Trump’s Election Conspiracy

Posted on April 27, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 27, 2022

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the events of January 6th, 2021 was Vice President Mike Pence’s courage and integrity in standing up to the barrage of attacks from Donald Trump’s election team. Pence’s stance, that he had no power to reject electors designated by the states, was legal and correct, and a critical defense of our Constitution and our democracy. Pence got it right, in part, because he was being advised by a retired federal appellate judge, J. Michael Luttig. Luttig is a Republican who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H. W. Bush.

Judge Luttig published an OpEd on the CNN website this morning that addressed the wider issue of what the Trump-dominated Republicans were really after. While he did not say anything many of us didn’t either already know or suspect, he put it all together in a succinct package that ought to send a chill through anyone who believes in our Constitution, say, those three “originalist” justices appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump.

Luttig explained that “January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud.” It was all about state legislatures that passed or changed voting rules to expand the ways people could cast votes in response to the COVID lockdown and subsequent concerns about averting super-spreader events. He describes Trumpers’ claims that Trump lost due to election fraud as false and disingenuous. In fact, everything that occurred between Election Day, November 3, 2020, and January 6th, 2021 was part of a conspiracy to circumvent the Constitution that began long before the election. More ominous was Luttig’s warning that it was all a dry run of a process they intend to refine and use again in 2024.

The intent is to rewrite election rules based on their contention that the swing states that gave the election to Biden violated the Independent State Legislature Doctrine. They believe that will ultimately allow them to control the outcome of all future presidential elections in favor of Republican candidates. That’s an important reason that traditional Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have not completely broken with Trump. The conspiracy would benefit the party, independent of the internal struggle over who controls it. The fact that it would blatantly undermine the intent of the voting clauses in the Constitution isn’t even a consideration.

The Doctrine grants exclusive power to state legislatures over how to conduct elections and select electors, which Trump’s people favor because Republicans control a majority of state legislatures. They contend that it is therefore illegal for state courts or election officials to interfere with that process, even in emergency situations like the COVID pandemic. Thus, by expanding early and absentee voting rules, which Trump contends favored Democrats, the election was thrown to Biden. It’s a position that even the Supreme Court including Trump’s three appointees seemed to have rejected, last month, when they refused to block state courts’ actions in North Carolina and Pennsylvania that changed grossly gerrymandered district boundaries set by the states’ legislatures.

The conspiracy to undermine the 2020 election began months before Election Day when it was becoming clear that Trump’s refusal to accept the advice of his COVID policy task force, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, would likely cause him to lose. It was perhaps ironic that every case brought before the Supreme Court challenging the election result was rejected based on the same Doctrine. Trump’s justices ruled that federal intervention in state-run elections would not be constitutional.

Judge Luttig’s warning not only casts a spotlight on what we can expect from a Trump-dominated Republican Party in future presidential elections. It also provides a meaningful context for the work of the House January 6th Committee, which is now in possession of thousands of text messages, emails, and telephone records describing the actions of Trump’s team and family members during the transition period prior to January 6th. All of the attempts by Trump’s people claiming lack of knowledge, poor memories, or innocent intent fly out the window when viewed against the judge’s rendering of events.

It couldn’t be clearer that Mark Meadows, at the direction of President Trump, was the focal point of the conspiracy, and that all the usual suspects, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Donald Trump, Jr, as well as all the House members who beat the drum falsely over election fraud were part of the cynical attempt to undermine the Constitution.

It’s time for all Americans to wake up to the very real threat to our democracy. Stop believing what you read on Facebook and look at the facts, or your children may not have one.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Ray of Hope?

Posted on April 25, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 25, 2022

The second world war ended with the nuclear destruction of two Japanese industrial cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis had been forced to abandon their atomic weapons development program during the war, and Russia’s program was still a few years from producing an atomic bomb. But even amid the euphoria produced by ending the most destructive war in human history, the people who best understood the implications of America’s use of its only two nuclear weapons knew the world had entered a potentially new phase of self-destruction.

In 1947, the world’s leading atomic scientists, led by Albert Einstein, established the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic indicator of how close they believed the world was to total annihilation, which was represented by Midnight. The Clock was initially set to seven minutes to Midnight, but in 1949, when Russia exploded its first A-bomb, it was reset to three minutes to Midnight. The Timeline produced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists shows how the clock’s minute hand moved in response to world events – wars, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, and political climates.

The Clock was moved to two minutes before Midnight in 1953 when the Soviet Union successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, and it stayed there throughout the 1950s as the Cold War ramped up. The election of John Kennedy and the anticipated thaw in the relationship between NATO and the Soviets created a wave of optimism sufficient to set it back to seven minutes to Midnight. The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the signing of a limited nuclear test ban treaty moved us to twelve minutes from complete destruction in 1963, but the Vietnam conflict edged it back to seven minutes. The 1972 SALT agreement limiting the number of nuclear weapons allowed by both sides, which the Bulletin described as “the greatest step toward world peace since the Sermon on the Mount” reset the clock to twelve minutes before Midnight.

The Clock hovered in that range until it was moved a full seven minutes further from the brink in 1991 when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev mutually reduced their nuclear readiness, effectively ending the Cold War. Sadly, seventeen minutes to Midnight was the most optimistic view of the future ever expressed by the Doomsday Clock. The rise of ISIS, radical Islam in Iran, two attacks on the world trade center in New York, our failed military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ineffectiveness of the Paris Climate Accords, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the ascendency of autocratic governments throughout the world caused the Clock to be reset at two minutes to midnight by the time Donald Trump began dismantling the western alliance, disrupting world trade, and declaring war on science in the midst of a pandemic.

In 2020, the use of cyber-wars and the inability or unwillingness of national governments to show restraint in their use, combined with rises in nationalism and the gradual disintegration of international relations, caused the atomic scientists’ review board to set the Doomsday Clock to its most pessimistic reading ever – 100 minutes to Midnight. In 2021, the disruptions caused by COVID kept it there, and as 2022 began, the conclusion of the Board was that while the change in leadership in America by the Biden administration was a positive influence in reducing world tensions, the use of disinformation throughout the internet and attacks on democratic institutions around the world created a standoff in the Clock setting.

On March 7, 2022, the Bulletin released a special statement in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It had long warned that the greatest threat to the world was the likelihood that any military confrontation between Russia and NATO would escalate to the use of nuclear and biological weapons. It did not move the Clock closer to Midnight, but kept it at 100 minutes from catastrophe. We have all tried to ignore the frightening possibilities, but with tensions building around the world and the attacks on democracy in our own country worsening, it was becoming difficult to remain optimistic.

As the possibility that Marinne Le Pen might defeat Emmanuel Macron in yesterday’s runoff election, and thus plunge a dagger into the unity NATO has shown in the face of Russian aggression reared its head, it looked as though things might quickly become immeasurably worse. But no, voters in France re-elected Macron by a seventeen-point margin. The world badly needed that injection of hope for the future, despite the fact that more voters abstained in the French election than actually cast votes for Le Pen – an ominous warning that people everywhere are fed up with governmental dysfunction.

It’s not much, but any ray of hope must be seized these days. Macron’s re-election may signal that the populist anger that made Trumpism such a dangerous, destructive force in America may be waning.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Judgment Day

Posted on April 23, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 22, 2022

Whether you favor the Judeo-Christian concept of God, the Quran’s vision of Allah, the philosophy of Gautama Buddha, or nothing of the kind, consider that there’s clearly a lot more to our universe than can be grasped by human intelligence or perceptions. Whether we got here by divine creation or a Big Bang, the reality of the forces that govern our universe are unknown to us.

Imagine for a moment that we humans are neither unique nor alone in this universe. Scientific evidence suggests that there may be millions of star systems that contain planets capable of supporting intelligent life, and that much of it may have been around far longer than we have. There may be countless beings among the stars who are far smarter and wiser than us. That idea has been the basis of a common science fiction trope – that somewhere out there in the void is a council of alien judges watching and evaluating us.

Billions of humans believe that their deity of choice sees and hears everything they do and metes out rewards and punishments. The concept of sin versus virtue is so deeply rooted in their psyches, it dominates their thoughts and actions. We can debate whether that’s a rational belief system some other time, but for right now, I ask if it is any less rational to believe we are being judged as a species by beings so far advanced in thought and technology as to be nearly godlike themselves.

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien Klaatu comes to deliver a message to the people of Earth, telling them they have been found deficient in the eyes of those whose responsibility is to maintain peace and tranquility in the universe. His message to the nations of Earth, in the midst of the Cold War, is change your ways or you will be destroyed. As billions of us believe we are judged by our chosen God, I prefer to imagine how we would behave if we believed humanity as a whole were being judged with its future existence in the balance.

Imagine how some inter-galactic tribunal of wise old, very powerful aliens might view us today. Conventional wisdom tells us daily that the forces of autocracy (darkness) are attempting to snuff out democracy (light) all over the world. We have evidence this very weekend that one of the world’s longest-lived democracies may be on the verge of electing a right-wing president who favors autocratic government. Incumbent president Emmanuel Macron will face off tomorrow against Marinne Le Pen, a devotee of Vladimir Putin, in a runoff election to determine who will lead France. At a time when Russia has determined it must change the balance of power in Europe and the world, Macron has been one of the loudest voices of reason, one of NATO’s most prominent statesmen, and a staunch ally of the United States.

Macron casts his bid for re-election in the same light as what Democrats will face against the Donald Trump-dominated Republican party, both this year and in 2024, when Trump is expected to try to regain the White House. The only thing restraining Russia in its war of annihilation against the people of Ukraine has been NATO’s solidarity. Should Le Pen, who is currently trailing Macron in French polls pull off an upset, that unity could be shattered. What happens then, if nuclear-armed Putin continues to attempt to reconstruct the Soviet Union and undermine the western alliance? What happens if our own political landscape continues to be dominated by lies and misinformation, enabling Trump and his rabid supporters to undermine the Biden administration’s attempt to steer a strong course in defense of democracy?

What if our right to exist as a species were actually at stake right now, if instead of a worldwide tribunal attempting to make a largely symbolic case that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a war of genocide and destruction, in effect a two-month long war crime against humanity, we were actually being judged by beings capable of enforcing their will on us? What if the very real threat of nuclear holocaust were to increase every day as a result of actions taken by leaders who have lost sight of morality and common decency, and there was a day of reckoning in our near future?

I like to imagine that as our leaders contemplate their next moves, as those of us who can do so exercise our rights to choose who will govern us and how we want them to behave in office, that we act as if we will be held accountable in some universal court empowered to evaluate right and wrong. Failing that, how can we expect our grandchildren to thrive, even to survive the next round of conflict as freedom and decency fight for their survival?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Playing Chicken

Posted on April 20, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 20, 2022,

Remember the crazy things we did as teenagers and some still do as adults? How many times have you driven on a two-lane road behind a vehicle going well below the speed limit until you were frustrated enough to pass it despite limited sight lines? Did you let the risk stop you? The driver you were passing might suddenly speed up just as a vehicle appears in the passing lane coming toward you. Did you floor your accelerator, knowing you probably had enough time to pull back in your lane ahead of that slowpoke, but not entirely sure? Two cars rushing toward each other, waiting to see who flinches first is the ultimate game of chicken.

I see two games of chicken in our future, one immediate and extremely dangerous, one a year or two away, but possibly even more dangerous to our democracy. First is the strategic chess game between NATO and Russia over the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO requires unanimity in its military decisions, yet its leaders have struck a balance. Europe allowed, in fact wanted the United States to take the lead, while President Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pledged to respect Europe’s need to veto some sanctions, like immediately banning all Russian oil and gas imports. NATO’s unity, helped greatly by Ukraine’s amazing grit in the fight against superior Russian forces, is vital.

Russia and Vladimir Putin do not need unanimity or unity. Putin is completely in charge in Russia, at least until those around him decide he isn’t. He and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, defined their vision in terms of perceived “existential threats to Russia’s homeland.” They would have NATO believe that if they viewed Ukraine, us, or anyone else as such an existential threat, they would escalate the fight as far as necessary, including the use of nuclear weapons. After threatening that NATO continuing to arm Ukraine might pose such a threat, Putin symbolically moved tactical nukes into Crimea this week.

As the nominal leaders of NATO’s defense of Ukraine, Biden and Blinken have been clear that their decisions to arm and train the Ukrainian military would be measured, always cognizant of what Russia might perceive as a direct NATO threat. For weeks, they argued that supplying Ukraine with Soviet-era MIG fighter planes was off the table because it might result in a direct confrontation that could trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty which could spark World War III.

On the other side was the example of Europe appeasing Hitler in the 1930s rather than confronting him, and similar examples throughout history that all lead to the same conclusion. Appeasing autocrats, displaying fear and weakness rather than strength, is far more dangerous than strongly defending our allies’ borders. Biden, et al, understand that, but their posture in the world media had to be understated and subtle. Now, as Russia has begun a massive assault on the southeastern provinces of Ukraine in which they “must be victorious,” NATO must decide how seriously to take the implied threat that Putin will use every available weapon if his military continues to falter.

Today, we see that NATO has been planning its own escalation on a carefully measured time scale in reaction to Russia’s campaign of total destruction and utter disregard for what we naively regard as the “rules of war.” In addition to the attack helicopters announced last week, Ukraine is apparently going to receive those MIGs after all, and Biden has dropped the pretense that Americans will not train Ukrainian fighters in the use of the weapons we give them. Our experts will train a select number of Ukrainians in NATO countries, who will then go home to train their own forces.

As always, the ultimate question is who will blink first. My money is on Putin, unless he has truly lost his mind. Biden and his NATO counterparts understand blinking first would likely lead to a sequence of military adventures by Putin that will ultimately force the confrontation no one wants.

The second developing game of chicken hasn’t begun yet, but it’s coming. Republicans Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney broke with the pro-Trump wing of the Republican party, voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial, and chose to participate in the January 6th Committee’s investigation of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. But then Kinzinger announced he would leave Congress at the end of this term. What was that about?

Now it’s becoming clear, as Kinzinger announced he might challenge Trump in the 2024 primaries. Kinzinger knows he’ll probably be crushed by the party Trump now seems to almost own, but he relishes the opportunity to have a national stage supported by big money interests that he can use to broadcast the truth about who Trump is, what he has done, and what he will try to do if he returns to power. This chicken fight is likely to result in a head on collision that rivals the most explosive crash ever seen on the NASCAR circuit.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Nuclear Endgame

Posted on April 14, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 14, 2022

As a fan and writer of science fiction, I have read several apocalyptic/dystopian novels and published one myself (The Portal, https://https://www.amazon.com/Portal-Alan-Zendell/dp/1523721049.) As reader and writer, I have always been fascinated by the authors’ conceptions of how modern civilization destroys itself. In The Portal, the world is not destroyed, but the economies of America and other major nations crash due to military adventurism triggered by the terrorist attacks on nine-eleven.

The better-known dystopian novels have their own scenarios. Neville Shute Norway’s On the Beach, (1958,) published as the Cold War was ramping up, imagined a nuclear war that begins when Albania sparks an Arab-Israeli conflict that escalates into war between NATO and the Soviet Union. Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, (1959,) doesn’t tell us how the nuclear war starts, but posits that the mutually assured destruction that has kept us from destroying the world is a merely an illusion, and that armed with nuclear weapons, civilizations will inevitably use them and re-use them in millennia-long cycles of destruction.

In David Wingrove’s twenty book series, Chung Kuo, (1988-1999,) the end of western civilization begins with a war in the Middle East, after which China swoops in and occupies all the surviving nations. The Mad Max films (1979 and later) blamed the destruction of the world on running out of oil. There are many others, David Brin’s The Postman, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon, dozens in all, but none of them imagined the apocalypse beginning when a paranoid Russian autocrat invades Ukraine.

That has occupied the mind of every leader in the NATO alliance in the seven weeks since Russia began its invasion. As Ukrainian forces bolstered by militia volunteers and armed civilians beat back the Russian offensive, leaving mountains of junk (former Russian military equipment) and carnage in its wake, the free world cheered. Vladimir Putin expected to seize and occupy Kyiv, decapitate the national government, and install his own puppets in a matter of days.

Had that occurred we would now be facing a nation of forty-four million people occupied by Russia with the rest of the world in shock trying to devise a negotiating strategy and four NATO nations bordering occupied Ukraine. That would not be an enviable position for either NATO or the world, but the question must be asked: is the world’s prognosis better off as a result of Ukraine defending itself so impressively against a Russian military that showed itself to be substandard in many ways?

Two things are now clear. Ukraine will defend itself as long as one Ukrainian still has life and a weapon, and reluctantly or not, the West is now committed to supporting Ukraine with ever more powerful and sophisticated weapons until the fighting ends. Russia will suffer a huge price economically, and its citizens will wonder if they are back in the 1960s, as store shelves which used to be filled with western goods are now empty.

But we already see that the sanctions imposed on Russia have significant limits. Countries like France and Germany, which depend heavily on Russian oil and natural gas are not willing to cut off those imports and the billions of dollars that flow to Russia every week. Many countries that depend on Russian and Ukrainian wheat will face serious food shortages, and Putin seems determined to continue the fight until someone or something stops him.

The question on every military and political leader’s mind is whether we are writing our own apocalyptic scenario. With someone like Putin securely in control of Russia, this confrontation was inevitable. Potential conflict between NATO and Russia, with the always-present threat of nuclear war, has been on the table since Russia fired its first missile. President Biden and EU leaders have cautiously danced around sending Ukraine weapons that might spark such a crisis, but the fifty days of war and the deaths of thousands of targeted civilians and the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II have placed us all on a path from which we cannot turn.

The risk of a greater conflagration will exist as long as Russia is governed by someone like Putin, whose people have been long-indoctrinated with his paranoid propaganda. We’re going to have to face it head on one day no matter what we do, and the Ukrainian people have, in effect, thrown down a gauntlet to the rest of us. That, and the consistent lessons of history that the only way to defeat powerful autocrats and bullies is to stand against them with equal force, means that we may be on the verge of the end game of nuclear confrontation.

Putin knows the use of nuclear or biological weapons will spell the end of Russia and his regime. Is he sane enough to impose limits on his own ambitions, or failing that, will the people around him force him to? We don’t know, but we have no choice but to see the conflict in Ukraine through to its end.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine Phase 2

Posted on April 10, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 10, 2022

There’s nothing subtle about what is about to happen in Ukraine. Russia is openly preparing a brutal attack on Ukraine’s eastern provinces that will continue the systematic destruction of once beautiful cities and the targeting of innocent civilians. It will be nothing less than a massive terrorist attack ordered by Vladimir Putin and directed by his favorite war criminal general, Aleksandr Dvornikov.

While he has never been brought before a war crimes tribunal, The Guardian reports that in Syria, “forces under [Dvornikov’s] command were responsible for widespread abuses against the civilian population and were frequently accused of committing crimes against humanity. [He] has been described as an ‘old school’ general and a ‘blood and soil nationalist’ trained in Soviet military doctrines that view obliterating civilian targets as a means of gaining battlefield momentum.”

Dvornikov will lead the second phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine after Putin claimed Phase 1 achieved its objective. Yet, we all saw massively outnumbered Ukrainian defenders beat back the two-pronged Russian siege on Kyiv, and then force Russian forces to retreat, leaving behind countless wrecked tanks, support vehicles and downed aircraft. Russian forces left behind thousands of weapons, and by some accounts, up to 20,000 dead soldiers and officers, with thousands having surrendered, been captured, or simply deserted. One can only conclude that Russia’s objective must have been the wanton reduction of cities and towns to rubble and rape, torture, and murder of unarmed civilians.

Phase 2 will be different from Phase 1 in several ways, which should convince President Biden and the EU to drop their reluctance to arm Ukraine with what it needs:
• the Russian attack will focus entirely on the eastern and southeastern provinces that border Russia and Crimea, which the U. S. and NATO permitted Russia to annex in 2014. Future historians will argue whether that miscalculation is what brought the world to where it is now, but it is clear that we cannot afford another;
• by focuing his efforts on obliterating eastern Ukraine, Putin has moved the war hundreds of miles from the border of any NATO country;
• this time, there will be no retreat by Russian forces until they have destroyed and occupied every part of Ukraine from the Donbas Region in the east to Mykolaiv in the south, which Russia has already leveled with missiles launched from ships and aircraft. No doubt, they would like to occupy Odesa, Ukraine’s most important Black Sea port, as well.

If Russia is allowed to control all that territory, NATO will be in the impossible position of negotiating the withdrawal of an occupying force in the midst of what will surely be a nonstop guerilla war. That would undoubtedly lead to the very confrontation Biden has sworn to avert – the possibility of direct hostilities between Russia and NATO forces with the threat of nuclear war always in the background.

We must face up to that in the decisions we make in the coming weeks. The only alternative is to follow the course of Neville Chamberlain who kept appeasing Adolf Hitler until the entire world was at war. If we haven’t learned that lesson, we’re doomed to the same fate.

How do we minimize the risk? By giving Ukraine what its president, Volodomyr Zelensky, has been begging for. He needs MIG fighters, helicopters, and sophisticated anti-aircraft weapon systems. With the war now centered far from NATO borders, and Ukrainian forces having proved their mettle, arming them with what they need to destroy Russia’s ability to feed and supply it’s forces is clearly the best way to avoid winding up in an untenable negotiating position when the fighting finally ends.

The Russian military, while retaining the ability to cause mass destruction, has shown itself to be far from the unstoppable fighting machine Putin thought he was putting in the field. Taking away Russia’s domination of the skies and giving Ukraine the ability, using western intelligence, to destroy Russian supply convoys and further weaken morale among Russian conscriptees is the best chance to stop Russia in its tracks.

No strategy is without risk, but even Vladimir Putin cannot survive continued military and leadership failures when thousands of body bags start showing up in cities and towns all over Russia. It’s possible that Putin will attempt something desperate to save himself, but it’s more likely that at some point those around him, seeing their personal fortunes and Russia’s economic future being destroyed, will take him down.
Now is the time to move what Ukraine needs to where they can use it. President Biden and his NATO counterparts must come together without delay before the bombing starts. The only way to minimize the risk of a worldwide conflagration is to engage Russia on its own borders rather than ours, with willing Ukrainians doing the bulk of the fighting using weapons supplied by us.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Valuing Life

Posted on April 6, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Znedell, April 6, 2022

I just returned from a funeral. Two friends gone in the blink of an eye this winter, very special ones who were a large part of what saved my sanity during COVID and the lockdown. Both were smart, fit, caring, generous, the kind of people we all wish we had in our lives. They were also diverse, as reflects our entire community. One was a progressive, the other a Trumper, yet in our community, we put all that aside in favor of what’s most important.

Robert and Jim represented everything that was good in all of us, and we valued them greatly and mourn their loss. They remind us how quickly things can change, not always for the better. Both in their seventies, they were alive and vital, and then suddenly they weren’t. Brain cancer and pancreatic cancer will do that. Missing them, mourning their loss reminds us of the sanctity of human life.

Not everyone is as special as Jim and Robert were, but we react the same way when any member of our community passes. In the final decades of our lives, we are all acutely aware that every time one of our sparks is extinguished, we all shine a little dimmer. Life is so precious, but not everywhere.

We now see what happens when people who have no respect for human life are allowed to run wild and commit murder, rape, and mayhem. Considering how the loss of two men has affected everyone who knew them, it’s almost impossible to conceive of the terror and loss of life Russia is wreaking on Ukraine. How incredibly strong the Ukrainian people are to stand up to Putin’s ravaging hordes. I hung a Ukrainian flag from my window a few days ago. It looks really good there.

Trying to celebrate the lives of our missing friends and to help their families move past their loss, we also think about the thousands of innocent Ukrainians whose lives have been snuffed out and the millions who fled their homes and are separated from their family members fighting on the front lines. At first, we even mourned the conscripted soldiers in the Russian army who had no idea why they were ordered to kill their neighbors. Russia being as big as it is, many of those military units were from thousands of miles to the east. I wonder how many of those soldiers had even heard of Ukraine before they were ordered to invade and pillage it.

The world sees their barbarism, the way they appear to revel in murdering innocent civilians. Many talking heads want us to believe that that’s just the Russian way of warfare: invade sovereign neighbors with impunity, ignore all the internationally recognized rules of war, (which I always considered a farce, anyway,) and destroy and kill wantonly until the enemy either succumbs or no longer exists. At the same time, wage a propaganda war of lies and delusional paranoia about Europe and America plotting to destroy Russia.

Is it really the Russian mentality that’s at fault here? I think not. Most of my extended family traces its roots back to that part of the world. If Russians were fundamentally as evil as they are being made out to be, what would that say about all of us who carry the same genes as these murdering savages? This is not the Russian way of warfare; it is not in the Russian psyche to have no regard for human life. It is greedy, power-mad, paranoid leaders like Vladimir Putin who wage war this way.

Doesn’t this sound hauntingly familiar? Don’t Putin’s lack of concern for life, his complete disdain for truth, and his brutal approach to dealing with anyone he perceives as an adversary remind you of someone? Donald Trump never ordered the kind of murder and destruction Putin has, but he callously allowed the preventable deaths of more than a half million Americans from COVID, simply because he believed it was his best path to increasing his power and wealth.

President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken are entirely correct in demanding a world-wide tribunal to investigate the war crimes and genocide being committed in Mr. Putin’s name, while our erstwhile president cannot make himself condemn the leveling of once beautiful cities and the piecemeal destruction of a nation of forty-four million people.

All of this becomes especially poignant when we consider the loss of our friends. Life is life, whether it’s someone dearest to us, an ignorant Russian conscriptee thrown into a fight he never wanted, or one of the thousands killed by a psychopathic leader. As moral human beings, the rest of us must do everything in our power to push back against wanton destruction and killing no matter what the risks. Allowing this kind of creeping evil to spread and infect others is no less dangerous than the threat of nuclear war.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

After the NATO and European Council Summits

Posted on March 27, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 27, 2022,

In 1987, campaigning in the Democratic Primaries for the 1988 Nomination for President, Senator Joe Biden used some lines from a particularly moving speech by British MP Neil Kinnock without attributing them to him. The resulting accusations of plagiarism ended Biden’s campaign.

Knowing what I do about politicians and the thousands of speeches they deliver, and knowing what I do about Biden, I never believed he deliberately plagiarized Kinnock’s words. It’s the speech writer’s responsibility to vet the contents of every speech, and while, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops with the president (or in this case, the candidate) it’s quite a stretch to expect a politician on the stump to recognize every line from every speech given by every other politician.

Even Mr. Kinnock agrees. In 2020, when Biden was campaigning against Donald Trump, Kinnock was interviewed by The Guardian. Kinnock said he’d always regarded the incident as an innocent mistake. “Joe’s an honest guy…If Trump had done it, I would know that he was lying.” Even so, ever since, Biden’s critics have referred to him as a gaffe machine. Personally, even if he sometimes puts his foot in his mouth, I prefer a leader who speaks his mind without concern for political correctness to one who cannot utter a sentence without lying, insulting someone, or massacring the language.

The gaffe thing came up again yesterday, as President Biden was delivering a speech in support of Ukraine and his Polish hosts, who’ve taken the lead in resettling Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s aggression. Biden accused Vladimir Putin of starting a “war of choice” with Ukraine that had neither provocation nor justification other than Putin’s dream of recreating the former Soviet Union. After recounting acts of bombing and shelling against civilian targets, which he characterized as war crimes, Biden added, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Oh, the furor. Every media hack who sensed that an alleged Biden gaffe would help ratings more than reporting that Russian forces had bombed another school or hospital reported, “Biden calls for regime change,” something American leaders and diplomats are apparently not supposed to do. That’s especially ironic in this case, because a large majority of Americans, including most politicians looking for new sound bites believe removing Putin from power is the only way the current war can end without risking World War 3.

The White House tried to spin Biden’s off the cuff comment to assure the world that he wasn’t advocating removing Putin as president, but referring to his potential power to threaten neighboring countries. In the process, they shifted the focus away from the unprecedented NATO summit and the meetings Biden held with the European Council and the Prime Minister of Poland. That’s more than disappointing. The world is on the edge of its collective seats trying to figure out how to defend Ukraine and prevent attacks that would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty and risk direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

Although Biden’s speeches this week included lists of things the United States and Europe are doing to help Ukraine, the New York Times reported today that “the president ended his trip…and returned home with few concrete answers about how or when the war will end — and grim uncertainty about the brutal and grinding violence still to come.” That’s because Biden continues to reject the idea of relocating MIG fighter planes from Poland and sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems from Slovakia to Ukraine.

We don’t know what was said behind closed doors in Europe this week. While NATO is happy to use Biden as their spokesperson to the world, in particular to address Putin, we’re not aware, for example, whether Biden is voicing his own beliefs or simply stating that the thirty NATO nations, which can only take military action by unanimous consent, disagree about supplying Ukraine with planes and missile systems.

NATO countries that border Russia and Ukraine see the war as a precursor to Putin’s ambition to invade them next and want Ukraine defended to the max. Western Europe and the United States appear to be more concerned about avoiding World War 3. A couple of days ago, I would have strongly advocated giving Ukraine the planes and missiles they need immediately, but as Russia seems to be backing off its initial goal of decapitating Ukraine’s government and occupying its cities, the war may become a regional struggle over pro-Russian breakaway provinces.

Given Ukraine’s stoic resistance, stopping the Russian invasion in its tracks and disrupting Putin’s ability to keep his forces supplied, it may be that the more cautious elements of NATO leadership are right to keep the threat of planes and missile systems in reserve. The killing of thousands of civilians and destruction of Ukrainian cities are tragic, but if the apparent change in strategy by Russia is real, nothing is more important than transitioning back from war to diplomacy.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Nuclear Elephant

Posted on March 23, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 23, 2022,

Conventional wisdom in the United States has it that Americans need not fear an accidental launch of nuclear missiles toward another country. It’s not something we can predict accurately, but we’ve seen evidence that our senior military leaders would be willing to defy a nuclear attack order from their Commander in Chief if they believed he was not in control of his faculties or if irresponsible political extremists seemed to be in control.

We saw Chief of Staff Alexander Haig build a virtual fortress around Richard Nixon during his final months as president to limit his ability to execute dangerous decisions, when friends and foes alike came to believe Nixon was no longer rational. Haig, who had been Supreme Commander of American Forces in Europe, understood the havoc a desperate, deranged president could wreak.

We also saw Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Mark Milley separate himself from the actions of President Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election, making it clear that he would not permit Trump to use the military in any way that violated the Constitution. Amid all the misinformation surrounding Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election, and speculation among many pundits that Trump might instigate a war as a pretext for declaring emergency powers and martial law, whispers from military leaders were leaked to reassure Americans that that would not happen.

As Russia keeps pushing the envelope, escalating its brutal attacks on Ukraine, the possibility of nuclear war, should NATO forces come into direct conflict with Russia’s, has become the elephant in the room that everyone wishes they could ignore. But they can’t, and avoiding a nuclear exchange has become the dominant factor in NATO’s and the rest of the world’s attempts to aid Ukraine. Both President Biden and the Secretary General of NATO have consistently said the risk of nuclear war was too catastrophic a possibility should NATO forces become directly involved in the conflict.

Biden has been criticized by some Trump Republicans for publicly drawing that line in the sand, comparing it to announcing a definite date for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan and suggesting that it plays into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Most Putin “experts” believe he will aggressively pursue his ambition of rebuilding the Soviet Union under his control until he is either forcefully stopped or ousted in a coup by his own people. Putin maintains his stranglehold on power in Russia by daily living up to his reputation for ruthless brutality. It’s a binary strategy. It will either succeed or end in chaos and destruction.

Yesterday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that if Putin perceived that an existential threat to Russia existed, the Russian constitution permitted first use of nuclear weapons. That point of view is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of mutually assured destruction that drove both sides in the Cold War to build huge arsenals of nuclear weapons. But the latter only works if leaders on both sides behave rationally. What if Putin is so desperate, with his conventional forces unable to overcome a military one tenth its size, that he believes his only option is to continue to escalate the conflict? What if, as some suggest, Putin is in fact losing his mind? Is there anyone in Russia with the power and courage to stop him from setting off a world-wide holocaust?

Former Trump National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster spoke about that, yesterday. He began by praising President Biden’s leadership in re-uniting NATO after Trump did his best to undermine it. He stressed that only united western strength had any chance restraining Putin. “McMaster urged the world to take Putin’s nuclear threats seriously because nobody knows what’s in the Russian leader’s mind…’We have to be concerned about him using some of the most heinous weapons on earth…But we need to make clear to him that he will suffer tremendous consequences if he does.’”

Where does that leave Biden and the western alliance? They can’t ignore the nuclear elephant, but neither can they be intimidated into giving Putin what he wants. As autocrats have proven for centuries, only determined force and resistance will stop them. If Putin has re-written the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, we have to accept that. The risks are huge either way, but one thing that’s clear is that letting fear of the consequences determine whether we’re willing to defend innocent nations can only lead to disaster.

I can’t imagine anything worse than the destruction of human civilization, unless it’s watching it decay and ultimately expire because we didn’t have the courage to defend it. Nuclear war will occur or not at the whim of Vladimir Putin, but that cannot determine our actions if he continues to destroy cities and civilians. Our best option is to stand firm, pour military and humanitarian resources into Ukraine, live up to our treaty obligations, and hope (possibly with our back channel assistance) that cooler heads prevail in Russia.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Only Courage and Leadership Can Save Us

Posted on March 16, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Znedell, March 16, 2022

Interviewed by the Washington Examiner Tuesday, Donald Trump admitted he’d been wrong (well, not exactly,) about Vladimir Putin. Our former president, who repeatedly referred to himself as a genius who knew more about diplomacy than his professional diplomats and more about the military than his Joint Chiefs of Staff now realizes the only way he can retain any credibility with his supporters is to acknowledge the obvious.

“I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border…I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate…I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along [he can’t dispense with his self-aggrandizing BS even with the fate of the world in the balance]…And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

No, Donald, the very sad thing is that you set this up by trying to undermine NATO’s unity, thus convincing Putin that he could invade Ukraine without consequences. Even sadder is that the world had to come to the brink of a war that could mean the extinction of all life on Earth before your self-interest kicked in to try to change the narrative. You are a fool and not nearly as smart as you think you are. People with far more knowledge and acuity than you have accurately described Putin for thirty years. Putin hasn’t changed, you’ve been shown up for the charlatan you are. You don’t give a rat’s ass about Ukraine, Europe, the United States, or anything else unless it enriches you.

If the self-described master dealmaker who believes he can read and out-negotiate everyone thinks his change of tune gives him a free pass for his sociopathic arrogance, he’s going to be surprised. The emperor turns out to be stark naked before the world. A complete fraud. If someone starts a GoFundMe to buy Trump a one-way ticket to Hell, I’ll be the first to contribute. Does my anger feel inappropriate? Has anyone been paying attention? Trump’s narcissism and incompetence have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

On the other hand, men who have been libeled and castigated by Trump, men who have shown courage and leadership Trump can only dream about, are now left to find a way to hold the line between autocracy and democracy without dropping into the abyss. When the Prime Ministers of three European countries, Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Janez Jansa of Slovenia traveled by train to Kyiv on Tuesday to show support for Ukraine, risking air and missile attacks by Russian forces guilty of killing indiscriminately, they honored the courage and tenacity of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

They will be followed by our President, Joe Biden, who will travel to Brussels next week for a NATO summit. Throughout 2021 and the recent leadup to the Russian invasion, European leaders have praised Biden, who has single-handedly rebuilt the crucial alliances Trump trashed. Only Biden’s leadership held NATO together, and that’s critical since it represents the only possible way out of this mess.

In Putin, the world is dealing with a man made desperate by his own paranoid delusions. That’s the most dangerous kind of craziness, because he really believed the future of Russia was at stake, and he was acting righteously when he ordered the destruction of historic cities and the killing of their civilian populations. There never was any threat to Russia from the west before the invasion of Ukraine; NATO never had any intention of attacking the Russian Federation. It has no reason to, and many reasons not to. But Putin’s actions put Russia very much at risk of economic collapse and internal dissension.

For four years, Donald Trump sucked up to autocrats wherever he found them while demonstrating complete disdain for our Constitution. For four years, he attacked and insulted allies like Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau and caused Europe, for the first time since the second world war to distrust America. Thank God for Mr. Biden and the courageous leaders of the twenty-nine other NATO countries who understand exactly what is at stake.

They have a very difficult choice to make, and very little time to make it. Do they continue to give Russian forces uncontested airspace to bomb and maim innocent Ukrainian civilians, or do they act to defend them, risking direct combat between Russian and NATO forces? I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice. Thanks a lot, Donald.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment