Ukraine Intrigue

Posted on December 13, 2023 by thezman

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Determining what the regime is plotting is often a guessing game, as the regime has turned itself into the father of lies. The people in positions of authority lie even when the truth would serve their interests. As a result, we are left to look at what is going on around the regime, how various players are reacting, in order to guess at what may be happening inside the black box that is Washington. We just got a dose of that this week when Zelensky arrived rattling the tin cup.

Everything about the trip was weird, compared to what has been the norm regarding Ukraine over the last two years. His arrival was not met with a big ceremony and the media was not flooded with Ukrainian agit-prop. The closest we got on that score was a press release to C-level crazies in fringe media. Six months ago, these stories were regular features in regime media. Instead there were grim stories about Ukraine at a cross roads militarily and politically.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Zelensky was not invited to Washington, even though his trip was certainly arranged by the Kagan cult. They first had him show up in Argentina at the swearing in of their new ruler. Since he was in the neighborhood, he decided to swing by Washington just as the Biden administration is begging Congress for more money for Ukraine. This week is the last week to get a package passed as Congress goes on an extended break.

That is the other bit of weirdness. House Republicans suddenly grew a spine for the first time in generations and have refused to give Biden more money for Ukraine without getting significant concessions on immigration. In fact, they are holding up Israel money in the process, which is no doubt angering the usual suspects. The administration refuses to separate out Israel money from Ukraine money and the House refuses to consider a bill that combines the two.

The final bit of weirdness to the drama is they had Zelensky make the rounds in order to guilt Congress into relenting. The thing is, he only met with the Senate and reportedly the meeting did not go well. He did not meet with House members, presumably because they would be even more hostile. He closed his trip with what was expected to be a tongue bathing from Fox News zombie Brett Baier, but the producers gave Bair some real questions to ask, which ruined the effect.

Taken in total, it was a disaster for Zelensky. It is not just being cut off by Congress but the way it was done. He now has to go back to Kiev empty handed and with the impression that Washington no longer loves him. His main card in Ukrainian politics right now is he keeps the money flowing. If he is not keeping the money flowing and he is not on good terms with Washington, then what is his point? Why keep him around if all he does is strut around in gym clothes?

That may have been the point of this trip. Back in Kiev there is a power struggle between the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, head of the secret police Kyrylo Budanov and Zelensky. Some generals are siding with Zelensky, and no one really knows where Budanov stands, but the bulk of the officer corps backs Zaluzhnyi. What really matters, of course, is which faction is backed by Washington and that is why this trip matters.

It is possible that the Kagan cult has determined that Zelensky is a liability, and they need to find a replacement. If it appears that Zelensky has fallen out of favor and that is slowing the flow of cash to Kiev, then there is a good chance that the anti-Zelensky factions will come together and topple the government. In this context, a military junta run by Zaluzhnyi makes some sense. He is on good terms with the Western war machine, and he has credibility with regards to conducting the war.

On the other hand, this may be a bit of 2-D chess. By now everyone in the White House has to know that Ukraine is lost. The question now is how to manage the endgame, especially in light of an election in eleven months. The last thing the regime wants is scenes of Russian tanks entering Ukrainian cities this summer. If the army overthrows Zelensky, the administration can claim the failure is due to Republicans cutting off funding which resulted in a coup and then collapse.

This sounds a bit farfetched, but keep in mind that Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. Everyone in Kiev knows this. That is why stories like this one in a CIA front operation are important. The Kiev Post is not in Kiev. It is one of the many nodes of disinformation operated by the regime. Stories about a third coup in Kiev coming from such a source are intended to send a message. Zelensky’s palace could soon be the closing scenes of the movie Scarface.

One always has to consider ineptitude in these matters. It could simply be that the Biden people have poorly managed all of this and the botched trip to Washington was just one more self-own. Mike Johnson is as green as grass, so he is trying to earn some street cred by holding the line on Ukraine money. The Biden people handed him this gift of trying to tie Ukraine money to Israel money, so he is using this impasse to make pleasant noises about immigration.

Taken as a whole, the best we can say for certain is some elements of the regime are now moving into the endgame phase of project Ukraine. Whether or not they have internalized how this will end is hard to know, but clearly some elements are thinking about how to manage the inevitable defeat of Ukraine. Given the implacability of the Kagan cult, this suggests Zelensky brought the gift of palace intrigue to Washington, as the tribes duke it out over how to manage Ukraine.

In the end, none of it really matters. Moscow has ruled out negotiations with Kiev and is in no mood to do Washington any favors. For the Russians, Ukraine is one part of a larger war against the Global American Empire. That means they will continue to manage the Ukraine war in light of that larger conflict. The fate of Ukraine is no longer in the hands of Washington. Once important people in Kiev understand this, the war ends along with the current Kiev regime.

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Orphan Child

Posted on December 5, 2023 by thezman

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, John F. Kennedy supposedly said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Whether or not he actually said it is unknown, but the expression has been with us ever since. Supposedly it was an updated version of the Tacitus line, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” Kennedy was pithier but Tactus captures the truth of the matter.

We are seeing this with the Ukraine war. The news from the battlefields is uniformly bad for the Ukrainian army. The West is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the much publicized counter-offensive, which ended in disaster soon after it was launched, but the West spent the last few months in denial. Ukraine does not publish numbers as far as casualties, but independent guessing suggests they lost between seventy and one hundred thousand men in the counter-offensive.

As the overall condition of the Ukraine military comes into focus, the recriminations are beginning to turn up in Western media. This long story in the Washington Post is a good example of the general tone. Washington is looking to place the blame on the Ukrainians, while the Ukrainians are placing the blame on their Western backers or on one another as the situation warrants. Europe has yet to join the blame game, but in time they will no doubt blame the Ukrainians.

Another pithy expression that is useful regarding the Ukraine debacle is “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” Washington never learns from its failures, which is why they have the Ukraine debacle, but the rest of us can gain some insight into how our pollical leaders stumble into these disasters by looking at some of the major blunders in this war. How they managed to reach this point speaks to how they view the world and their role in it.

The first major blunder was getting into a land war with Russia. This is right up there with “Never getting into a land war in Asia” and the slightly less well-known “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” The Russians are bad at many things but when it comes to fighting a land war, they are exceptional. When they view the land war as an existential threat it quickly becomes a great patriotic war and the whole of Russia organizes to defeat the enemy.

This is what the West managed to do in what should have been a low-grade border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The West made this into a game of the world against Russia and the Russians accepted the challenge. The sanctions regime was clearly intended to hurt average Russians, which made it easy for the Russian leadership to recast this conflict as this generations great patriotic war. That war is with the West, not just the Ukrainians.

The question is why did the West do this? The reason is they assumed Russia was too weak to fight an actual war. They came to this conclusion not based on observable facts but on the power of their own rhetoric. They kept saying that Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country” so often that they believed it. Instead of looking at what was happening in Russia, the West told themselves appealing stories about what would happen if they blew hard enough on the Russian house of cards.

This gets to the second colossal error of the West. The Russians crossed into Ukraine with a force of about one hundred thousand men with the assumption the West would demand a peace meeting. They were not prepared for an actual war. Ukraine, on the other hand, had an army of over three hundred thousand regular army troops and another three hundred thousand reserves. Russia, the attacker, was outnumbered three-to-one one by Ukraine, the defender.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainians had a chance to smash the Russian army if they went on the offensive. It would have come at a price, but they could have pushed the Russian back into the Donbas and maybe out completely. Instead, the Ukrainians dug into defensive positions along the line of contact. This gave the Russians time to reorganize their lines into more defendable positions and begin the process of building a much larger force to take on the Ukrainians.

The reason Ukraine did this is they were repeatedly told by their Western backers that Russia could never sustain an army in the field for long. The best people ran to their favorite media outlets predicting an imminent Russian collapse. The intellectual everyone in the West considers a seer claimed early on that Russia would not just lose but disintegrate as a result of the war. The fact that Fukuyama has not been right about anything in his career has not lowered his status in the West.

Here again we see that the West blundered into a catastrophic mistake not because they misread the evidence but because they confused their own magical thinking about the world and their role in it with reality. People with what passes for impressive credentials in the managerial class spun fabulous tales about the imminent collapse of Russia and those tales became reality for the war machine. Meanwhile, the Russian army used this time to prepare for what we see happening now.

This brings up the third colossal error. Having figured out that Russia was not going to disintegrate in the face of what amounted to an internet cancel campaign, the West prepared Ukraine for a big arrow offensive. They conscripted close to one hundred thousand fresh troops, trained them in NATO tactics and supplied them with NATO weapons for the purpose to driving the Russians out of the Donbas. This was the great spring counter-offensive that kicked off in the summer.

In the early hours of the offensive, columns of Western armor barreled into the Russia outer defensive lines in the south with the aim of driving to the Sea of Azov. Instead, they bogged down in massive minefields. The mine clearing equipment provided by the West turned out to be useless for the task, so the armored columns were trapped in the minefields and obliterated by Russian artillery. A large area in the south is called Bradley Park because it is full of destroyed Bradley fighting vehicles.

It is impossible to overstate the failure here. The Ukrainians not only lost the entire army assembled for the task, but they stripped their lines in order to supplement this army on the expectation that it would smash through the Russian defenses and those reserves would then flood into the breech. Instead, these reserves were thrown into what was called a meatgrinder. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed and maimed in order to capture one tiny village in the south.

What is even more stunning than the enormity of the failure is the fact that Western military planners were so slow to accept reality. Even as it was clear that the Russian defenses were too strong, General Milley was talking like it was just a matter of time before they collapsed and Ukraine rolled to victory. Even after thousands of videos appeared online of burning Western tanks, Western generals kept saying that things were on schedule for a glorious victory.

The result of this catastrophe is Ukraine no longer has offensive capabilities and is struggling to maintain its defensive positions in key areas. The massive losses of men and material cannot be replaced. Ukraine is running out of men to conscript for the war and the West is out of equipment to send them. This is why we are seeing reports in Western media talking about who is to blame. No one wants to be the father of what is going to be a collapse of Ukraine in 2024.

The theme throughout this two-year debacle is that the people making the decisions have substituted a preferred reality for actual reality. These are the type of people John Derbyshire once described in another context as those who are “awfully good at creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” For the last two years their version of reality has crashed into a reality that rests on the truth, not narrative.

The Ukraine debacle is a microcosm of what plagues the West. The people in charge are long on credentials that are meaningful only within the artificial reality that is the managerial class. The result is an echo chamber populated with credentialed idiots who compete with one another to produce the most pleasing sounding narrative to describe what they imagine lies outside their reality. They live in a simulation but seek to impose what they experience on the world around them.

These are the same people now operating the court system based on their paranoid fantasies about invisible enemies and staffing the air traffic control system to match their image of the inclusive society. What lies ahead for the West is what we are seeing in Ukraine which is the fantasies of a delusional and deranged ruling class smashing into the reality of the world, all paid for by the common man. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

The Israel Problem

Posted on November 22, 2023 by thezman

The founding of Israel seventy-five years ago brought with it a problem that has never been resolved, one that is at the heart of the current troubles. In fact, times of trouble operate as a reprieve from the hard work of ignoring that central issue. Israeli leaders can stimulate Western leaders into worrying about what Israel means to them, rather than what it is. The current war in Gaza lets the American Right forget its troubles and cheer blindly for its favorite country.

That central problem at the heart of it all is the definition of Israel itself. The “Jewish state” is a label used by Israelis, especially those on the Zionist side, and one that should raise some question. No one uses the term “Irish state” or the “German state” when describing those countries. No one would dare call Germany the home of the German people, but Western commentators disposed to Israel comfortably say that Israel is the home of the Jewish people.

Israel is by design, an ethnostate. It is the only self-declared and self-defined ethnostate in the modern world. From the very beginning, the point of Israel was to be the homeland of ethnic Jews. This is the central problem for Israel. To be a citizen of an ethnostate requires one to be accepted into as a member of that ethnicity. You cannot just one day decide to be a Jew and emigrate to Israel. Unlike Western countries, Israel is not an idea. It is a genetic threshold.

This is the problem Israel faced on day one. At its founding, the newly minted Israelites found themselves with lots of non-Jews in their lands. Those non-Jews could never be citizens, as that would violate the logic of the ethnostate. Those non-Jews were not going to voluntarily evacuate for new lands, so it meant Israel had a population of aliens in its midst that could never be assimilated. Like a pebble in your shoe, this non-Jewish population would be an irritant to the Jewish state.

Israel could extend most of the rights and privileges of citizenship to this non-Jewish population in an effort to pacify them, but they could never extend all of the rights and privileges to them. The non-Jews are not citizens and can never be citizens, so therefore they must always be suspect. In any two-tiered status system one class must be superior and the other inferior and this must lead to conflict. From the start, Israel was saddled with a hostile alien population.

Of course, the logic of the ethnostate demands that Israel do what it must to expel this non-Jewish population from its midst. Again, the whole point of the ethnostate is to create a homeland exclusive to your people. The reason Israel exists is to clear and hold the land of Israel for the Jews and only the Jews. Add in the natural hostility of the dispossessed minority population and conflict was inevitable. By definition, Jews can never be at peace with the minority population.

If that minority population were Mongols or Bantus, people with no natural connection to anyone in the region, this would have been an easily solved problem. Obviously, that was never the case, so this inevitable and necessary conflict with the non-Jewish population has defined Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. If Israel were, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, a nation of ideas, this would not be the case, but Israel is an ethnostate which sets it apart from all other nations.

This would be true even if the surrounding nations were ethnostates. The logic of the ethnostate starts with the assumption that the people of the proposed ethnostate are superior to other people. A people cannot demand a land of their own unless they think they deserve it. That can only come if those people, at some level, see themselves as superior to others, at least with regards to their claims for a homeland. Exclusivity begins with the claim of superiority in some critical respect.

Compounding things for Israel is the fact that their definition of a homeland includes territories now currently occupied by others. This has been true from the founding of Israel in 1948. Just look at old maps and it is easy to see. Israel is the only country in the modern era to expand its borders at the expense of its neighbors. It does this because the logic of its existence requires it. It is why the first response to the Hamas attack was the call to expel the people from Gaza.

This is the crux of the “Israel’s right to exist” debate. The Arabs understand the logic of the Israeli ethnostate and what that must mean for them. Israel’s right to exist means her right to expel non-Jews from the lands claimed by Israel. It also means using whatever means necessary against those defending those non-Jews. The non-Jews living in those lands can never agree to those terms. Therefore, they can never accept Israel’s right to exists, at least not as an ethnostate.

This also explains the ruthlessness of Israel’s response to Hamas. The unspoken truth of the Israeli – Gaza relationship is the people in Gaza must go away to that this land can be absorbed into greater Israel. Any resistance to that is viewed as a threat to the very idea of Israel, which warrants a maximum response. From the perspective of the Zionists, genocide of the Palestinians is a proportional response to the terrorist raid perpetrated by Gaza last month.

Obviously, this flies in the face of Western political morality, but money can buy a lot of political blinders. That and there is a strong Christian Zionist subculture in the United States that provides easy cover for the political class. Washington can pretend they are catering to public support for Israel, while cashing checks from the Israel lobby on the condition they never mention the reality of the Israel ethnostate. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees prepare to emigrate to your town.

Send In The Clowns

Posted on November 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: Thinking about doing a mailbag show for Friday. If anyone has an interesting question, post it up here or on Gab.

President Harry S. Truman famously said is a speech at the end of his career that if it is a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article. He was giving a pre-election pep talk to his fellow Democrats who were downcast at their prospects in 1952. His point was that if you proudly give the voters an alternative to the other option, they will at least consider what you have to say and may even vote for you.

It is interesting to note that the two parties were having a uniparty problem way back in the middle of the last century, but it is the nature of democratic systems. Like all markets, they eventually converge on one dominant market player. It is why we have one operating system maker, two mobile phone makers and so on. In the marketplace, people seek safety, which is a form of protection. As Robert Nozick noted, protection must always lead to a monopoly or something close to it.

Like consumers in a grocery store staring at rows of the same product, people will flock to novelty, even if the market prefers predictability. We are seeing this in Argentina where the voters elected what can best be described as an autistic Austin Powers character as their next president. Javier Milei won Sunday’s run-off against Peronist former Minister of Economy Sergio Massa. It was a stunning victory for a man who promises to radically change the Argentine economy.

Javier Milei is the next in line in what has become a tradition that started with Beppe Grillo a dozen years ago in Italy. He was the former television comic who formed a joke party to run for office, which quickly turned into a social phenomenon. Getting back to what Truman said, given the choice between people acting like clowns, the voters in democracies have repeatedly picked the genuine clowns. Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni and now Milei have come to power this way.

That is not to say that these eccentric candidates have not come with a real platform and a genuine list of issues. It is that their primary appeal is their eccentricity. A more traditional presentation would have failed, even if the issues were popular, because part of the problem for voters is the dreadful sameness of the candidates. One of the ironies of “our democracy” is it produces gold-plated phonies. The least relatable people on the planet are popular political figures.

Of course, it goes deeper than just a desire for authenticity. The unspoken truth of politics for the last thirty years is the sense that something is deeply wrong, despite the relative material prosperity. One reason so many were so quick to embrace the Covid madness is the sense that we were about to get what we deserved. Mother Nature was about to balance the scales with a great plague. These eccentric candidates are something of a search for absolution by the voters.

There is also an end of time issue with many of them. Italy has been convulsed with populism since Beppe Grillo because no one is able to answer the big question that hangs over every human society. Why does it exist? Italians no longer have a reason to exist, which is why they have stopped having children. People like Grillo and now Meloni offer some hope for a purpose. Their anger and eccentricity are a little bit of light in the gathering darkness of their civilization.

This may be the case in Argentina where they have been ruled by a combination of kleptocrats and maniacs for generations. One party steals the nation’s resources on behalf of international interests in the name of fiscal discipline until the people grow weary of it and replace them with the maniacs. These are the socialists who then start printing money to buy happiness until inflation gets out of control and the banks stop lending them money or accepting pesos for debts.

This is where Argentina is now. They currently have inflation at 120%, a swelling debt crisis and a stagnant economy. In addition to being an entertaining weirdo during the campaign, Milei promised to dollarize the economy, de-unionize the private sector, cut taxes, and restore private property rights. He calls himself a libertarian, but he has not promised to give free weed and porn to children or convert to Bitcoin. Perhaps he is saving that for his second act.

This is where Milei will turn out to be like the other eccentrics that have paraded across the stage of democracies over the last decade. There is little chance he will get any of his agenda implemented. The two main parties still control all of the important institutions, so they will collude to block his initiatives. Another feature of democracy is the controlling parties are incentivized to not address genuine problems. The metastasizing social ills are the systems’ defense mechanism.

In the end, that may be the function of these eccentric populist characters that are turning up in democratic politics. They gain support mostly because they are a break from the dreary reality of the system. If voting is not going to lead to good public policy, then at least it can lead to amusing failure. If food prices rise faster than you can count pesos, then maybe having autistic Austin Powers staring back at you through the television will take your mind off things.

So far that has been the result. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement accomplished nothing, other than helping the EU sidetrack genuine reform. Trump and Bolsonaro, of course, were stymied by the system. Meloni’s angry housewife act remains popular, but her administration is the same as her predecessor. What all of these eccentric characters are, in the end, is proof that there is no voting your way out of the problems of liberal democracy.

Winter In Kiev

Posted on November 20, 2023 by thezman

The war in Ukraine is heading into the winter with the great counter-offensive all but officially declared a great failure. After six months of attacks, the Ukrainians gained a small sliver of ground in the south and lost a large swath of territory in the north, along with billions in Western equipment. Outside of small ventures to keep up appearances, Ukraine is no longer conducting offensive operations. The big question that looms over all of it is what comes next for Ukraine?

The place to start is the battlefield. The Russians have the initiative everywhere now and they seem to be preparing the battlefield for winter. They are about to take the fortress city of Avdeevka in Donetsk and there are reports that they have fire control of the key logistics hub in the north called Kupyansk. There are also increasing reports of desertions on the Ukrainian side as the Russians press them nonstop. Right now, the Ukraine army is doing what it can to hold its positions.

This is an untenable position for Ukraine as the politics of this war are such that they must always be looking like they have the initiative. This is why so much time and money were invested in the public relations system. Ukraine needed to look like it was winning the war and that meant flooding Western media with stories about Ukrainian success on the battlefield. Stories about Ukrainians desperately clinging to bombed out fortress cities is poison for the public relations system.

There are three angles to the politics. One is the internal politics of Ukraine, which at this point is the struggle between the military, Zelensky and the secret police, all of whom have friends in Washington. It is assumed they need to be showing progress on the battlefield in order to keep the money flowing. The fallback plan in these cases is always the same and that is find a scapegoat. You blame that guy for the failures and buy another round of funding the operation.

Rumors out of Kiev suggest Zelensky wants to fire his top general, Zaluzhnyi, and the head of operations in the south, Oleksandr Syrskyi. Last week there were rumors that both had been arrested then there were rumors that they were in hiding. Officially, nothing has happened, but Zelensky no longer uses their names in public, instead referring to their titles. That is the only hard evidence that something is happening, but it confirms that there is a rift of some sort.

For his part, Zaluzhnyi has made no bones about telling Western media that the offensive failed and the situation is dire. The reason to do this is to publicly undermine Zelensky who always insists that things are going great in the war. The result here is you have Zelensky trying to pin the blame on Zaluzhnyi, while Zaluzhnyi tries to undermine the credibility of Zelensky. You do not have to be a political genius to see where this is heading if things deteriorate much further.

This is why CIA director William Burns was sent to Kiev last week. One school of thought says he was sent to calm the situation, while another school of thought says he was sent to get a frank assessment of what is happening. This seems strange, given that the whole war is a Washington operation, but it is clear that the Ukrainians have not been entirely forthright with Washington. This is most likely at the behest of the State Department, which has been running things on the side.

That brings up the second political angle. Washington has been poached in a warm bath of public relations nonsense for two years, so the reality of the war is now just starting to appear in the media. With an election on the horizon and Biden in serious trouble, mentally and politically, bad news from Ukraine is very bad news. That is probably part of what Burns is up to in Kiev. If the White House needs to abandon the Ukraine project, they need a plan to do it.

The third political angle is the money. The Ukraine project is and has been a very lucrative money laundering operation. This means it has a very large lobbying effort behind it, so cutting off the money will be difficult. On the other hand, sending unknown billions through a failing operation, one that could be overrun by the Russian army very soon, is a tough sell even for Washington. Therefore, pressure is on to produce a new winning narrative to keep the money flowing.

This is why the Republicans are going to move heaven and earth to get fresh cash into the money laundering system. If the cash runs out, not only does the money laundering end, but it also means the end of Ukraine in a hurry. Ukraine no longer has a functioning economy and it is no longer able to pay for its own government services. If money from Washington and Brussels stops flowing, Ukraine will collapse in weeks. This kills project Ukraine for future money laundering.

The result of all this is all the players now see the status quo as the only workable option, even if the battlefield reality says otherwise. Zelensky knows he cannot kill Russians with dollar bills, but dollar bills keep him alive. At the same time, Washington thinks they can pretend it is a stalemate as long as Zelensky remains in charge, so giving him money works for them. Of course, the money laundering machine wants the cash to keep flowing for its own sake.

The trouble is the reality on the battlefield. The Ukrainians officially mobilized three quarters of a million men. They have less than half that number remaining. There are pictures of girls and old men turning up dead in trenches now. There is only so much damage an army can take before it begins to crack. The politics of the war point to maintaining the status quo, but the reality of it is pointing to collapse. That is what lies ahead for Ukraine in 2024.

Whither Ukraine?

Posted on October 31, 2023 by thezman

For close to two years, Project Ukraine has been the fashion statement for all of the best people in the American empire. Celebrities from all over the West have made the trip to Kiev to be seen with Zelensky and Zelensky has toured the world to be seen with the most important people and ask them for money. Now all of a sudden Zelensky is finding it hard to get anyone to take his calls, much less visit. The war in the Levant has made him and Project Ukraine last year’s fashion.

This may be difficult for Zelensky personally, but it is probably for the best in terms of present politics, as things are not going well for Ukraine. The long-promised offensive that kicked off in the summer has ground to an ignominious halt. Ukraine lost most of the equipment sent from the West and tens of thousands of men in order to capture a few square kilometers of land. Russia actually captured more territory overall than the Ukrainians during the Ukrainian offensive.

Now the war is about to enter a new phase. With Ukraine having lost much of its offensive potential in the counter-offensive, it will have little choice but to settle back into defensive lines and hope for the best. It is hard to know how many men Ukraine has in its army, but even if the high estimates for losses are correct, they probably have a force of about 150,000. They also have to conserve ammunition and equipment as shipments from the West are slowing.

In the south, the line of contact changed very little. This is where the Ukrainians ran into the massive Russian defenses during the offensive. There is some speculation that the Russians could stage a winter breakout from this area, like they did against the Germans in the battle of Kursk. This is where the Red Army withstood a massive German offensive and then launched a counter-offensive, defeating the Germans in one of the biggest tank battles in history.

There is no evidence to suggest the Russians have such a plan. Instead, they appear to be content to reduce their losses to the absolute minimum by grinding down the Ukrainians with superior artillery and air power. The one exception is a heavily fortified town in Donetsk called Avdiivka. The Russians are executing an encircling operation against some of the best Ukrainian units. This is one of those key strongholds along the line of contact that Ukraine will defend to the last man.

Where things have changed the most over the last several months is in the north where the Russians have made big gains. The Ukrainians stripped these lines for the offensive in the south, which allowed the Russians to break through to a city called Kupiansk, a key logistic hub for the Ukrainians. If the Russians are able to secure this city over the winter, it sets them up to move south towards Izyum and Kramatorsk, where the command and control of the Ukraine army is located.

In a war of attrition, however, territory is secondary. The game is to kill as many opposing men as possible while losing as few men as possible. The same logic holds for equipment, logistics and industrial capacity. This is the game the Russians have been playing for over a year now. As a result, their casualties have fallen sharply since the early days of the war. Ukraine, in contrast, has been trying to take territory, which has resulted in huge losses in men and material.

This is going to be the story for 2024. The Russians have been slowly building their forces over the last year. They probably have three quarters of a million men in and around the front. Ukraine is probably down to 150,000. The Russians are also well supplied with ammunition and an increasing variety of weapons with which they can strike Ukraine from a distance. The Russian air force is now operating with little resistance over the entire battle space.

This means there is one very large, well-supplied army on one side, content to pound away at a smaller army from a distance. That smaller army is also finding it difficult to maintain its supply lines and keep its suppliers happy. This rather frank story from Time hints that the army is no longer following orders from the government. Add in the sudden disinterest from Washington and things look bleak for Ukraine. They are facing a slow death at the hands of a superior army.

This is where things get interesting. If victory is off the table and stalemate unlikely, that leaves one option for the West. The problem is Washington has boxed itself in with its rhetoric and actions. This may not be an accident. If in the end Ukraine collapses and Russia installs a new government, Washington will declare it all illegal and refuse to recognize the new government. They will treat Ukraine like North Korea and shift to a law-grade war to keep the place in chaos.

Ukraine has no good options. Zelensky may have gone mad under the pressure of the last two years. Regardless, it is unlikely the Russians will agree to deal with him in a peace settlement. Of course, if he reaches out to Moscow, his own people will kill him, probably at the request of the CIA. On the other hand, if they fight to the last Ukrainian, the army will eventually revolt and kill the political leadership. The only hope is some new event forces the Russians to end the war on their own.

As for Russia, the war is just one part of a larger geopolitical strategy that looks far past the Ukraine situation. The cost of the war in terms of men and material is manageable so they can continue it as long as needed. They see the impact it is having on the European political class and their relationship with Washington. It is also slowly draining the EU economically. For now, the best option for Russia is to keep doing what they are doing and prepare for the inevitable breaks in the opposition.

What this means for Ukraine is it becomes something of a tar baby. With a presidential election coming up in 2024, Washington is trying to flick the Ukraine problem off, hoping it sticks to the Europeans. The Europeans are noticing this and are starting to look for a way to avoid having Ukraine stick to them. Russia is not about to help and allow the fate of Ukraine to become their problem, at least not yet. The result is Ukraine becomes an economic, demographic, and social catastrophe.

Iranian War Drums

Posted on October 30, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the declining intelligence of American film audiences, a post about driving in hell and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Way back in the Bush II years, there was an open debate about whether to invade Iran after conquering Iraq. This was right around when the war against Iraq started, and some people noted that the neocons had ambitions beyond Iraq. For their part, the neocons were quite open about going from Baghdad to Tehran. After all, Iran was part of the “axis of evil” that included Iraq and North Korea. The Bush team made no bones about wanting to regime change all of them.

Of course, the plan to take out Iran was predicated on the plan to take down Saddam and “liberate” Iraq. Dick Cheney famously said that the Iraqi people would greet the American military as liberators. Bill Kristol in the run up to the war said, “This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.” In other words, the war plan with Iraq assumed the people would revolt against Saddam and the then the Iraqi army would either collapse, surrender or join the revolt against Saddam.

This was a critical part of the Iran concept. Once Iraq was defeated then secured as an America possession, it would be the launching pad for the Iran phase. That half million man American army in Iraq would secure bases for American air power and begin the process of rebuilding the Iraqi army. The new Iraqi army using modern Western weapons supplied by their new benefactors would then be part of the new coalition of the willing which would launch a war on Iran.

Obviously, the Iraq war was not what the neocons imagined. The people certainly had their complaints about Saddam, but they were not sitting around waiting for Uncle Sam to liberate them either. A significant portion dreamed of an Islamic state after the fall of Saddam, not a liberal democracy. The war became a guerilla war that dragged on until Team Obama finally put an end to it in his first term. The dreamed of war against Iran had to be tabled by the neocons.

The reason to care about any of this is there is a lot of loose talk about starting a war with Iran over the war between Hamas and Israel. Without any evidence at all, the neocons have laid the blame at the feet of Iran. In this new narrative, Iran controls Hamas, so Iran must have known about the attack in advance. The plan is to bait Israel into attacking Gaza, so Hezbollah can then attack from Lebanon. This could then lead to Hitler returning to lead the Arabs against Israel.

In response to these fantastical claims, the Biden administration has sent two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean. There are reports of two other carrier groups headed to the Persian Gulf. These reports are based on rumors as the empire does not announce this stuff in advance. Word gets out among the crew of the ships and eventually makes its way to the internet. The only thing for certain is one carrier group is in the eastern Mediterranean right now as a show of force.

The deployment of two carrier groups would be an overreaction to the situation in Gaza, but four would be a clear signal of something. The reason this could be important is that part of those old war plans for Iran was the deployment of four carrier groups to the region, two in the Mediterranean and two in the Persian Gulf. They would be used in the first phase of a planned attack on Iran. Maybe it is a coincidence, but the regime likes to work in symbols, so probably not a coincidence.

There is a belief among some people that the neocons in the regime are looking at this Gaza situation as a chance to dust off the Iran war scheme. Rather than a warning to Iran, this is an effort to bait Iran into greenlighting Hezbollah, which would be the excuse to unleash an air assault on Iranian facilities. This would then warrant a full-on war with Iran with the demand for regime change. The one thing we know about neocons is they never abandon a project, so this makes some sense.

There are a few problems straight away. One is the old war plan back in the Bush II years said that it would require 1.6 million ground troops. Iran is a big place with lots of challenging geography and it has a big army. Despite decades of sanctions, it has highly sophisticated air defenses and a range of missiles. It is hard to know how its army would perform in a real war, but analysts think it would perform better than the Iraqi army due to better discipline and morale.

That was twenty years ago. Since then, Iran has become expert at the use of cheap but effective drone technology. They gave the Russians this technology last year, which has altered the battlespace in Ukraine. Hundreds of “flying Doritos” overwhelmed Ukrainian air defenses, exhausting their supply of surface-to-air missiles. There is a very good chance that Russia returned the favor by supplying Iran with improved air defense systems and maybe even advanced missile technology.

Then there is the fact that Iraq would not be an ally in this war. In fact, Iraq could side with Iran and attack American assets in northern Iraq and Syria. At the minimum, Iraq would stay out of the fight. There is no reason to think the Turks would agree to host American ground forces. There would be pressure on the Saudis and Kuwaitis to be the launching pad, but the Saudis hate the Biden people. In other words, a war with Iran would be a bloody complicated mess – at best.

Surely the Pentagon understands this, and they have communicated this to the neocons running regime policy. The only thing the military could do in a wider war in the region is attack Iranian facilities from air and sea. They cannot launch a ground invasion and they could not hope to topple the Iranian regime. There is a good chance that the Navy would lose some expensive assets. Iran has only grown stronger since this wargame resulted in a lost aircraft carrier.

This raises the question as to what the regime is doing in the Middle East. They lack the resources for the long dreamed off war with Iran. There has been no effort by the regime to build international support for a war. The usual suspects are on American television screaming for blood, but they do that every day. Lindsay Graham exists solely to go on television and call for war somewhere. In other words, it looks like this is a big show that is not intended to lead anywhere.

If the plan was to put on a big drama and draw all of the mass media attention to it, then it has been a great success. The Gaza story has not only blotted out other news, but it has also triggered convenient domestic stories, like the pro-Palestinian protests. The usual suspects are wasting everyone’s time with claims that those marches are the prelude to the return of everyone’s favorite villain. All of a sudden, there is no room for stories about Ukraine or the economy or anything else.

Alternatively, this could be another example of a regime that is both out of gas and low on intellectual capital being dragged along by events. Their Ukraine plan is a great example of how poorly they understand the world. They were sure Russia was just a gas station pretending to be a country. All it would take is some sanctions and some American weapons and regime change was guaranteed. They could be making the same errors with Iran as they made with Russia.

Alternatively, they could be thinking that the threat of war is just what is needed to get invited back into the game. The empire has been losing ground in the region for decades and is now down to a few barely allies. The Saudis are clearly thinking beyond the American empire. Israel is the last ally in the region and the one thing everyone else agrees upon in the region is that Israel is a bad neighbor. Maybe the threat of war is a reason to invite the Americans back into the discussion.

In the end, this will probably be looked upon as another event in the closing chapters of the Global American Empire. The Middle East is ready to move on from America and America is running out of resources to remain in the region. If this crisis ends in war, it will be another serious blow to the American war machine. If it results in peace it will come through the work of regional players with the help of Russia and China, thus further sidelining America in the region.

The Not So Great Game

Posted on October 25, 2023 by thezman

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not ~~hitting~~ exceeding the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.

When the driver of the car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand got confused about the route and had to stop and turn around, no one thought this would be the moment that changed history. No one who knew Gavrilo Princip to that point would have imagined that he would be the man who changed the world. He was the son of poor rural peasants and should have grown up to be a poor rural peasant, but instead fate led him to that cafe just as the car of the Archduke arrived.

Of course, Gavrilo Princip was not a victim of circumstances. He willingly joined Young Bosnia, a radical separatist group. He was part of the planned conspiracy to kill the Archduke, who was on tour from Austria. For its part, Austria-Hungary decided to issue a démarche to Serbia known as the July Ultimatum, which led up to the outbreak of World War I. They made the assassination look like it was planned and executed by the Serbs, rather than pan-Slavic separatists.

The Great War and the events leading to it are a useful example of how the participants in a game will not deviate from their strategy on the assumption that they know the strategy of other players and therefore think their initial strategy will result in the optimum outcome, despite the initial results. The fact that the players did not fully understand the thinking of the other players and their desired outcome was not part of the set of possible outcomes led to disaster.

This is something to keep in mind when trying to understand what is going on in the present-day great game. We now have two hot wars involving proxies of the Global America Empire, Ukraine, and Israel. There is a third war in the planning phase using Taiwan against China. American planners are sure they know the strategy of Russia and China, so it is full speed ahead with the grand plan to defeat these two adversaries and bring about the long-promised end of history.

We got a glimpse of this last summer when the imperial planners mapped out the great Ukrainian offensive that was supposed to break Russian defenses. They were sure they understood how the Russian army would react in the field. They were sure they knew how this would impact Russian domestic politics and global politics. When it was clear from the start that things were not unfolding according to plan, they stuck with the strategy, assuming it would result in the desired outcome.

We are getting another glimpse of this in the Levant. Like the group that plotted the assassination of the Archduke, this Hamas cell that plotted the attack on Israel was acting outside the game. They relied on old analog techniques to coordinate their efforts, thus avoiding detection by Israel and other players in the region. This attack is a new element to the game, but the players are all acting on the old strategy, under the assumption that they know what everyone else is doing.

For example, the United States has sent at least two carrier groups to the region as a threat to Iran, which is assumed to be backing Hamas. There is no evidence to suggest Iran had any role in this event, but the American side is undeterred in their belief that Iran is the primary instigator in the region. In fact, the entire American strategy in the region depends on this assumption. The United States has issued an ultimatum to Iran assuming they must respond in a specific way.

It is an interesting example of asymmetric thinking. Like the great powers of Europe before the Great War, you get the sense that American planners want a war with Iran, so they are acting in a way that will bait the Iranians into acting. Israel gets to indiscriminately bomb Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, but if anyone in the region reacts to this, then the United States will consider it an act of war. Like the Serbian government in 1914, Iran is slowly being boxed in by events.

Of course, all of this is operating within the context of the greatest of great games, the challenge to the unipolar order ruled by America. Russia and China are sure they know the strategy of America, as American leaders are public about it. They seek to regime change both countries and turn them into provinces of the empire. The same holds for the lesser powers like Iran and maybe even India. For its part, the imperial schemers are sure they know the plans of their intended targets.

That is the lesson from the Great War. When all sides are sure they fully understand the strategy of the other players and they remain convinced their strategy will get the optimal result but all of them are wrong on both counts, disaster follows. The world seems to be inching toward this exact scenario. Everyone is increasingly sure of how the game must play out, so they are locking in their strategies. They are doing so despite events routinely showing them to be wrong.

There is another piece though, one that may prevent the players of this great game from blowing up the world. Great cataclysms like the Great War seem to require a bit of chance to keep the game going. Gavrilo Princip was not the cause of the Great War, but it is hard to imagine events playing out as they did that summer if he had not been in that cafe at that very moment. Throughout the war, bits of randomness worked to keep both sides locked into destruction.

Those random events worked to continue the game because all sides were locked into a myopic view of the game. In this version, the only player suffering from this is the Global American Empire. The rest of the players seem to understand that the West is acting on an internalized script. The way to avoid catastrophe is to avoid playing the designated role in that script. Russia has managed this in the Ukraine war and Iran seems to be doing this so far in the Gaza war.

That said, one should never be too optimistic about these things. The Thirty Years War happened. The Napoleonic Wars happened. The Great War happened. The Second World War happened. The theme in all of them was the players became convinced they had the optimal strategy, because they thought they knew the strategy of the other players in the game. History says that creating such conditions is easier than it should be, so this great game could end poorly.

The Agony Of The Script Writers

Posted on October 18, 2023 by thezman

The great philosopher Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until I punch them in the face.” He was, of course, paraphrasing the great Prussian field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, who said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” That is an abbreviated version of the original. Some version of this expression no doubt exists in most languages, as it is an essential part of human existence. All plans suffer from the faults of the people making the plans.

We may be seeing this unfold in the Levant, where the Israeli plan to exterminate Hamas and anyone near them is running into trouble. The narrative unleashed on the public was that the attack on the drug rave near Gaza, in which an undetermined number of people were killed, was the red line. The Israelis were now justified in taking any and all necessary steps to eradicate this threat. All media nodes were activated to whip up support for maximum vengeance against Gaza,

Curiously, it was not just Israel whipping support. The Washington regime swung into action with more than just words of support. Every administration official was sent out to cry in public while demanding blood. Word was leaked to regime media that Washington told Tel Aviv they had a green light for anything. They sent two carrier groups the eastern Mediterranean in support of the project. Top diplomats were sent to Israel to express their unwavering loyalty to Israel.

As an aside, the dispatching of two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean only makes sense if Washington expects to be in an air war. Given that Hamas lacks an air force, it must mean they are thinking about a neighboring country. There has also been talk about moving another attack group to the northern part of the Indian Ocean, within reach of Iran. You do not need these assets to launch a rescue mission into Gaza and they are not needed to supply Israel with weapons.

You do not have to be a suspicious person to think that maybe there was something else going on here rather than just a response to a terrorist attack. Israel and the Palestinians have been at this for half a century. This Hamas attack was an unusually successful action on their part, but it was not that unusual. They stage these raids all the time, which is why Israel spends enormous amounts of American tax dollars on the world’s most advanced border security.

One possibility is that this Hamas attack was catalyst for a larger narrative developed in Washington for when the time was right. Israel would be seen as pushed into a corner with no choice but to preemptively strike at its enemies. These enemies would be aligned with Iran, which would then come to the aid of them. This would trigger a wider war with Iran, which would be when the United States joined in to attack the nuclear, missile and drone facilities in Iran.

That skeleton of a narrative was quickly filled in with the Hamas attack. Note that regime media was filled with claims about Hamas being an Iranian proxy and that this attack had to be planned by Iran. In reality, Hamas gets its support from Qatar and was a creation of Washington and Tel Aviv. Iran has provided support over the years, but they have little control over Hamas. Few people know this, so these details could be bulldozed by the wave of claims to the contrary.

Israel immediately went to work dropping bombs on Gaza, while saying quite plainly that the intent was to drive the people out of Gaza. According to the pro-Israel media complex, the Palestinians have forfeited their right to exist by their ongoing support of Hamas, so Israel had the right to use any means necessary on them. The rhetoric and immediate actions were over the top, but most likely intended to elicit a response from Iran in support of the Palestinians.

Looking at the rhetoric, Washington must have been thinking that Iran would greenlight Hezbollah to launch cross border attacks from Lebanon. They spent a couple of days warning against such an act. Israel launched some attacks into Lebanon, probably on the same assumption. They also launched an air raid on the Damascus airport, probably for the same reason. The script said Hezbollah would attack so Israel just assumed it would happen and acted accordingly.

Outpacing the script is something we have seen with Ukraine. Washington created a narrative for the Ukrainian offensive last spring, which said that they would burst through Russian defenses and reach the Sea of Azov in a few weeks. This would set off a crisis in Moscow, maybe even topple Putin. They were so sure this would happen they even planned a peace conference in Saudi Arabia, without inviting Russia, in order to determine the terms that would be imposed on Russia.

The great Ukrainian offensive was a disaster, complete with images of burning Western tanks and video of Ukrainian soldiers trapped in mine fields. Instead of marching to the Sea of Azov, the Ukrainians marched into thick minefields without air cover and were destroyed by Russian air power and artillery. It took months for this reality to sink into Washington, so they continued on as if the script was reality. Only recently have they abandoned the script they created last winter.

That is something to keep in mind with this new script. Iran did not take the bait and has instead called for negotiations. Hezbollah has stayed quiet, despite the Israel attacks on their facilities in Lebanon. Instead of offering an excuse for the regime to launch attacks on Iran, the Iranians are backing the play of Russia and China to find a diplomatic solution to the Gaza problem. Washington remains committed to their bit, but it is clear that the Middle East is not playing its part.

Where things go from here is hard to say. The Arab world is slowly figuring out that they are being gas lit by Washington. Biden’s trip to the region was scaled back to just a goodwill visit to Israel. This is happening as the world debates who dropped a missile on a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians. Israel says Hamas bombed themselves, while everyone else says it was Israel. Odds are it was Israel, and it was simply a mistake, which happens in war.

Then you have the fact that the IDF does not want to enter Gaza. A ground campaign would be a bloody and expensive project. There is no guarantee of success, given the history of such efforts. There are up to half a million fighting age men in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Imagine a guerilla war in Manhattan and you have a good idea. It took the Russians six month to take Mariupol and that is a city a quarter of the size of Gaza.

Instead of an excuse to bomb Iran and maybe Syria, the narrative writers are slowly getting boxed in by the diplomatic efforts of Russia and China. Putin has had one-on-one talks with all of the players, including Israel. China is coming in with promises of financial support for the peacemakers. Meanwhile, Washington is saber rattling and carrying on as if their script for this project is reality. It is not a good look and probably why Arab leaders refused to meet with Biden today.

Washington now finds itself on the wrong side of a war that no one really wants, especially the Israelis. As is the case with all of the narratives dreamed up by Washington, this one does not come with an exit ramp. A week of fiery rhetoric in favor of righteous retribution and threats to anyone saying otherwise has left the administration with few options. As with the Ukraine offensive, they may be forced to pretend everything is going according to the script.

The Virtue Of Survivalism

Posted on October 16, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about Double Indemnity, a Bill Wilder classic from the film noir genre, a post about a forgotten post-war classic, The Best Years of Our Lives and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony argues that the ideal world order is one based on the nation state. All the peoples of the world would have a place to call their home and be governed by their own kind. He defines the nation as a closely related people with a common language and history. Since shared history requires close proximity, he assumes this history happened in a place. He avoids the phrase “blood and soil” but that is his intent.

Of course, the ideal world can only exist in the abstract. He points out that there are thousands of identifiable groups of people without a county of their own. He points to India as having over one thousand languages. Since language is tangled up in blood and history, it is a good proxy for identity. All over the world there are pockets of people living as minority groups. It is unreasonable to think that all of these people should be granted a nation of their own.

He also points out that his definition of a people is arbitrary. Two groups of people could share a language and history, but also find a way to see themselves as distinct from one another. There has to be some limit to this as the logical end point is to reduce all human societies to tiny tribes. Without some lower bound on what constitutes a people, nationalism would “pulverize” exiting states. For a people to be a nation they must exceed some threshold of sustainability.

If on the one hand the ideal is for every people to have their own nation, but on the other hand it is impossible to create sustainable nations for every group of people, how can national claims be properly judged? Hazony’s answer is self-referencing in that he sets the threshold at sustainability. In Chapter XVII of his book, he argues that a people are entitled to a nation if they can sustain it and prudence suggests it is practical or moral to support their claim to national independence.

His first example is the United States. The thirteen colonies had a legitimate claim to independence, despite sharing language and history with England, because it was impractical for England to resist their demands. The great ocean between England and the New World was too large. On the other hand, the Confederacy did not have a rightful claim to independence, because the Union could and did force those states back into the Union. The South could not sustain its independence.

Another example he gives in Israel, which gained independence in 1948, thanks to changing moral perspectives in Britain and America. Hazony claims that the English-speaking world opposed the creation of a Jewish state on the grounds that it would upset the Muslim world. The events of World War II involving the Jews, however, changed this calculation. “The holocaust demonstrated with maximum moral clarity the moral case for Jewish national self-determination.”

Putting aside the veracity of his claims here, the Hazony model for determining the edge cases for national independence comes down to either winning the support of the international community through moral persuasion or gaining your independence and maintaining it against all challenges. The two can be combined to enlist the support of powerful neighbors to take your side, as the American colonists did when they got the support of France in the American war for independence.

When you boil it all down, the Hazony formula for determining who has and who does not have a moral claim to self-determination is quite simple. Your claim is valid if you can make it stick. If circumstances or the actions of larger nations around you prevent you from gaining independence, then your claim was invalid. In his view, the virtue of nationalism lies in its effectiveness. Nationalism is a virtue if it wins your people their independence, but it is not a virtue in and of itself.

If this sounds a little bit like trial by combat, that is because it relies on the same view of man and society as ancient people. From Hazony’s point of view, you are morally indistinguishable from your people. You are a virtuous person if your life is lived in service to your people. Your people deserve respect and support if they are able to gain and keep their independence, by any means necessary. Nationalism is, in effect, trial by combat but between peoples.

This is a way of viewing virtue that is alien to the modern Western mind, as we think of virtue as an end, not a means to an end. You are a virtuous person, for example, if you practice certain habits like charity and conscientiousness, not if you make a lot of money or attain great power. For Hazony, virtue is about your purpose in helping your people attain their freedom as a people. This means anything that you do in pursuit of that collective goal is by definition virtuous.

This may not seem all that interesting, but in the context of the war between Israel and the Arab population in Gaza, it sheds light on what we are seeing from the Zionist supporters of Israel. The reason they do not see the contradiction between their claims about the Palestinians and their behavior toward the Palestinians, is the difference in how they see virtue. It is not simply tribalism that lets them maintain these contradictory views, but an alien moral framework.

From the point of view of the Zionists, Israel has a right to exist because it has gained independence and convinced enough big countries to support them in their fight to maintain their independence. The Palestinians, in contrast, have not been able to secure their independence and even if they were granted it in Gaza and the West Bank, they lack the means to sustain it. Therefore, their moral case for independence is invalid and their war against Israel is immoral.

Despite it being alien to modern people, this view of the world has its appeal, which you can see in the bloodlust voiced by Americans in support of Israel. The calls for vengeance and retribution titillate some ancient part of our brains that was of great value to our ancestors but is now buried under the conditioning in favor of individualism and moral objectivism. The suburban peasant may not be allowed to root for his own side, but he can root for Israel, so he does that instead.

In the end, Hazony may be correct in that the only thing that matters is the survival of your people, so all moral abstractions must be sublimated to it. The West has simply taken a holiday from reality by asserting that there is an objective moral standard for how people should act and how nations should act. In reality, the only thing that matters is winning the battle for survival and the winner can then declare how he won as the only acceptable way for how nations out to live.

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