At the conclusion of his Washington Post column on the leaks of sensitive documents David Ignatius quotes Winston Churchill:
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
It looks like the question is whether the truth has been overwhelmed by her bodyguard.
Here’s his assessment of the trove:
We’re in Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors†here. What matters, as he observed, is that you know what’s accurate and what is a manipulated reflection. Though a few documents appear to have been doctored, an administration official told me Monday: “We’re still examining them, but at first glance, this appears to be real.â€
and here’s what he thinks we’ve learned:
- Ukraine’s air defense weapons have dwindled to the point that Russia about to gain air superiority.
- Ukraine is firing faster than the West can replenish.
- The Biden Administration has been less inclined to use our own troops in the conflict more than some of our allies, e.g. the United Kingdom.
- U. S. officials think the conflict is reaching a stalemate.
I found this passage in the column wryly amusing:
This ought to be the trump card for the United States. In World War II, the United States converted manufacturing plants across the country to make tanks, planes and aircraft carriers that simply overwhelmed Japan and Germany. No similar mobilization has taken place this time. Why not? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met several times with defense contractors, but why hasn’t President Biden appointed the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board?
It may have escaped Mr. Ignatius’s attention but this isn’t 80 years ago. The “manufacturing plants across the country” to which he refers were dismantled decades ago and much of that manufacturing is being done in China. Surprise! China isn’t on our side in this conflict.
The reason that President Biden hasn’t appointed a “war production board” is that it would take a lot more than that to restart our manufacturing. Millions of square feet of auto manufacturing, just to cite one example, no longer exist to be converted for use building tanks. The same is true in Europe. They have been offshoring their manufacturing to China for the last 30-50 years.
We’d need to be mining more coal and iron, making more steel, building more plants. We’ve been moving in the opposite direction for 50 years. A war production board can’t change that overnight.
Add to that John Bolton’s utterly insane diatribe in Saturday’s WSJ. What is especially disturbing is that the editors of the WSJ thought Bolton’s oped was a reasonable contribution to discussions of the war in Ukraine, and that Bolton was/is at the very pinnacle of power in this country.
The qualitative differences between the clowns who run all the governments in the West and the people who govern the Russian Federation and China, and even Iran, are appalling. Putin and Xi and their colleagues are well-educated, serious people who are actual patriots seeking the best for their countries. And their counterparts in Washington, London, Berlin, Ottawa, Canberra… are literally insane megalomaniacs.
For the US, UK et al., the Ukrainian war is a game that has no possible consequences for them. For Russia it is an existential war, as Bolton’s plans to dismantle and occupy Russia show. The US State Department actually has a division devoted to planning the dismantling and occupation.
If need be, Russia will escalate this war all the way to nuclear strikes on American cities. If you bomb the 50 largest cities in the US, you break all the networks that hold this country together and make it work: transportation, power transmission, communications, financial services. All the networks collapse.
No doubt Russia would be bombed, too. Actually, every city from the Atlantic to the Urals would be bombed, De Gaulles’s Europe. Better know some Mandarin. China would become the world hegemon.
To be honest, if one follows the conflict outside of the Visegrad and Anglosphere media, Mr Ignatius findings aren’t a revelation. The first 2 points is the consequence of Russia pursuing a strategy of attrition. 3rd point can be inferred given that multiple sources (Israeli, Russian) said the UK was the most hawkish in the failed negotiations to end the war in Spring 2022.
In some sense much of the leaked data isn’t surprising. The US spies on everyone; Hungary isn’t enamored with US (esp the current administration), the Israeli security establishment hates Netanyahu, US has penetrated the Russian military (or its equipment).
I guess the shock for many is because the Anglosphere media really left objectivity behind when the war started.
Here’s the real uncovered news this week. Russia nearly shot down a manned UK spy plane last September. Apparently, the Russian pilot thought he had permission to fire from ground control which was a miscommunication. The world got lucky because the munition malfunctioned.
The world was that close to a worse than Cuban missile crisis situation between two nuclear powers. It’s scary how it’s been buried by the media.