If you live within 200 miles of our Nation’s Capital, you probably heard that enormous squeal of terror last week when, on October 22, 2022, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Joe Biden making the not too remarkable suggestion—one would think—that the current bloody war in Ukraine can only be brought to an end by negotiation, rather than, I guess, Vladimir Putin walking barefoot in the snow from Moscow to Kyiv in February to beg for peace—as long as he’s wearing a sign around his neck saying “I am a great big dope.”
Yes, one might think that. But, of course, that’s only true if one were, you know, sane—that is to say, not a member of America’s military intellectual complex, the gang that has brought you such wonders of statecraft as the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Libya, and the War in Syria, which all have contributed so mightily the current era of good feelings that is enjoyed by virtually every member of the human race.
The CPC bent over backwards to acknowledge that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was brutal and entirely unjustified:
We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine. Such a framework would presumably include incentives to end hostilities, including some form of sanctions relief, and bring together the international community to establish security guarantees for a free and independent Ukraine that are acceptable for all parties, particularly Ukrainians. The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks.
This, frankly, is what our foreign policy experts ought to be telling us. This is the sort of thing they ought to have been telling us for the past 35 years. But they haven’t been telling us this, and they aren’t telling us this, and when someone has the courage to do so, to do their jobs for them, and the courage to do it the way it should be done, and when so many of them were, you know, women, and when so many of them, men and women alike, have funny names, well, all of right-thinking Washington went absolutely apeshit.
Intercept dude Ryan Grim, who is a lot quicker on his feet than I am, has the whole sad story—the CPC’s letter, the hysterical backlash, and the CPC’s sad cave—I’m guessing Mother Pelosi told the kids they wouldn’t be getting a dime of campaign money unless they kissed the MIC’s ass pronto in a big way—at his eponymous substack “Ryan Grim”.
I have been bitching about this compulsion among the chin-stroking set to seize upon the war in Ukraine as a means to reinflate their sagging egos and portray themselves once more as the champions of humanity for a long time now. I was particularly disappointed in Francis Fukuyama, who apparently decided that moderation is for sissies and went all Charlie Krauthammer on my ass, swearing that he would fight this war to the last Ukrainian!
Yo hawks! Stop being so generous with other people’s blood!
Afterwords
If all those “Russia on the brink?” think pieces the lamestream media are running turn out to be true, and Putin does have to accept a “shameful” peace, well, wonderful, although the notion that so many smart people, like Anne Applebaum and Cathy Young, seem to have, that Putin’s fall would guarantee a new, fully democratic Russia, strikes me as little more than wishful moonshine. The combination of a self-infatuated, hubristic America and a feral, cornered Vladimir Putin is not one I care to contemplate, but I have no choice.
