[pjw] INFO: Analysis of US escalation of Ukraine war (Responsible Statecrafte 1/23)

[Peace and Justice Works]

IAG supporters
I poked around to see whether there was an action alert on any of our 
allies' websites about the US decision to send tanks (not the "light 
armored vehicles" from a few weeks ago) to Ukraine.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151306068/us-germany-pledge-tanks-to-ukraine-signaling-heavy-fighting-ahead

I didn't find  anything. Hovever, I ran across this artcile from two days 
_before_ that announcement was made, which analyzes the US mission creep.

We'll certainly talk about this development at Friday rally today, 5 PM at 
SW Yamhill and Morrison (as usual).

dan handelman
peace and justice works iraq affinity group


https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/01/23/how-the-us-role-in-ukraine-has-slowly-but-steadily-escalated/
Mission Creep? How the US role in Ukraine has slowly escalated

  The Biden team has quietly blown past red lines of involvement. The
  question now, is how far is it willing to go.
January 23, 2023
Written by Branko Marcetic

When the United States involves itself militarily in a conflict, it often 
finds it hard to get itself out, let alone avoid deep entanglements that 
blow well past lines it had drawn at the start of the intervention.

It happened in Vietnam, when U.S. military advisers helping the South 
Vietnamese fight Viet Cong eventually became U.S. soldiers fighting an 
American war. It happened in Afghanistan, when an initial invasion to 
capture al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban morphed into a nearly 
two-decade-long nation-building project. And it could be happening right 
now in Ukraine.

Little by little, NATO and the United States are creeping closer to the 
catastrophic scenario President Joe Biden said "we must strive to prevent" 
— direct conflict between the United States and Russia. Despite stressing 
at the start of the war that "our forces are not and will not be engaged 
in the conflict," current and former intelligence officials told the 
Intercept back in October that "there is a much larger presence of both 
CIA and US special operations personnel" in Ukraine than there was when 
Russia invaded, conducting "clandestine American operations" in the 
country that "are now far more extensive."

Among those clandestine operations, investigative journalist and former 
Green Beret Jack Murphy reported on Dec. 24 to little mainstream 
attention, is the CIA's work with an unnamed NATO ally's spy agency to 
carry out sabotage operations within Russia, reportedly the cause of the 
unexplained explosions that have rocked Russian infrastructure throughout 
the war. This is the kind of activity that skirts dangerously close to 
direct NATO-Russia confrontation.

To put it into perspective, consider the way that swaths of the U.S. 
political establishment viewed the mere act of Russian meddling in the 
2016 election an "act of war" — outrageous, but orders of magnitude less 
serious than helping to carry out infrastructure attacks on another 
country's soil.

Meanwhile, the United States and its NATO allies have serially blown past 
their own self-imposed lines over arms transfers. At the start of the war, 
the New York Times cautioned that the overt supply of even small arms and 
light weaponry "risks encouraging a wider war and possible retaliation" 
from Moscow, while U.S. officials ruled out more advanced weaponry as too 
escalatory. It took less than two months for the Biden administration to 
start sending these more risky tranches of high-powered arms.

By the end of May, it was sending advanced rocket systems that just weeks 
earlier it had considered too escalatory, on the strict condition that 
Ukraine didn't use them to strike inside Russian territory, something they 
feared could spark escalation drawing in NATO — until that line too, was 
eventually breached. The Pentagon admitted this past December it had given 
Ukraine the go-ahead to attack targets in Russia after all, in response to 
Moscow's destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure.

"The fear of escalation has changed since the beginning," one defense 
official explained to the Times of London, with the Pentagon less worried 
ever since Russian president Vladimir Putin pulled back on his nuclear 
threats in October.

As the Ukraine war effort has stalled and Russian forces have made small 
advances, NATO arms transfers have now escalated well beyond what 
governments had worried just months ago could draw the alliance into 
direct war with Russia, with the U.S. and European governments now sending 
armored vehicles and reportedly preparing to send tanks. Ukrainian Defense 
Minister Oleksii Reznikov had predicted as much in October last year.

"When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for 
Stingers, they told me it was impossible," he had told the New Yorker 
then. "Now it's possible. When I asked for 155-millimeter guns, the answer 
was no. HIMARS, no. HARM, no. Now all of that is a yes. Therefore, I'm 
certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and ATACMS and F-16s."

It remains to be seen how long before U.S. opposition to such military aid 
goes the way of its earlier opposition to the heavy weaponry it's already 
sent, or how long the administration will continue to hold out on sending 
long-range drones, which a bipartisan group of senators is currently 
pushing for and which Russian officials have explicitly warned would make 
Washington "a direct party to the conflict."

As the nature of arms transfers has expanded, so have war aims. The 
alliance's initial goals were to help Ukraine defend its independence and 
sovereignty by repelling a Russian invasion bent on regime change. Two 
months later, U.S. officials were publicly talking about "victory" and 
inflicting a "strategic defeat" on Russia that would leave it "weakened." 
Biden has repeatedly vowed to support Ukraine "as long as it takes," even 
as Zelensky and other officials have made repeatedly clear their goals are 
now to retake Crimea, something that could spark nuclear escalation.

Talk of diplomacy is again nearly absent from U.S. commentary on the war, 
far outnumbered by calls for drastic escalation of NATO involvement to 
achieve Ukrainian victory, often on the basis that any other result would 
deal an existential blow to the West and the entire liberal global order.

"If Russia wins the war in Ukraine, we will see decades of this kind of 
behavior ahead of us," Finland's progressive Prime Minister Sanna Marin 
recently said at Davos, as she pledged to back the Ukrainian war effort 
for 15 years if necessary. "We have to make sure that in the end, 
Ukrainians will win. I don't think that there's any other choice."

And it seems as of last week, the Biden administration is poised to cross 
yet another major line, with the New York Times reporting that U.S. 
officials are strongly considering giving Ukraine the green light to 
attack Crimea, even while acknowledging the risk of nuclear retaliation 
that such a move would carry. Fears of such an escalation "have dimmed," 
U.S. officials told the paper.

By escalating their support for Ukraine's military, the U.S. and NATO have 
created an incentive structure for Moscow to take a drastic, aggressive 
step to show the seriousness of its own red lines. This would be dangerous 
at the best of times, but particularly so when Russian officials are 
making clear they increasingly view the war as one against NATO as a 
whole, not merely Ukraine, while threatening nuclear response to the 
alliance's escalation in weapons deliveries.

NATO governments are increasingly painting the conflict to their publics 
not as a limited effort to help one country repel an invasion from a 
larger neighbor, but rather as an existential battle for the survival of 
the West, mirrored in the Russian leadership's own evolving view of the 
war as a battle for survival against hostile Western powers. Notably, this 
has happened despite the Biden administration's public endorsement of 
diplomacy late last year.

If the intention is to keep this war a limited, regional one between two 
neighboring states with NATO playing only a peripheral, supportive role, 
all of these trend lines point in the exact opposite direction. Unless 
officials make a concerted effort to de-escalate and pursue a diplomatic 
track — and prominent voices in media and politics create the political 
space for them to do it — Biden's vow to avoid World War Three will mean 
as much as President Johnson's 1964 promise not to "send American boys 
nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to 
be doing for themselves."