War News

Some things about the war in Ukraine are obvious. The Russians are the aggressors, and the war is the fault of their dictator Putin. There is fighting on more than one front, and the Ukrainians have not been overrun. Many Ukrainian civilians have been killed, and many others have become refugees. Some things about the war are difficult or impossible to know accurately in the midst of the fighting, such as counts of casualties in both armies, the effectiveness of various weapons and tactics, the degree to which Russian controlled territory is actually under their control, how much and how effectively Ukrainian guerrillas are operating behind Russian positions, and so on. The fog of war is real, and it is well known that early reports on conflicts are often incomplete, tinged by propaganda, or even completely wrong. War correspondents in Ukraine have a difficult job.

The job of writers and journalists back in the United States is far easier, and one should expect better than what some are producing. There is a lot of ignorance and dishonesty out there – some of it about the war and some about the history and background. I have read more than one story reporting that the Germans’ decision to increase spending on defense is a departure from nearly eighty years of post World War II pacifism. The truth is that from the 1960s through the 1980s West Germany fielded the largest NATO army deployed in Europe and dropped its defenses after the fall of the Soviet Union less out of pacifism than a pragmatic opinion that the threat had disappeared. Other stories talk of the war in Ukraine as ending a seventy five year European order of peace and unity. The truth is that from 1947 to the fall of the Soviet Union what Europe had was not a peaceful order but an armed truce between hostile forces facing each other across the iron curtain. A peaceful European order goes back only about thirty years, and even then one has to ignore a few things in the Balkans, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine. Various political hacks in the traditional media try to blame the war for price inflation in the United States, ignoring the fact that the rate of price inflation was high and climbing before the Russians invaded Ukraine, and the fact that under both Trump and Biden, the US government manufactured money at inflationary rates.

There is also worse. Various people, mainly Trumpists including Trump and anti-American leftists, seem to have a soft spot for Putin. One can believe that Biden has handled things badly or that America should avoid pushing Russia into becoming a client state of China or that admitting Ukraine to NATO would be a mistake or simply that this should not be our fight, without becoming an apologist for or fan of what the Russians are doing.