Weekly Mind Dump, 12/24-12/30, 2023: Ukraine - Massacring Civilians Doesn't Win Wars
And - What if FDR had pulled the rug out from under Britain with U.S. aid? That's exactly what the GOP has in store for Ukraine.
Waging War on Civilians is the Recourse of Cowards
The following essay is updated and modified from one I published shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
We continue to be stunned by reports and images of Russian forces massacring Ukrainian civilians through indiscriminate missile attacks, destroying schools, residential apartment buildings and hospitals. It’s as though, failing utterly in warfare, the Russians are going on an uncontrolled rampage of vengeance against the Ukrainian people. On Friday, in one of the largest of such assaults in the war, 158 Russian missiles and drones killed at least 39 people and wounded about 160 others. And, yes, another maternity hospital, a favorite Russian target, was destroyed. In retaliation, Ukraine struck the Russian border city of Belgorod, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 110 others, in what was the deadliest single assault against a Russian city since the start of the war nearly two years ago (a Ukrainian military spokesman stated Kyiv did not target civilians). Not to be outdone, Russia bombed Kharkiv, 70 kilometers from Belgorod.
Military strategists conclude that Moscow’s aim in carrying out such wanton destruction is to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, crush their will to resist. But, if Russian leaders studied their history, they would see that such tactics rarely work, except occasionally in constrained geographical areas such as Grozny and Aleppo. When applied against nations of tens of millions, the results are mixed at best.
To win a war, military commanders need to know their Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, not their Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler.
Communities of people tend to be surprisingly resilient. During the three Roman-Jewish Wars of the first millennium AD, the Romans massacred 6,000 Jews in a single campaign, turned the Second Temple into a pagan site, changed the names of Judea and Jerusalem to Syria Palestina and Aelia Capitolina, respectively, banned the Torah, slaughtered religious scholars and scattered the Jewish population to the corners of the Mediterranean and beyond. Fast forward to today. Who else cares to take on Israel? Even Hamas will think twice.
Third Reich planners called for “the complete destruction of all Poles” in 1939. The Nazi occupiers killed 3 million Polish Jews and over 2 million ethnic Poles, including up to 100,000 members of the intelligentsia, during World War II. Some 150,000 Polish civilians, moreover, were killed by the Soviets during their occupation of eastern Poland; and another 100,000 Poles were murdered by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war. About 90 percent of Polish deaths were non-military in nature. Poland survived genocide and today is a frontline defender against Russian aggression.
While he did not outright advocate attacking civilians, Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz did maintain that the civilian population of an enemy country should be made to feel a war’s effects, and be coerced into exerting pressure on their government to surrender.
U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who may have studied Clausewitz at West Point, echoed the master strategist’s views in relation to the Civil War: “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war go terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” While Sherman ordered his commanders not to directly attack civilians, most else was fair game, notably the South’s economic means.
As World War II raged on, the British made the German civilian population a fair bombing target, with RAF chief Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris stating a goal was to destroy “the morale of the enemy civil population.” Though the Americans strove to limit their bombing missions to military and economic targets, this, too, shifted late in the war with devastating fire bombing of Japan. General Curtis LeMay, aware he was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths, later stated, “I suppose if [we] had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
The Allied “strategic bombing” of civilians helped to gradually undermine the will of the German and Japanese to prosecute the war. But for a long time, the bombing of civilians only stiffened their resolve to fight on. They surrendered only after their countries lay in ruins, hundreds of thousands had lost their lives, and hope of victory vanished. As for the British themselves, the German Blitz on cities, killing 30,000 civilians, only stiffened British resolve.
There is a whole body of law devoted to the rules of armed conflict called International Humanitarian Law, centered in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. They specifically protect people who are not taking part in the hostilities, notably civilians, health and aid workers and specify that civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack . . . .” Russian forces in Ukraine have deliberately destroyed over two dozen hospitals, including maternity facilities. Russia is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions.
Last year, the Ukrainian government announced the opening of its first war crimes trial, in the case of a Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian. Russian sergeant Vadim Shysimarin’s life sentence was reduced to 15 years. The Ukrainians have been prosecuting other such offenders. Earlier this year (2023), the International Criminal Court, in the Hague, issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes, centering on forcibly seizing Ukrainian children and sending them to Russia.
U.S. war colleges teach that history has proven two things: 1) wars are won based on, as Clausewitz asserts, “the destruction of [the enemy’s] forces,” not on “blind aggressiveness,” which will “destroy the attack itself, not the defense;” and 2) committing atrocities only feeds the zeal of an enemy’s will to resist. Russian tactics and strategy in Ukraine — such as they are — reflect stupidity and ultimate self-defeat. The evidence includes some 315,000 dead and wounded Russian troops, 17 Russian flag officers killed in action, the forced retreat of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet by a nation with no appreciable navy, the chaos in logistics, the massive losses of military equipment and the simple failure to achieve intended territorial gains much less regime change. As Winston Churchill admonished, “Vengeance is the most costly and dissipating of luxuries.”
Waging war against civilians is the recourse of cowards. Pursuing a victory based on breaking the will of an adversary’s civilian population, as opposed to undermining their military capacity to resist, is destined for failure. And then come the war crimes indictments.
The Republicans’ Plot to Sell Out Ukraine
Republicans in Congress have the Biden administration over a barrel by withholding approval of a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine, tying it to the administration accepting strengthened measures for controlling immigration at the southern border. The last aid amount of $250 million in military aid is on its way. After that, the flow dries up.
Republicans disguise their opposition to aiding Ukraine in clever sophistry about oversight and budget discipline. House Speaker Mike Johnson added his own verbal chaff: “We need a clear articulation of the strategy to allow Ukraine to win.” I’m sorry, but did Franklin Roosevelt, hampered back then by the isolationist right in the form of “America First,” many of whom were Nazi sympathizers, ever insist of Winston Churchill “a clear articulation of the strategy to allow Great Britain to win?” Of course not. Britain, as Ukraine now, was fighting for its life against a totalitarian monster. That many Republicans don’t see this should make us all question their sincerity. For the congressional far-right, it is not about money or a “clear strategy” or border security. It’s about serving their master, Trump. Add to this, genuine admiration for his Russian case officer, ex-KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin.
Prior to this week’s missile and drone attacks, Russia has fired at least 7,400 missiles at Ukraine, an average of about 11 per day. The New York Times reports: “Ukraine’s supply of surface-to-air missiles — key ordnance needed to down incoming Russian missiles — is now running short, forcing Ukrainian troops to juggle resources between the front line and cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Lviv.”
Make no mistake, should Trump return to the White House, he would serve Ukraine to Putin as a gift, like a cooked goose on a silver platter.
European aid is also being bolixed up by another Putin minion, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has blocked a $55 billion EU package of financial aid for Ukraine. Orban’s veto power has sparked comments that it is like having Putin himself sitting at the table.
We face a turning point for Western democracies: freedom or surrender. If we abandon Ukraine now, we can prepare by packing our own white flags.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.