This has something to do with Ukraine, but you’ll need to connect some dots. I’m getting ready to write about a bunch of people who bother me, stimulate me, provoke me, and intrigue me: John Mearsheimer is the first.
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For a while, it seemed as if we had learned our lesson in Vietnam: don’t get involved in other people’s civil wars and don’t take on the causes of dodgy proxies.
Well, we didn’t.
Some of us did. The others just “learned” what they already knew: we were stabbed in the back by (take your pick): the media, the leftists, the hippies, Walter Cronkite, you name it.
Some people have a hard time seeing reality.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the “Powell Doctrine.” You think you know what it means: it means go in with overwhelming force and have an exit strategy. I recently heard an American general invoke the Powell Doctrine using exactly that meaning. (I think it was this guy.)
So I looked it up. Guess what—that’s not what the Powell doctrine means.
The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:
Is a vital national security interest threatened?
Do we have a clear attainable objective?
Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
Is the action supported by the American people?
Do we have genuine broad international support?
As Powell said in an April 1, 2009, interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, it denotes a nation's exhausting of all "political, economic, and diplomatic means", which, only if all were futile, would result in the condition that the nation should resort to military force.
I was quite surprised by the reasonableness of the Powell Doctrine. I have had a bad opinion of General Powell since Iraq. I don’t see anything about “overwhelming force.” Yet this “overwhelming force” tic is endlessly repeated by our brain-dead media and its cast of chattering nitwits, one of whom was this general.
It’s also here, in this website for war-junkies and spergs, referred to as “decisive force.”
The author of this piece hates the Powell Doctrine. He thinks it’s an excuse to do nothing.
He’s seriously deluded. War is his junk. He’s high on his stash:
“The fear embedded in this alleged lesson is that Americans cannot fight a long war. Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom have laid that myth to rest.”
I had to look up “Enduring Freedom”— it’s the official name for Afghanistan. Iraqi Freedom, that one I could figure out.
Permit me to scream. Long and loud. Whose freedom, the 500K dead people there?
About Afghanistan, that was what woke me up from my years of political slumber, and I don’t think I’ve stopped vomiting yet. The futility, the waste, the idiocy!
If “Enduring Freedom” and “Iraqi Freedom” disprove the Powell Doctrine, give me the Powell Doctrine.
Now, although I was in a political bubble for years, I have never been the type to escape from harsh reality into outright fantasy. I don’t go for anime, I haven’t watched cartoons since I was a kid, and I don’t watch superhero movies. My escape from harsh reality is more reality. A beautiful sunset is real, isn’t it? A beautiful painting, poem, story, book—they, too are real. Those are my escapes.
But when circumstances dictate, I face the facts and I find them curiously comforting.
I was suspicious from the start of the MSM reports about the Russo-NATO war. I asked the guys at RWA Podcast some questions (I can’t remember them); they answered me courteously and soberly, to the best of their ability, and the ground beneath my feet began to shift... and I found myself in a strange new world where tankies and Russkies were more trustworthy than “my” side.
That’s war, I guess. It upends everything you thought you knew.
Which brings me to John Mearsheimer—up next.