Friday, March 18, 2022

Today's News: Reality bites

Photos from the Russia Ukraine War are striking and memorable, so I am planning to post some daily.
This Reuters photo of a woman carrying her cat to safety is so beautiful it haunts me: Coincidentally, CNN's Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy in their nightly email newsletter tonight highlighted the work of photographers throughout the Ukraine. Here are some of their links: 
 Associated Press: Inside Mariupol's devastation 
And some other photo essays here: 
 The Atlantic: Animals can be refugees too 

The world is so angry now at Putin and at Russia, it may not be possible anymore for everyone to just forgive and forget. 
But in Slate today, Tyler Austin Harper writes eloquently about the profound and tragic reality which we in the West now find ourselves facing - that there cannot be any heroes in a nuclear war. So yes, America and NATO can help Ukraine in many ways, but it can't fight the war for them, not without risking nuclear annihilation. And that reality could be a tragedy with no solution.
I worry that many of us expect this to be a modern story: one where good prevails, evil is vanquished, and the invaders are turned away at the city gates.... If the Ukraine crisis has brought anything into focus, it is that our national identity and our national interest are at odds... 
many—indeed most—of those Americans calling for a no-fly zone ...are simply people who cannot accept that, at a certain point, there is nothing more America can do. They are people who cannot believe there may come a time when we must contemplate letting Putin win, because the alternative would be to set Europe—and Ukraine with it—on thermonuclear fire. They are people who cannot bring themselves to understand that American heroism is in this instance impossible, that the price for our past sins—for the terrible bomb we invented that we alone have ever used in anger—is that the United States can no longer swoop in to save the day. 
We can send money, provide defensive supplies, and impose sanctions. We can make this war costly, in terms of international standing and economic stability, for Russia and its allies. But that is all we can do. And if it is not enough? Then that will be a nearly incomprehensible tragedy. 
But the alternatives are more incomprehensible, more tragic still. ...
The atomic genie shed its bottle in 1945, and it cannot be put back. The morally monochrome heroism of America’s past—the America that carried out a democratic revolution, that tore itself asunder to abolish slavery, that turned back the Third Reich—is no more. 
We can no longer risk everything in defense of our utmost values. That is the devil’s bargain we made when we dropped “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on two Japanese cities, transposing human shadows onto concrete. 
This does not mean the heroism of American individuals is over ... [but] military heroism of America as a nation can no longer function in extremis. The stakes have become too unfathomable, and our very power has become our most profound weakness. 
So pray for the heroism of Ukrainians—pray that they can hold on, make do with what help the world can provide—but it is time we let go of the old American fantasy that there is no war we cannot win, no democracy we cannot save, no wrong we cannot right. 
Ukraine faces an enemy whose capacity for evil may well be greater than America’s capacity for good. That is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy we must learn to understand if we are not to stumble into a greater tragedy still, out of a misplaced faith in our own heroism. Much has changed in the world since 1945, but this fact has not: There are no heroes in a nuclear war. 
Biden knows all of this already, and so does Trudeau and the leaders of Europe. But its hard to figure out they are going to educate the public about this -- just look at the media hysteria yesterday in Canada over Joly's "convene" remark. And the number of people I see online slamming Biden for "doing nothing" because they still think its a movie, that the US can just send in the 82nd Airborne and win the war before the credits role. Sigh. Well meaning, but really.... That said, Putin is also facing a difficult reality, too -- he is losing the war in Ukraine. He fired another general today as his illegal war went from bad to worse, and Ukraine continues to battle back on several fronts: I see tweets about the upcoming NATO meeting, and the expectation that NATO can figure out what more can be done -- I hope so, but I guess I just can't see anything yet:
Another big question is where China will land in all this: At Daily Kos, Mark Sumner is talking about the Russia Ukraine War as the first war where new kinds of weapons are being used to attack enemy positions: 
 In just three weeks of combat, Ukraine has become not just a war zone, but a laboratory. On the one hand, Russia is using the same tactics of brutality, and the same weapons, that it has deployed for decades to destroy cities and persecute its invasion. On the other hand, Ukraine is defending itself with an arsenal that increasingly depends on weapons designed to take down armor and aircraft. Where Ukraine has been less successful is in degrading Russia’s ability to inflict brutality to civilian areas — but systems like Switchblade might well help with that. Because while a soldier with a rifle can’t do anything about artillery firing from woods five miles away, a soldier with a Switchblade definitely can.
 Other news today, the world continues to figure out how it can help: And the latest news is that 130 people have been rescued now from the Maruipol theatre bombing.
Finally, I'll bet very few people knew this before: Obama should have done it. 
And this also happened today:
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