Letter 2 America for March 7, 2014

Dear America,

With all the saber rattling in the world...with the price the United States has paid on foreign shores over the past decade in particular, but over the past century in general, it is surprising that people like John McCain want to keep on rattling them.  For more than ten years we have been sacrificing young soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in just the past three years we have participated militarily or diplomatically (if you can call saber rattling diplomacy) in revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Syria, and now we are volunteering to threaten Russia in Crimea and Ukraine as if it were our business.  The lack of a military threat over Crimea is what John McCain calls "feckless foreign policy" and I suppose he would rather that we make such a threat, just so as to assert American hegemony, rather than mind our own business and continue diplomatically, and rationally, on the name of joining leagues of nations rather than recruiting them when there are crises in the world.  It's so Republican, this admonition to act rather than try to prevent others from doing so...so conservative.  Last week, our State Department published a list called "President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims About Ukraine."  Rather than a missive in the diplomatic pouch it sounds like the rant of a cyber bully on FaceBook.  Of course, the Russian state department responded in kind, chastening the chasteners with a review of American interventionism abroad in recent years; a history that is undeniably characterizable as ill-advised if not downright illicit in terms of international law.  The claims raised in both documents were self-serving, tendentious, somewhat contrived and often no more than semiotic in nature, but so what.  As to the antagonists and protagonists, if there are any protagonists to pit against the antagonists, Putin is known to be the leader not of a democracy but of a kleptocracy, which is what started this whole incident: Putin's protégé in Ukraine was a kleptocrat after Putin's own heart, and the Ukrainians ran him out of the country for it...or at least to Crimea from which he crossed the border into Russia.  And as for John McCain, he graduated fourth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis, yet he got to fly jets for the Navy...a posting that is generally reserved for the best and the brightest, not the ne'er-do-well son of an admiral who managed to accrue more demerits in his academic career than any one before him in history, which perhaps explains how he managed to get shot down over Vietnam.  It doesn't explain how he became a war hero because of it though, which leads me to the impact of all this on American politics.

Marco Rubio addressed the Conservative Political Action Convention this week and tried to resurrect his fleeting popularity with conservatives by advocating a more vigorous American response to the Russian invasion of Crimea.  And while he may once again become a conservative darling because of it, the Republican mainstream seems more interested in pulling in American horns abroad than it is in more foreign adventures, ergo a Pyrrhic victory for Rubio if it works at all after his stance on immigration reform.  And as President Obama rattles not his saber but his pocket knife, Republican cat calls ring out in the media...or at least they will...and the Democratic faithful won't be much impressed either, and all this for what.  Crimea was part of Russian until Nikita Kruschev ceded it to Ukraine, one of the members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--you may remember it as the USSR--in 1954, back when the word "The" was a compulsory predicate to the names Ukraine and Crimea.  Before that formality that didn't really change anything within the USSR, Crimea had been the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet since the 18th century, and continued to be until today, albeit now only by treaty.  And when the nations that are trying to prevent Russia from taking Crimea back invaded Crimea during the Crimean War, Russia defended the people of Sevastopol, the regions greatest city, until it fell.  It was the Russians who kept Crimea from falling again during the Nazi invasion effort of World War II, and the people of Crimea who speak Russian, as their ancestors have done for centuries, haven't forgotten.  So with a history that almost begs the question of how Crimea ever got to be part of Ukraine in the first place, why do we care.  The Crimean parliament has set a plebiscite for March 16, and the people of Crimea will speak. What do we care...let them.  This isn't about international affairs.  It is about the unity of the CIS (Confederation of Independent States) which is what the USSR became.  And frankly, I don't give a damn about changes in the Russian alphabet.  Let Putin be Putin; he isn't fooling anyone anyway.  And let the Russians keep piping gas into Europe, Russian gas being 30% of the European supply.  It's cold over there too, and allowing our oil companies to ship our natural gas to Europe at the cost of rising costs in this country seems like a fools errand.

No, Crimea is a sleeping dog, and I'd rather that it sleep in Russia than join in an international expeditionary force...either diplomatically or militarily...designed to prevent what seems a natural change from occurring.  Let's not look for any more trouble.  Iraq and Afghanistan cost us more than a trillion dollars, not to mention the more important loss of thousands of lives of young people who thought they were somehow responding to the 9/11 assaults.  In the end, nothing was accomplished in a favorable sense, but a lot of widows and orphans were made and corrupt governments have been propped up at their expense.  Let's not repeat our mistakes, no matter what John McCain says.

Your friend,

Mike