I’m not excusing or minimising anything, and I’ve made a clear enough statement above regarding this point I think.
I never got the feeling that NATO interventions were based of genocidal conquests, perhaps I missed something?
Ok often the concept of being superior beings came across … it’s often difficult for people to accept that somewhere else there might be different ways of functionning that are just as valid as our own.
Is it daft because it uses Russia to illustrate a point about humanity?
To each his own, I guess.
It would be fairly difficult to get targeting-accurate radar signatures for these systems. Firstly, they are point defence systems deployed well behind front lines, out of the range of most counterbattery radar systems - the Zooparks for example have a maximum range of about 40km. The launch signature to trace is a very short interval. Once the missiles launch, they are course-correcting, so trajectory analysis isn’t sufficient. The detection radar Patriots use jumps frequency to avoid jamming and other ECM, which makes accurate location of the radar array quite challenging.
Probably the greatest detection risk for the Patriot units is not radar or signal triangulation, but good old-fashioned human intelligence. Russians know there are Patriot batteries in an area perhaps +/-5km, but a simple geolocated cell phone photo could provide a location to within +/- 10 meters. Patriot batteries can be deployed in an hour, and moved out in rather less than that. I suspect they are relocated every day - it is possible the recent shift to day time barrages by the Russians was hoping to catch them offguard.
A Patriot battery will normally have 6 launchers. A Patriot battalion will have 4-6 batteries (press has used battery and battalion interchangeably, which is incorrect). A battery will have a platoon that handles fire control and detection, and 1-2 launcher platoons that operate the missiles themselves. So the ratio of launcher to control system is about 6 to 1. All of this assumes NATO standard formations, I am not sure what is actually deployed there. The Israelis use a somewhat different configuration, but not radically so.
Also worth noting that the US now has an order of magnitude more information on Russian capabilities in this area, with Ukraine having captured quite a cross-section of Russian gear.
4 Likes
Nice writeup. Thanks @Arminius .
1 Like
He wants to pray he doesn’t get sent back , like some others have.
The US and NATO in general never targeted civilian infastructure to the scale that Russia has. Nor have they committed organized atrocities such as Bucha’s like Russia has.
I’ll just let this article here, and that will be it from me on that topic:
The notion of ‘indirect deaths’ has to be used fairly carefully - methodologically, that 4.5 million number is based on an assumed coefficient (4) multiplied by the known number of direct deaths. There is a truth in there somewhere, indirect deaths without a doubt occur.
That article is particularly problematic in how it treats Afghanistan, counting as ‘indirect war deaths’ the suffering of Afghani civilians now that the economy has collapsed under the Taliban. But the level of economic activity, including direct food aid was an explicit function of the ongoing war. Children starving in Afghanistan now are not starving because of the war, they are starving because the war ended. Prior to that 2001 war, guess what was happening under Taliban rule? The economy was the same disaster it is now, people were starving (especially the ethnic minorities), and the country was de facto in civil war with the Pashtun Taliban controlling most of the country, but actively fighting the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara. The war never stopped, the US interlude was simply a prosperous period within a conflict that has really been going continuously since 1980. Seems a little absurd to label it a ‘post-9/11’ war.
2 Likes
them spin doctors though, they love a good tale to try and spread the guilt around.
that country was poor before 9/11 and still is poor. as is most regions where the warlords have more power than the government. Taliban are just another warlord
I understand what you mean, but I guess that what can be retained from that is that every war will have very long-term consequences. Deadly, costly ones, with a lot of suffering.
My take is that every government starting a war has to be condemned, whomever that is. In Ukraine’s case, it’s clearly Russia for me, no discussion about that. But NATO gave them several terrible examples previously to that. Dictator Putin keeps saying that, I know, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, at least in part.
For me Putin and GW Bush for instance, are exactly the same kind of types: ruthless warmongers who despise human lives, even though their motives, or rather, their talk justifying the warmongering, may be different. But the motives were approximatively the same: conquering lands with a lot of oil and gas in the underground.
Two war criminals. The only difference between them in my book is roughly twenty years.
easy to say that. How old were you when 9/11 happened? I was in my early 20’s living in sin with my first wife. woke up to my phone ringing, it was my boss calling me to turn on the news.
The world came to a standstill, watched in horror as a second plane flew into the second tower. at that exact moment, you knew something terrible was happening. an act of war was declared on the US by Al-Qaeda, and the US doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Afghanistan harbored those who organized the attack.
Iraq was a separate entity to 9/11…
I don’t think oil was remotely close to a motivation for Afghanistan, which to me was in fact a justified war. Notably, that was a NATO action, invoking the self-defence clause. Iraq was a neo-con disaster, but to compare the sheer naivete of the neocons to the brutality of Putin’s pan-Russian project gets something spectacularly wrong.
Similarly, Libya’s Qaddafi provoked an intervention with repeated attacks. Had the West stayed behind to clean up the mess afterwards, it probably gets condemned as another Afghanistan situation.
3 Likes
No comparison to Putin, but to call it ‘naivete’ gets something spectacularly wrong too.
I think the neocons came in two flavours - the ones who were really just expressing naked American power, and the genuinely naive kind that believed that if you just got rid of Saddam Hussein and took control for a couple of years, a pluralist democracy could be installed which would then happily sell their oil to the West. Many of them genuinely thought they would be able to be out in perhaps 2 months, and worse, planned accordingly. Hence the dismissal of Powell’s concerns about just how many US troops would be needed for the post-war rebuilding period. The Rumsfeld faction thought that would be the easy part, and getting it wrong destabilized the entire region.
In essence, there was more raw stupidity than malice than the mix from Putin’s Russia
1 Like
Not interested in the Putin comparison, they’re not comparable and there’s absolutely no doubt that Ukraine is much, much worse.
But just because they’r e not comparable there’s no need to use euphemisms and excuses either. Iraq was an act of pure aggression that was justified with ridiculous fabricated lies. And that was just the beginning. My opinion. Probably no use discussing this any further from my part though, feel free to tell my how wrong I am.
1 Like
No, I don’t disagree with you at all - they were ridiculous fabricated lies, and Iraq was pure aggression. I don’t think that is fundamentally incompatible with my take on at least a substantial part of American neocon thinking. The American capacity for self-delusion is absolutely staggering, and it reached a real apex in that thinking. Implicit in that naivete, to return to the word you object to, was brushing aside any consideration of thinking about the ‘project’ from the Iraqi point of view, dismissing it as irrelevant. I don’t think understanding that thought process in any way excuses it - there is a real brutality there.
A good friend was involved in the Chretien government’s discussions as to whether or not to join the US invasion of Iraq (Canada participated in Afghanistan, but not Iraq). The Bush administration was putting intense pressure on Canada to send forces, and even large sections of the Liberal Party were supportive of the idea. He counts participation in that decision as one of his proudest moments of public service, as one of the people asked to assess the American intelligence and make a recommendation. We would have been stuck there for a decade.
3 Likes
Chretien ?
The friend in question worked in his PMO, the ‘political’ guy working with the civil servants to prepare the briefing.