[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

I think we should have a full-scale debate thread about this. I used to agree with you on this, but this war has been like the laboratory experiment which proves all the paper theories wrong. The key is predictive value, look at the predictions of your favorite thinkers, did they get it right?

Originally Posted by Barry

I just wondered why nobody was trying to end this war through diplomacy

How? I already wrote:

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

Russians justification for war is that a group of friends (NATO) is making too many friends who are too close to Russia.

The small-scale version of this is a popular person who keeps meeting people and making new friends. Then he makes friends with the guy next door. So you go next door, beat up your neighbor, trash his house, and so on.

How do you solve this diplomatically? Putin wants to rebuild the Russian Empire, and to do this he needs to return international law to what it was before 1914. Would you compromise and meet him halfway, say, with 1938 rules?

Originally Posted by Barry

Putin isn't the aggressor, he's the patsy, that fell into a trap deliberately laid down by Americans. All the deaths we are witnessing, are caused by US meddling in a region of the world, it has absolutely no business in. Your nation's pursuit of hegemony, appears to many in the rest of the world, as little more than a murderous campaign waged on defenceless nations. If you want this war to stop, you need to tell your government you can see through it's lies.

I believe that Putin is acting like a Biblical King of old, righteously committing evils as part of God's mysterious plan, as explained by Pat Robertson.

Meanwhile America's influence and coherence has been dropping like a stone ever since the competitive pressures of the cold war ended. At that time our elite realized they could get away with becoming the short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent crooks they've become. At least our overpriced weapons are effective, I credit the competitive international arms market for that, and nothing else.

On the other hand, Vladimir Putin is a KGB agent who climbed to the top of the Epic Darwinian Corpse-pile that is Soviet/post-Soviet politics. You're painting him as some sort of naïve hippie who is being led around the nose by the 5-dimentional chess geniuses of the Washington Swamp, who are always thinking decades ahead of brilliant new ways to strengthen America.

This seems to be the heart of our disagreement. Do you agree?

Originally Posted by Barry

The US Government has a long tradition of lying, in order to justify it's wars.

This is not a sign of competent Machiavellianism, it's the key to America's strategic incompetence. Credibility and trust are the main currency here, both of them have been profitlessly expended since the 1960's with no attempt from the elites to remedy the situation, except for counterproductive censorship attempts that are absurdly out of place in the internet era.

It justified going to war against Spain by pretending the USS Maine was attacked

I'd recommend you strengthen your argument by using examples from the past century.

It cooked up a whole croc of garbage in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify the invasion of Vietnam.

South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were invaded by the communists long before America put boots on the ground in response. The only problem with that war was that due to some lawyer's fine print we didn't openly fortify a front-line across Laos. Those whole thing could have been as cheap and quiet as the as the War On Terror in the Philippines. Heard about that campaign? Nobody has, because we won.

The first 5 rules of warfare are: 1. Don't get outflanked. 2. Cut your enemy's supply lines, all else is a distraction 3. Ranged weapons are strategically useless unless you can win a war of attrition 4. Democracies don't win wars of attrition. 5. Monarchies are immune to communist subversion (unless they are run by liberal, literal cuckolds like Mr. Romanov) therefore don't send a penny to the Vietnamese, have Thailand handle everything.

So what did we do? Instead of paying Thailand to fortify a line across Laos to the sea, we followed the lawyerly fine print of some treaty that the Communists were ignoring from before the ink was dry. The result meant dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of WW2...But at least there weren't boots on the ground, except when there were. And they did all this while thinking it could be kept secret.

No, the lesson of Vietnam was not "USA BAD" it was "treat lawyers like someone who is trying to kill you, because they are".

More than half of them, believed Saddam Hussein was in someway implicated in 9/11. More than 80% of them believed Saddam had WMD.

About 99% thought we were going to going to overthrow Saddam and then bring the troops home a month later, not that we were going to conduct an experiment to see if meth-crazed foreign soldiers make better social workers than actual locals.

This is evidence of incompetence, not Machiavellian brilliance.

ACX:...Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence...the intelligence community might suck at the sort of small-state terrorism work it’s been asked to do the past few decades, but that “infiltrating Russia” is kind of its bread and butter and a big part of its institutional DNA. Maybe we should trust it more on Great Power conflict than on tinpot dictator stuff? ...Bounded Distrust...

The US Government is lying again today.

If so, it's the Polish, the Balts, and most of all the Ukrainians themselves who are lying the hardest. Why do you think you know more than them, the people who are closest to the issue, who have lifetimes of direct first-hand experience with the issue?