic state into the picture because like the golden square which allied with hitler and the baath who sided with the soviets they are just another manifestation on sunni tribal intentions upon the demographic majority in iraq which drove the shia and the kurds into the arms of the communists and the dawa faction
An ironic element is how khomeini was never persecuted by saddamm when he was in najaf and karbala
bob sykes:
Bless your heart and the horse you rode in on.
Ive gone far afield
Commentary under the podlet and national review under lowry has put nearly no resistance to the left agenda buckley would be distressed that his life long project has gone to ground. Everything that has happened in the last 15 years that has made American more coarse weaker in myriad ways was to be as expected my distaste for the bushes is encapsulated in their willing to go along with these trends
Ah walter mead ive been following him since he was a young lefty out of yale sighing over the lefts failure to topple the country and dark intrigues of the right then there was the interval where he was enthused about buying siberia from the russians a notion that never really went anywhere thankfully
Heh
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/cnns-new-boss-announces-unsettling-layoffs-coming-december
In which Saddam does rank up there even among the ancients but does not really come into the top tiers.
To which I respond: Shamshi-Adad the First, Hammurabi, Tiglath-Pileser the First, and Hulagu Khan have entered the chat.
See Barbara Tuchman on accounts of ancient atrocities.
@bob sykes
Uh what? Are we reading the same VDH? Because VDH has plenty bad to say about the Ruling Caste and he has not turned on Trump, for starters. Indeed, many of his most scathing columns are about the Ruling Caste and their inflated self-worth.
I see that neocons are still around and posting.
Uh what? Are we reading the same VDH? Because VDH has plenty bad to say about the Ruling Caste
Sykes means da Joos.
Saddam was bad but zarquawi who filled the vaccuum was worse and he waz the forerunner of islamic state
Escobar was bad everyone who came after was worse same with guzman loera
From a 2019 Foreign Policy article:
“The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010. It was out of the Donbass that came his corrupt Party of Regions. And it was the Donbass that opposed popular pro-democracy uprisings in 2004 and 2014.”
“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass in the summer of 2014 effectively disenfranchised its voters. That was bad for the voters, but it enabled pro-democratic forces in unoccupied Ukraine to win the presidency and control of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2014. Most of the reforms that have been adopted in the past five years—along with Ukraine’s steady march toward Europe—would have been impossible had the Donbass remained a part of Ukraine.”
“If the eastern Donbass is brought back into Ukraine’s fold, many of these changes could be reversed or stalled, and whatever hopes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has for pursuing more reform would be dashed. By the same token, Putin would be emboldened by Ukraine’s appetite for self-destruction to make even greater encroachments on its sovereignty.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/ukraine-better-without-donbass-costly-reconstruction-pro-russia-west/
Interesting opinion by FP, and possibly a realistic statement of the need to recognize the intractable nature of the dispute between Donbass separatists and Ukraine.
Another point worth considering is this from Donbass separatists. Couldn’t the same principle that allowed Ukraine to declare its independence from the Soviet Union be applied to other regions that didn’t share the same allegiance to Ukraine?
I understand the reluctance of the west to endorse such an idea, but in the case of Donbass, the referendum of 1994 shows overwhelming Russian influence.
Part of the problem, is of course, whether Russia could be trusted to keep any treaty, if the eastern region was given the choice of integration with Russia, as did Crimea in 2014, the results of which were disputed. What would the results be if a secure election were held?
“the text of the Act on the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine is also interesting. It refers to “the deadly danger hanging over Ukraine in connection with the coup d’etat in the USSR on August 19, 1991”. Excuse me, but did Crimea not hold its own referendum on 16 March 2014 for the same reason?
“Proceeding from the right to self-determination provided for by the UN Charter and other international legal documents” – does this only apply to Ukraine, but not to the Crimea, Donbass and other regions?”
https://www.donbass-insider.com/2020/05/14/the-donbass-referendum-of-1994-on-which-the-whole-world-turned-a-blind-eye/
No one disputes that Saddam was a bad man. But as had been noted, the worst of his purges was over. His ruthless consolidation of power is textbook dictator– make extreme examples of power, and the remaining will clap in fear until their hands bleed.
While Saddam was meddling in ME affairs, Iraq did provide a counterbalance to Iran. After his overthrow, the destabilizing effects of Iran in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia and other areas and now their support for Russia’s efforts in Ukraine are a direct result of Saddam’s overthrow.
The Bush administration’s miscalculation of this result neutralized any positive outcomes.
Chalabi certainly gave cover for the administration pre-invasion. Did the administration really believe him?
Mike K:
I’ve noticed that “neocon” is one of those words that are now defined any way the speaker or writer wants to define them, becoming a protean label of opprobrium.
Mike K:
So “neocons” posting comments is a good thing or not?
And you consider yourself a con?, paleo con?, proto con?, philo con?, pseudo con?, or just a Dr(Md) con? Dr cons are not to be confused with Phd cons.
It turned out that extreme conservatives were not ex cons, nor conservative after all.
@Brian E
Ask the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs if they believe that.
Saddam was incapable of purging the former with as much brutality or thoroughness as he did in the 1980s not because of a lack of will or malice, but a lack of means: Allied enforcement of No-Fly-Zones in the North deprived the Iraqi central government of a traditional advantage it enjoyed for half a century over internal rebels and allowed the Peshmerga to fight Iraq ground forces up close, where they stood decent chances of winning. The Marsh Arabs had no such luck because while the Southern No Fly Zone also covered it, they lacked the demographic strength or military organization to offset the fact that Saddam’s armies already occupied their land, and so the slaughters and displacements continued apace.
That fits for his consolidation of power over the Ba’ath Party and the Iraqi Government, but doesn’t change either his internal campaigns or the less… savory aspects of the Hussein Government (the Iraqi one, not the American one) in office. Allowing your eldest son Uday and other leaders the ability to do things like rape underage children in detention centers hardly benefitted Iraqi stability in a conventional sense but it is what happened.
True to a certain extent, but I think this has to be measured against the undeniable harm he was doing. Especially the shapes such “counterbalance” took, such as post-9/11 bidding wars with Iran to see who could provide more support to AQ franchise orgs without it destabilizing their government.
Sorry, can’t agree; Iran was very much active in those other regions before Saddam had his card punched and while we can say that being done gave them more leverage, it didn’t create the problem.
In sharp contrast to the destabilization and particularly the amount of internal leverage Iran gained in Iraq with the ascendant Shiite Majority, which is a direct result of Saddam being dealt with.
I can’t agree, especially given what we now know of Saddam’s financing for the likes of Abu Sayyaf. The issue is it should have been managed better.
Probably a little bit of yes and a little bit of no; I know a lot of veteran Middle Eastern hands had him pegged as a buffoon from the start and some were probably in the Bush Admin (and Totten – before he went full BDS – pointed out how many journalists would not even take notes when he spoke), but he was still a high profile and reasonably connected Iraqi Exile that could at least seem competent to some, so others did.
And there was the not-so-golden-mean of being skeptical of much but believing others.
Re: the Foreign Policy Piece, I can agree with some of its points but I believe on the whole they are seriously missing the plot in most aspects.
While this is true to a POINT, I think it is overstating matters. Yanukovych was a creature of the Donbas, but like the wider Donbas he could never have become such a monster without deep connections to the wider Ukrainian and Russian political landscapes, including the central bureaucracies in Kyiv and Moscow. Which I think is a good point on the whole and does not necessarily recommend a separation of the Donbas from Ukraine.
Moreover, I think this seriously overestimates the degree to which the wider Party of Regions signed up to the worst of Yanukovych’s crimes, given how they ultimately turned on him and supported his removal from office, as well as the degree to which the Donbas is inherently “retrogressive.” There’s a reason why prior to the 2022 invasion the Kremlin could only sustain occupation in about a third of the Donbas; public support was just not there.
There are few more braindead takes than this.
Yanukovych had so polluted the “anti-democratic forces” in Ukrainian politics that a shift to the Orange, “Pro-European” faction was all but inevitable in the next invasion, with a “Pro-Democratic/Pro-European” caretaker government being appointed in a compromise between the Regionnaire/Blue Majority in the Rada and the Orange/Euromaidan leaning minority in the Rada and mass popular movement. Indeed, the Regionnaires were going into the 2014 election denouncing Yanukovych and running to one degree or another as Orangists-Lite, at least for this election.
Which means that a “Pro-European” outcome of the vote was all but inevitable. And most of us who were regular Ukraine watchers knew it, including the Kremlin. Which is one reason why it timed the invasions to be when and where they were, in order to exploit the weakness of the caretaker government(s) to try and force a fait accompli.
But on top of that, there is the fact that the Russian invasion *DID NOT* in fact “disenfranchise” all the voters of the Donbas; only those in the areas that were occupied, and particularly those occupied prior to the 2014 elections. Which was relatively small.
And reading the author, Motyl is a Ukrainian but also an anti-Donbas crumudgeon who has been pretty scathing of the region and its people for a long time and I think has this overly color his view.
In particular, you COULD make similar arguments in regards to Crimea, but Motyl doesn’t… probably because while the populace in Crimea is if anything MORE pro-Russian than that in the Donbas nobody can deny Crimea’s strategic and economic benefits in contrast to the Donbas Rust Belt. Which makes Motyl’s suggestion reek of hypocrisy and motivated “reasoning.”
Again, provably false. Look at the territorial possessions around the 2014 elections. Also look at how the Regionnaires were posturing themselves at the time. It would probably have been less far-reaching or drastic, but still present.
Even if this were true, it would have to be measured against Ukraine’s territorial integrity being rebuilt and more strategic depth to protect it against a Russian invasion. Also, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the people of the Donbas have by and large not gotten more pro-Russian during the occupation than they were. Being at the mercy of people like Strelkov and suffering mass conscription is hardly going to make favorability ratings increase.
I would argue that EVEN if that were true -and I really don’t think it is, especially when you factor in how these regions would likely have legal justification to exclude many of the most pro-Russian powerbrokers from holding office – I would argue it is a necessary evil compared to allowing a permanent dismemberment of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
And this is where I think Motyl’s bias REALLY shines through. A violent, decisive repulse of Putin’s encroachments on its sovereignty would embolden Putin to try more?
It might not completely DETER him from doing so, as the costly defeats North of Kyiv and now in Kherson underline, but I doubt it would make him more eager to do so. Especially in light of how when the Kremlin faced military defeats it moderated its desires, such as how “Novorossiya” was abandoned by about 2015, only to be dug up in the wake of advances in the open war in 2022, only to now be suffering losses due to things like the liberation of Kherson.
For the reasons above, I really do not view it as such. Especially since the “Donbass Separatists” are by this point primarily Russian Federation military forces and members of “The Organs.” Donbas Separatism was never PURELY an astroturf, but it was also never primarily homegrown or organic even in comparison to Crimea (and while Crimea had a much more prevalent and vested autonomy/secession movement what mattered was the Russian Fed Spetznaz deployed there).
The main reason the “Donbas Separatists” are intractable is because of the Rus Fed Government and regulars.
Not in the way it happened, absolutely not.
Firstly: the referendum for Ukrainian independence was quite telling and binding throughout its territory, with majorities even in the Donbas and Crimea. It was also remarkably honest by the standards of Post-Soviet Space Shenanagins. That created a binding allegiance to Ukraine – reflected in the Constitution – that could not be undone easily.
Secondly: the main avenue for negating it would be another honest vote. Which is absolutely not what happened. Instead either a foreign military force illegally occupied Crimea and much of the Donbas, created local puppet organizations, and shoehorned in a laughably illegitimate, corrupt vote to get the result it wanted… or said local “separatist” organizations invited a foreign invasion and occupation and did said vote.
I think the evidence points to the first case as being the more likely, but in either case which one is true is less important than the fact that both are utterly illegitimate. Especially since the Kremlin has steadily rejected all offers by even Zelenskyy and other relative doves for a legitimate plebiscite in the Donbas on condition of demilitarization and internationally supervised elections.
And that was before years of tariff wars, the extent of Kremlin corruption, and now military occupation
Answer; No.
Putin has been “kind” enough to establish and re-establish this multiple times over.
I’d argue they are relatively immaterial for a number of reasons, but starting with the fact that the Kremlin has shown it has zero interest in a secure election being held.
Also, saying the results of the Crimean Referendum of 2014 were disputed is being generous. While I for one COULD see Crimea voting to join Russia by majority, the amount of arm twisting and corruption involved showed Putin was not willing to allow an honest vote in the most.
Excuse me dumbfuck terrorist shill (Not you Brian E, but the person you are quoting), but no, it did not hold “its own referendum for the same reason.”
Firstly because there was no coup in Kyiv in 2014. There was the democratically elected, Regionnaire-dominated Legislature jettisoning its Presidential Cabinet on grounds of failure to carry out his constitutional duties. This is in SHARP contrast to Yazov and the gang arresting Gorbachev in secret without due cause and trying to impose martial law.
Secondly: Crimea didn’t hold its own referendum; the thinly-veiled Russian military occupation force did so, and did so in a laughably illegitimate and rigged manner that confers no legitimacy and tells us nothing about the wishes of the people in Crimea. Especially when you realize that the Rada members from Crimea were still present and holding office in Kyiv during all this time.
It applies to Crimea and the Donbas and other regions, which is precisely why no vote held under the conditions Russia imposed in said regions in 2014 can be respected.
It is SELF-Determination, not Violent-Neighbor-Determination.
And you Mr. Donbas Insider Writer (not you Brian E; sorry for this) probably know that enough, which is why Mr. Donbas Insider has to fall back to the old canard that an abusive, tyrannical, and unconstitutional dictator being ousted by his own legislature amounts to a “coup.”