The View from Right Field

Are We Going to Help Ukraine Win? Or Will We Quit Because It’s Too Hard or We Don’t Care Anymore?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “[t]he U.S. fears Iran is preparing to provide Russia with short-range ballistic missiles for its military campaign in Ukraine”.  At this point, we don’t know if Iran is going to do this, but every expectation is that Russia is planning on another winter of attacks on Ukraine’s cities and power plants; i.e., on its people, its women and children.  This past weekend, they hit Kyiv with the biggest drone attack since the war began.  The addition of Iranian ballistic missiles would only add to the danger.

The problem is that, while the United States, and other countries, have provided Ukraine with a lot, we haven’t provided them with enough weapons and with the right weapons to beat Russia and get this thing over with.  I understand the concern.  Russia has nuclear weapons, and Vladimir Putin has, at times, threatened to use them.  As Constance Stelzenmüller noted in last Wednesday’s Financial Times: “[H]ow can one not empathise with [Jake] Sullivan’s [, Biden’s National Security Adviser,] conviction that he has ‘an obligation to the American people’ to prevent escalatory scenarios?”¹

Free Speech and “Censorship Envy”

With all of the protests about Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response thereto, the question of free speech is coming up again.  Of course, all the woke and anti-woke campaigners in the US are raising lots of free speech issues, too.  My main response to these is “Thank God for James Madison and his friends.”  The United States is so lucky to have the First Amendment – and a Supreme Court willing to enforce it.

I could go on, but really I don’t need to – because Eugene Volokh, professor of law at UCLA, has done it so well in “Censorship Envy” at The Volokh Conspiracy (and Reason.com).  There is no reason for me to try to write something when he does such a great job.  Read his article/post, "Censorship Envy," here. 

Addressing Republican Isolationism, 1947-Style

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University outlining a plan for aid to Europe, a plan that would become known as the Marshall Plan.  The next month, House Speaker Joe Martin appointed a special 19-member select committee, headed by Representative Christian Herter of Massachusetts, to go to Europe and report back on the situation there.  Among the members of the committee was a young Republican congressman from California.

Just before the committee left for Europe, the young congressman received a letter from a half dozen of his strongest supporters back home in California reminding him of the election coming up in just over a year and how important it was to elect a Republican administration.  The letter urged him not come back supporting “a dangerously unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy” of aid to Europe.

Israel Is Keeping Its Gaza Assault Secret. Sounds About Right to Me.

The Washington Post has an article today about Israel’s offensive in Gaza that is titled “Early Stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy”, which I thought was just about right.  I know that Hamas broadcast its terror attack/killing spree on social media as it was happening.  But that was the purpose of Hamas’s attack, publicity and generation of anti-Israeli and antisemitic protests around the world.  Hanas was killing babies, etc., to get Israel to react so that people would then react to Israel’s overreaction (whether real or not).  If Palestinians were killed, it didn’t matter to Hamas, as long as Israel could be seen to overreact.  In fact, the ,more Palestinians killed, the better it was for Hamas’s strategy. 

But, back to The Washinton Post headline: “Early Stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy.”  I remember back during the Persian Gulf War in 1990/91.  The news media complained that reporters were being censored and they weren’t being allowed to report on U.S. and allied troop movements and locations.  This was back before social media and public satellite coverage, etc., so we were able to keep our troop locations and deployments secret.  This allowed us to swing around the Iraqi right flank with our tanks, disrupting the Iraqi positions and crushing their forces.  Which would not have been doable if the media had been able to broadcast our plans and positions to the world.

So, if the Israelis want to keep their plans and what they are doing as secret as possible, it’s fine with me.  I can wait a couple of weeks to find out what happened.

Hamas Leaders “Surprised” at U.S. Response – And What That Tells Us

The Financial Times reports:

“Hamas has admitted surprise that its attack on  Israel this month promoted such a muscular response, with Washington deploying two carrier strike groups, air defense systems and thousands of troops to the region.

Ali Barakeh, a senior member of Hamas’s political leadership in exile, said the groupv ‘didn’t expect this much if a response from America.

Visiting the Baltics After “Voting for Estonia” in 2016

Just before the 2016 election, I wrote a post entitled “On Election Day, I’ll Be Voting for Estonia”.  The post continued – and explained: “and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and many more.”¹  At the time, I was worried about then-candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy: “He has threatened to abandon most of our NATO allies.  He has implied to Japan and South Korea that they are on their own.”  While I disagreed with some parts of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, and even more of her domestic policy, I voted for her because I felt she would maintain our NATO commitments and would continue to support our other allies and friends.  I felt such a foreign policy was the best way to protect the security and well-being of the United States. 

In saying I was “voting for Estonia”, I was really saying I was voting against what I feared would be President Trump’s foreign policy.  And I still think that was the right vote.  If President Trump’s foreign policy in his first term wasn’t as bad as I feared, that may have been because, for the first couple of years, he didn’t know how to do what he wanted (and, at times, didn’t even know what he wanted).  Inexperience slowed him down – and made his first term foreign policy not as bad as it might otherwise have been. 

James Buckley, RIP

I know I said I would not be posting for a while, but I had to note the passing of James L. Buckley yesterday.  Jim Buckley, the brother of the more famous William F. Buckley, Jr., was the first candidate I ever contributed to (other than time and effort to a certain former President when he was running).  It was 1970.  The New York Senate race looked like it was going to be a race between a liberal Democrat and a liberal Republican running on the Republican and Liberal Party tickets.  Running on a slogan of “Isn't it About Time We Had a Senator,” Jim Buckley won the three-way race with 39% of the vote.  He was a great senator, and I am proud he was our first contribution.

You can find more about him in The Wall Street Journal here and The New York Times here. 

Where Are All the Military Correspondents - Just When We Need Them?

Back in the day (not that long ago), major newspapers had military correspondents.  Not just reporters who covered the Pentagon, but reporters who really understood how militaries worked, how battles were fought, and how wars were won and lost.

At the turn of the century, i.e., the nineteenth to twentieth century, Winston Churchill was a military correspondent for newspapers in London, covering the Second Boer War in South Africa, among others.  Between the World Wars, there were people like B.H. Liddell Hart, who wrote for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times, as well as writing books on strategy and on military history.  More recently, a military correspondent I particularly remember was Drew Middleton of The New York Times, who, in addition to writing for them, wrote books such as Can America Win the Next War? and Submarine.

“Oppenheimer”, the Bomb, and Should It Have Been Used

With the new movie “Oppenheimer” out, we are once again debating whether it was right to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.  I have talked about this question many times before, so I will not go into it again,¹ except for one thought that I have had for a while but not written about before.  Actually, it’s more of a possibility or a question than a certainty.  In any case, I thought of it again because of a couple of things in a review of Road to Surrender, a new book by Evan Thomas focusing on three men involved in the decision to drop the bomb and end the war:

“After receiving a full description of the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including an account of the civilian death toll, President Truman ordered that further atomic bombs would be used only on his explicit order – first time in American history that a president had taken direct control of a military weapon. …

Drone Attack on Moscow; "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"

Several more drones attacked Moscow on Tuesday.¹  Ukraine has denied that the drones are theirs, though I would certainly have no problem if Ukraine was sending drones to attack Moscow.  Russia is attacking Kiev and so many other cities in Ukraine with rockets, etc.  Why shouldn’t Ukraine do the same?

But regardless of the actual physical effects of the drone attack, one wonders about any psychological effects of the attacks.  Which, of course, brings to mind the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April, 1942.  The story of the raid was told in the book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and the film of the same name that came out in 1944.  (Back in the late 1950s or early 1960s, I read a version of the book that was aimed at young adults.)