You are clearly sn
You are clearly an intelligent and well informed man, of that there is no doubt. Your knowledge of the history of the area and the series of events leading to this conflict is remarkable. Where you and I find ourselves at odds is that you still believe we should maintain military action against Russia. I dont agree. When was the last time Russia took military action against the US? In Iraq and Afghanistan, we know with absolute certainty that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran provided weapons and funding to the Arabs. There were very small contingets of Russian Muslims that answered the call for jihad and entered the fight independently, but there is zero evidence to suggest that the Russian government did anything more than infest social media with Troll farms. They had 20+ years to interfere with us on the battlefield, even if it was just monetary, and they didn't. But somehow, I'm supposed to believe (trust me bro, the Russians are bad) that despite endless opportunity in 3 seperate decades, they stayed out of it entirely, but they are the threat to our nation? Nope, not buying it.
You do realize that when all of the intelligence information came out from the 40's through the 80's, from the red scare to bomb drills, to... you get it, that it was almost entirely bullshit. Our own intelligence agencies lied to the president's for 40+ years, not only about Russian capabilities, but also intentions. Russia was never a threat to the US, and I don't believe they are now. Their military is pathetic and ineffective by comparison, their citizens have no pull of patriotism, and there is no cohesion in the government. They are shattered and ineffective. The best weapon they have is propoganda.
We are in agreement that the US should not engage in preemptive military operations against Russia. Nowhere have I advocated for the US to do such a thing. My perspective doesn’t fit into any of the narratives that have been created since 2014, because I was watching all of this stuff unfold dating back decades prior to the Soviet Collapse. My family was involved technical analysis of critical Soviet weapon systems in the 1970s, then later with Nunn-Lugar with the base exchange program (not the nuclear non-proliferation, though we gained some very interesting insights into the state of Soviet nuclear forces capabilities). That was in the early 1990s.
However, Russia was involved in providing technical assistance to bad actors both in OEF and OIF. There is a minority report in DIA that was ignored, which showed how the Chinese used the Pakistani ISI to glove the Muslim Botherhood, who then used their terrorist wing of Al Qaeda to do the 9/11 attacks. SOCOM/
ABLE DANGER showed that the corrupted US Intel Community knew about the plot beforehand, so ABLE DANGER was shut down. ABLE DANGER had already connected Mohammed Atta to Ali Mohamed and the Bin Laden network. ABLE DANGER was formed as a cooperation between elements in the SOF Community, because they were used to getting such bad intel from the usual suspects in the IC (namely CIA), so they realized that all the assets we had within DoD were far superior to the Langley folks, and pursued the anti-terrorism mission set using DoD and OSINT electronic searches of databases, especially against bad actors operating within the US.
The strategic objective of China and Russia post-Desert Storm was to distract the US from Europe and the Pacific while both nations could re-build and modernize their woefully-lacking militaries and industries. China and Russia used the Clinton White House in different ways to accomplish those objectives:
1. Since the CCP financed both of Clinton’t campaigns in 1992 and 1996 with illegal foreign contributions laundered through the Riady network and DNC (
China campaign finance gate), they were owed massive transfers of US defense technology and samples. Dutifully, Clinton allowed Chinese foreign intelligence officers access to scores of US military installations, brokered deals between US defense aerospace companies and China, transferred our aircraft assembly line operations and project management to them, transferred some of our ballistic missile guidance technology from Loral Space Systems, and our advanced Radio communications and encryption technology from Motorola. Chicom spies were given access to Dept of Energy nuclear facilities, were given a VIP tour of the B-2 Combined Test Force at Edwards AFB, to include cockpit access, and God only knows what else.
China put a lot of officials in the Clinton Admin and seeded the government with as many spies and moles as possible, with emphasis on ballistic missiles, nukes, strategic bombers, submarines, gas turbine jet engines, missiles, guidance systems, comms, electronics, and US military hardware that was obviously superior to the copies of Russian trash they were used to be fed.
2. The Russian 1st Gen oligarchs (former KGB Generals) were focused on exploitation of their industries and raw materials for personal gain at the time. They didn’t like the NSA seizing their funds from Swiss, Cypriot, Cayman Island, Panamanian, and other offshore/deregulated banks as they pilfered their own nation’s resources, so their strategic vision was extremely short-sighted and selfish, leaning on their stooges in the Clinton WH to provide the NSA monthly code updates to PROMIS so they could avoid the NSA asset seizure program. They began to realize Russia was in free-fall though, so they prepared new leadership to replace Yeltsin, placing 3 candidates as Deputy Prime Ministers in his cabinet to see what creme would rise to the top. One of them initiated or took credit for initiating the 2nd Chechen War, where they went scorched-earth on the Chechens to avoid a repeat of the 1st Chechen War disaster, and these military adventures were advertised on Russia One state news TV giving credit to that Deputy PM.
You know him as this guy:
On Dec 31, 1999, Yeltsin got on state TV and announced he would be retiring, no need for elections, because “We all know who we love. Does it make sense to have any elections?"
Putin is the kind of guy who should have been babied even more than usual, since his 2 older brothers both died as an infant and at age 1. His parents lived in post-war squalor, where he hunted rats with other kids in the complex. In Russian culture, the mothers and grandmothers obsess over and pamper boys like nothing I’ve seen before. He got into judo and sambo since he was so short, and was a cut-up in class. He tried to join the KGB when he was in 9th Grade, walked into the Leningrad Bolshoi Dom KGB HQ and asked for them to recruit him. He was told he needed a college degree in law if he was to join the exclusive organization. He was very ideologically-aligned with the USSR, Soviet policies, reliable, and dedicated to recruiting and running illegal assets out of East Berlin.
What he saw happening to Russia post-collapse deeply disturbed him, and as part of his extensive Russian history instruction he received in university, he truly believed Russia must rise again to its rightful position of greatness. In Russian culture, they literally believe they are the biggest, the best, have the best military, the strongest generals, most loyal soldiers, best infrastructure, not like those decadent homeless capitalists eating birds in the park. The Western World is presented to them as weak, lower quality of life, worthless, amoral, greedy, and stupid. So Putin did not like what was happening under Yeltsin and saw it as his duty to the nation and to upright the ship.
His first act was to purge the 1st Gen Oligarchs who put him in power, so there was no opportunity for them to cultivate a replacement for him. He then gave all of their businesses to the 2nd Generation of Oligarchs, who all answered to and owed him everything.
Putin turned Russia around from a post-Soviet KGB-raped carcass, towards the vision of a Tsarist Peter/recovering Soviet expansionist State.
His vision was to expand back into Russia’s “rightful and historical territories” by hook or crook, strategy, and brute force when necessary. When I heard from one of his foreign ministry secretaries that he was planning on expanding the empire once again, and he went down the list of countries, I wanted to believe this guy was just an old Soviet blow-hard (true), but I also took it seriously. This was in 2006 when everyone was still in unicorn farts and fairy dust “end of history” land, not facing reality.
Some people woke up when he invaded Georgia in 2008. It certainly got my attention because it was on the list provided by the Russian FM secretary (who was silenced after spilling the beans). I was in Estonia at the time having just finished OC’ing for ERNA Raid. As soon as that happened, I became more hyper-focused on Ukraine, because it only made sense that was going to be a big strategic objective for Putin.
When I was in Russia, former submarine crewmen were grudgingly-retorting that they will turn America into a radioactive wasteland filled with 3-legged dogs (Kangaroos that mutate from dogs). It was weird. These were Soviet-era guys who I also wrote off as blow-hards, especially after they asked me who my favorite US President was and I answered Reagan. They hated Reagan with a passion, because he demanded Gorbachev tear down the iron curtain and then it happened. Gorbachev is hated by them for being weak and an appeaser. This was late 2008-2009.