"Thinking the Unthinkable"

This is an old article from the Saker that really needs to be read. In it, the Saker suggests the various responses the US/NATO might make to intervene in the war. I agree with him that the Pentagon is generally full of sane people who do not want to risk all-out war with Russia. However, the US civilian leadership has gone insane, and I believe that they have been insane and drunk on power and stupid for some time now, maybe even a couple of decades. This are the people who really worry me, not the generals. And sadly, I believe that Saker’s most apocalyptic scenarios are probably very much possible. The Ukraine mess has the potential to be utterly terrifying; in fact, I would argue that it already is. Why do most Americans, and most in the West even, not care about this Ukraine mess? Because Americans no longer care about anything we do overseas and they are lulled into a false sense of security by the corporate takeover of the media which turned the US media into a state propaganda organ. Americans are fat, lazy, stupid, apathetic and ignorant. They don’t care what we do overseas. In fact, they love it whenever we attack and kill people. The more the merrier. We can kill as many people as we want to overseas as long as parades of soldiers are not coming back in body bags. This was the only reason for the opposition to the Vietnam War – too many Americans were being killed. Really the only thing Americans seem to understand and the only way to get through to them is to kill lots of US soldiers in a war with an easy out. In any case like that, the US public will simply bail and for good reason. There is nothing too evil or sinister that the US can do overseas because the vast majority of Americans continue to believe in the Indispensable Nation, the City on the Hill, and Great and Good America that fights for freedom and democracy, confronting Evil everywhere on Earth. The idea that America itself might be the Evil, and that folks we are fighting are the Good Guys is simply too much for most Americans to deal with. They simply flat out refuse to believe it. The Americans are always the Good Guys and our enemies are always the Bad Guys. Even Democratic Party liberals hold this attitude as one of their core beliefs. If you tell these liberals otherwise, they start jumping up and down, screaming and yelling and ordering you to get out of their homes. US patriotardism runs extremely deep in society. I estimate 8 In fact, for much of my life, I believed the bolded lie myself until I finally wised up and learned the very painful truth.  

Thinking the Unthinkable

By Saker

Introduction

I have been putting off writing about this topic for a very long while. In fact, I wrote several articles trying to explain the self-evident truism that the US/NATO/EU does not have a military option in the Ukrainian war. First, in an article entitled Remembering the Important Lessons of the Cold War, I tried to explain that the reason the Cold War did not turn into a hot shooting war is that both sides understood that they simply could never win and that any escalation in strikes and counter-strikes could very rapidly lead to a intercontinental nuclear war, something which neither side was willing to risk. In a piece entitled Making Sense of Obama’s Billion Dollar Hammer, I tried to show that all the money the US will be pouring into “European security” is just a grandiose bribe for some European elites and that it had no real effect on the ground. A few days later I posted an article entitled Why the US-Russian Nuclear Balance is as Solid as Ever in which I tried to dispel the myth prevalent in the West about the putative state of disrepair of the Russian military in general and of the Russian nuclear forces in particular. Lastly, in a piece entitled Short Reminder about US and Russian Nuclear Weapons, I tried to show that in reality it was the US nuclear forces who were in a state of disrepair. And over and over, in many comments, I tried to lay out the reasons why I simply did not believe that the US/NATO/EU would dare to attack Russia. In summary, I will say this: the US is not nearly as powerful as US propaganda claims. Without going into long debates about what “victory” and “defeat” mean, I will just say that in my personal opinion is that the last time the US military fought well was in Korea, and even there it had to accept a draw. After that, it was all downhill. This is not the fault of the US solider, by the way, but instead is caused by the fact that big money and politics got so heavily involved in the US military that they corrupted everything. This is most evident in the USAF which still has superb pilots but who are given a terrible choice: either fly on good but old aircraft or fly on new but terrible ones (I believe that given the choice, most would chose the former). As for the European NATO allies, they are such a joke that they hardly deserve mention. They even look bad on a parade. As for a military option in the Ukraine, it appears unthinkable to me not only because, frankly, I don’t see a single military in the West capable of taking on the Russian military in full-scale battle but also because geography powerfully argues against such a crazy idea (the very same geography which would make it impossible for Russia to try to invade western or even central Europe). And yet, something in all this very logical reasoning felt wrong to me. A few days ago it finally hit me. What bothered me was this:

The American Duck

Among the many beautiful and witty expressions and neologisms Americans use, I always loved this one: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. This so-called “Duck test” is funny, but it is also a powerful logical method which ended up chewing at me day after day after day. Here I was, all sure and certain that the US/NATO/EU would never consider such a ludicrous notion as a military attack on Russia or Russian forces. But kept hearing the voice of the American Duck telling me: look at what they are doing, what does that look like to you? Suspend your conclusions and just tell me what are you observing? Tell me, if they had decided to escalate to the point of a military confrontation with Russia, would they be doing things differently? And a few days ago, I threw in the towel (at the duck, of course) and had to accept that while I did not know what they were thinking or what their intentions really were, it sure looked to me like the western plutocrats had decided to escalate the crisis has much as possible. In truth, I have to admit that when I studied the theory of deterrence in the 1980’s, my teachers always insisted that this theory of deterrence was predicated on what they called a “rational player”. To put it simply – how do you deter a lunatic? Or a desperate man with nothing to lose? Or a person hell-bent on mutual destruction? The truth is, you cannot. Deterrence assumes a rational actor making a logical decision about unacceptable costs. As far as I know, nobody has ever developed a theory of deterrence applicable to a madman. When I initially wrote my pieces explaining why I believed that a US/NATO/EU attack was impossible, a lot readers posted comments saying that while maybe the top US military command was still mainly composed of rational men, the US imperial elites had clearly gone crazy a long time ago and that they were so stuck in their arrogance, imperial hubris, delusions of invincibility and knee-jerk and systematic use of violence that they could no more be considered as rational. At the time I replied that, yeah, sure, maybe, but what is the point of analyzing something crazy? How do you try to make sense of the suicidally insane? And yet, this is what I propose to do today. I will try as best I can to try to place myself in the mind of these lunatics and see what they could try doing and what the consequences of that would be. I will go through several possible plans that these crazies might have starting from the most limited one and then going up the insanity slope.

Plan One: a Symbolic and Limited Intervention

This plan is already underway. We know that there are US military advisers in the Ukraine, including at least one general, we know that the Dutch and Australians will be sending in a lightly armed force to “protect” the investigators at the crash site of MH17 (although how a few men armed with assault rifles can protect anybody from Ukie artillery, tank or mortar fire is anybody’s guess). Then there are all the reports of foreign mercenaries, mostly US and Polish, fighting with the Ukie death squads. There is also some good evidence that Poland is sending military equipment, including aircraft and possibly crews. Well, all of that is dumb and serves very little useful purpose, but that is what the West is so good at: pretending. If this plan stays at this level, I would say that it is not very important. But, alas, there is a nastier possibility here:

Plan Two: A Tripwire Force

This is just an extension of plan one: bring in a few men and then have them killed. This would trigger the needed “popular outrage” (carefully fanned and reported by the corporate media) to force the Europeans to accept more US sanctions in Europe or even some kind of “EU-mandated peacekeeping force”. Of course, if the Russians or Novorussians do not take the bait and fail to kill the “observers”, US/NATO false flag teams could easily do that. Just imagine what a heavy mortar strike on a building with these OSCE observers would look like. The junta in Kiev would be more than happy to “invite” such a “peacekeeping” force into Novorussia and since this would be an “invited” force, no UNSC Resolution would be needed. Finally, such a “peacekeeping” force would be regularly reinforced and augmented until it could basically cover the flanks of the Ukies in their attacks against Novorussia. This force would also assume the command and control of Ukie forces, something which the Ukies could greatly benefit from (their current command and control is a mess). Plans One and Two assume that Russian forces stay on the other side of the border and that the only opposition to such a deployment could come from the Novorussians. But what if the Russians decided to move into Novorussia either to protect the locals or to stop this limited US/NATO/EU “peacekeeping force”? Then the US/NATO/EU would have to take a dramatic escalatory step and send in a much bigger force, more capable of defending itself.

Plan Three: UPROFOR on the Dniepr?

This is the Yugoslav scenario. The West would send in something on the order of 10 battalions which would each be given an area of responsibility for “peacekeeping”. Then police forces would be also sent to “maintain law and order,” and EU commissars would be sent in to “help” the local population “express their will” and “organize” a local government. Soon there would be some kind of EU-run election, and all the Novorussian forces would be declared “bandits” from which the local population need to be “protected”. Since Strelkov himself fought in Yugoslavia as did many other Russians, I don’t believe that the Russians or Novorussians would fall for this one. I think that Russia would express its opposition to such a plan and that if she was ignored, she would move in her own forces along the line of contact. This might be the US/NATO/EU end goal: to create a Korea-like “line of demarcation” which would isolate the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from the rest of Novorussia and the rest of the Ukraine. This would mean getting plenty of Kosovo-like “Camp Bonsteels” all along the Russian border, and it would make it look like the “Wartime President of the One Indispensable Nation stopped the Russian Bear”. Finally, it would create a perfect Cold War-like environment in which the western

Plan Four: Operation Storm in Novorussia and Crimea?

I would not put it past the folks in the Pentagon and Mons to try to pull off an “Operation Storm” in Novorussia and even possibly Crimea. That is the scenario Glazev fears: the US/NATO/EU would put enough forces inside the Ukraine to allow it to survive long enough to mobilize a sufficient number of men and equipment for a lightning-fast attack on Novorossia and even possibly Crimea. And in theory, if we assume that Banderstan does not collapse under its own weight and economic disaster, the Ukraine has the resources to mobilize far more men and equipment that the tiny People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk or even Crimea. But that again assumes that Russia will let that happen, which she won’t, so now we have to look at the really crazy plans:

Plan Five: First “Desert Steppe Shield,” Then “Desert Steppe Storm”

That is a crazy notion: to do with Russia what the US did with Iraq. First, to place down a “protection force” in the Ukraine, isolate Russia, and then attack in a full-depth and full-scale determined attack. We are definitely talking about a continental war with a fantastic potential to turn into a world war. This plan would have be based on two crucial assumptions:

  1.  The US/NATO/EU conventional forces would be capable of defeating the Russian military.
  2. If facing conventional defeat, Russia would not use nuclear weapons.

I think that both of these assumptions are deeply mistaken. The first one is based on a mix of propaganda, bean counting and ignorance. The propaganda is something which western military are very good at. They are not. Most western armies are a pathetic joke, and those who can fight well (the Brits, the Turks) are too little to matter. That leaves the US military which have capabilities far in excess of what its NATO allies can muster. Just as in WWII all the serious fighting had to be done by German units, in case of a WWIII (or IV?), all the serious fighting would have to be done by Americans. The problem is that the Americans would have an extremely hard time bringing in enough forces to really make the difference. In any case, I have the biggest doubt about the current fighting capabilities of the US Army and Marine Corps. Faced with a Russian battalion defending its own soil, I think that an equivalent US Army/Marine force would get slaughtered. The “bean counting” is when you compare all the NATO APC’s or tanks to the number available to the Russian military. The corporate media loves these sorts of charts in which soldiers, APC’s, tanks, aircraft and other gear are compared. Professional analysts never use them simply because they are meaningless. What matters is how much of that gear is actually available for battle, the kind of tactics used, the training and morale of the soldiers, the skills of their commanding officers, and stuff which is never mentioned: supplies, logistics, petroleum, lubricants, ammunition, lines of supply, medical standards, and even food and weather. Bean counters simply never see that. But one could argue that the number of trucks is more important to a military than the number of tanks. Yet trucks are never counted. But yes, on paper NATO looks huge. Even though most NATO gear could not even survive your average Ukrainian road, never mind the winter. But let us assume that the Hollywood image of the US military is true: invincible, best trained, best armed, with a fantastic morale, led by the very best of the best officers, it would easily defeat the primitive Russian military, armed with antiquated weapons and commanded by fat drunken generals. Okay, and then what? If the official Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine is examined, in this case Russia would use nuclear weapons. Since even in Hollywood movies nobody makes the claim that the US anti-missile systems could stop Iskanders, cruise missiles or even gravity bombs, we would have to accept that the invincible US force would be turned into radioactive particulates and that in turn would leave the US President two terrible choices: a) take the loss and stop b) retaliate, and the second option would have to include the location from where the strike came from: Russia proper. That, of course, would place the following choices for the Russian President: a) take the loss or b) strike at the continental United States. At this points nuclear mushrooms would start appearing all over the map. Now please make no mistake: Russia can not only destroy Mons, the Pentagon and Cheyenne Mountain (just a matter of placing enough warheads on the right spot) but also every single major city in the United States. Sure, the USA can retaliate in kind, but what kind of consolation would that be for anybody left? I cannot believe that the US Deep State would truly, deliberately, want to start a planetary nuclear war. For one thing, US leaders are cowards, and they will not want to take such a monumental decision. A far more likely version is that being stupid, arrogant cowards, they will stumble upon just that outcome. Here is how:

Plan Six: American Football’s “Hail Mary”

In American football there is a specific pass which is used only when seconds are left on the clock, and your team is badly losing anyway. Basically it works like this: every single person who is not defending the quarterback rushes to the end zone, as do all the defenders, and the quarterback then just throws the ball straight into that zone with the very slim hope that one of his own players will catch it and score a touchdown. This is called a “Hail Mary” for very good reason as only a miracle makes such a desperate plan work. Most of the time the ball is either fumbled or caught by the other team. But, very rarely, it works. I can very much imagine a desperate Obama trying to show the American people that he “has hair on his chest” and that he is not going to let “regional power” challenge the “indispensable nation”. So what he and, really, his administration risks doing is the following: to play a game of chicken hoping against all odds that the Russian will yield. This is my worst nightmare and the worst possible assumption to make because Russia cannot yield. In March of this year I issued a warning which I entitled Obama just made things much, much worse in the Ukraine – now Russia is ready for war. What prompted me to issue that warning was the fact that the Council of the Russian Federation has just unanimously passed a resolution allowing Putin to use Russian armed forces in the Ukraine. Since then, this resolution has been repealed at Putin’s request and for obvious political motives, but the mood and determination are still there. In fact, I think that it has grown much stronger. There has been much useless speculation about Putin, his motives and strategy. This is way bigger than just Putin. If the US/NATO/EU really push too far, and that includes a genocide in Novorussia, an attack on Crimea or an attack on Russian forces, Russia will go to war, Putin or no Putin. And Putin knows that. His real base of support is not the Russian elites (who mostly fear him), but the Russian people (with whom his current rating are higher than ever before). And Putin himself openly spoke about the “threats to Russian sovereignty” though he did add that because of the Russian nuclear forces, there was, in his opinion, no immediate threat to Russian territory. If the US decides to play a game of chicken with Russia, then it will do the same thing as a car driver playing a game of chicken against an incoming train: regardless of the train’s driver, the train is on tracks and its momentum is too great: it cannot stop or veer away. The problem is that the USA has a long record of making absolutely irresponsible statements which end up putting them into a corner from which they cannot bulge without losing face. Just look at the MH17 disaster: the Obama administration immediately rushed to blame the Russians for it, but what will it do when the evidence to the contrary comes out? What if Obama also draws a red line somewhere (it does not really matter where) and then forces Russia to cross it? Sadly, I can imagine the USA declaring that the US/NATO will defend the Ukie airspace. I think that they are dumb enough to try to seize a Russian ship entering or leaving the Black Sea. Remember – these are the folks who hijacked the aircraft of Bolivian President Evo Morales to try to find Snowden on board. These are the folks who regularly kidnap Russian citizens worldwide (the last time the son of a well-know Russian member of Parliament who was kidnapped in the Maldive Islands). And, of course, these are the folks who did 9/11. Their arrogance knows no limits because they are profoundly evil sociopaths. For them, the organization of false flag operations is a normal standard procedure. They almost triggered a war between the DPRK and South Korea by sinking a South Korean military vessel. They used chemical weapons in Syria not once, but several times. And the last time we had a Democrat in the White House, he was crazy enough to send two US Aircraft Carrier Groups into the Strait of Taiwan to threaten China.

My Biggest Fears

This is my biggest fear: some kind of desperate “Hail Mary” maneuver in which the US will try to convince Russia that “look, we are crazy enough to start this thing, so you better back off” not realizing that Russia cannot back off. The other thing which really scares me is that during the Cuban Missile Crisis everybody was aware of the stakes, and most people were truly terrified. Now, thanks to the propaganda of the corporate media, almost nobody is afraid and hardly anybody is paying attention. Russia and the USA are on a clear collision course and nobody cares! How come? Because if 9/11 proved anything, it is that there are things which most people are simply unwilling to contemplate, no matter how close and real they are. It would only make sense that the Empire of Illusion would be populated by a people in total denial. After all, illusion and denial usually go hand in hand. Most of you, dear readers and friends, seem to be sharing with me a sense of total distrust in the sanity of our leaders. When I asked you whether you believed that the US/NATO were crazy enough to use military forces against Russia, an overwhelming number of you answered “yes,” and a good part of you were even emphatically sure of that. Why? Because we all know how crazy and deluded our Imperial Overlords are. Crazy and deluded enough not to quality as “rational actor”? Crazy and deluded enough to play a game a chicken with a train? Crazy and deluded enough to risk the planet on “Hail Mary? Alas, I think that this is a very real possibility.

But What Does Uncle Sam Really Want?

There is a gradual realization in Russia that for Uncle Sam this is not about the Ukraine. It is about Russia and specifically about regime change in Russia. A vast majority of Russian experts seem to believe that the US wants to overthrow Putin and that this entire war in the Ukraine is a means to achieve that. As a very cynical joke going around now says “Obama is willing to fight Putin down to the very last Ukrainian”. I think that this is correct. The US hopes that one of the following will happen:

  1. A Russian military intervention in Novorussia which will allow the US to restart a Cold War v2 on steroids and which will also fully re-enslave Europe to the USA. Putin would then be blamed for falling in the US trap.
  2. The creation of a US-run “Banderastan” in the Ukraine. That would ‘contain’ and destabilize Russia. Again, Putin would be blamed for letting that happen.
  3. A “nationalist Maidan” in Russia: this is what is behind the current Putin-bashing campaign in the blogosphere: to paint Putin as a weak and/or corrupt man, who traded Crimea for the Donbass (you know the tune – these folks even comment on this blog). These efforts are supported and sometimes even financed by Russian oligarchs who have a great deal of money involved in the EU and don’t need the current tensions. Here Putin would be blamed for not doing enough.

In all three cases, Putin would risk a (patriotically) color coded revolution which would, inevitably, bring either crazy rogue or a clueless fossil to power (a la Zhirinovsky or Zuganov) or, much better, a pro-American “liberal” (a la Medvedev). I think that all of these plans will fail. Putin will not give Uncle Sam the intervention he wants. Instead, Russia continue to support the Resistance in Novorussia until Banderastan goes “belly up”, i.e. for another 30-60 days or so. As for the “nationalist Maidan”, the Russian people see straight through this “black PR campaign” and their support for Putin is higher than it ever was. It’s not Putin who does not want to intervene overtly in the Donbass, it is the Russian people. The attempts at stirring up anti-Putin by first stirring up anti-Strelkov feelings have completely failed and, in fact, they have backfired. A lot of these “hurray-patriots” are now overly called “useful idiots” for the CIA or even provocateurs. Finally, while they are at this point in time only rumors, there seem to be more and more specialists of the opinion that MH17 was a deliberate false flag by the US. If the news that the Ukies did it ever becomes public, then the entire destabilization plan will go down the tubes. At this point, I would not put anything, no matter how crazy, past the US Deep State. And that is a very scary thought. The Saker

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0 thoughts on “"Thinking the Unthinkable"”

  1. Terrific commentary except for, “The Americans are always the Good Guys and our enemies are always the Bad Guys.” ISIS, Al Qaeda, LRA. Aidid milita, etc are not good guys by any stretch of the imagination. What on Earth is Saker thinking when he types out that sentence?

      1. “Obviously, sometimes we are fighting real bad guys. And many more times, we actively support bad guys.”
        I’d insert this somewhere in place of “we always fight good guys”. You can say instead “We often fight good guys”, “It’s not uncommon for us to fight good guys”, etc. Just my suggestion.

      2. From wikipedia: “In May 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act,[101] legislation aimed at stopping Joseph Kony and the LRA. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate on 11 March 2010, with 65 senators as cosponsors, then passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 May 2010, with 202 representatives as cosponsors. On 24 November 2010, Obama delivered a strategy document to the U.S. Congress, asking for money to disarm Kony and the LRA.[102]
        On 14 October 2011, Obama announced that he had ordered the deployment of 100 U.S. military advisors with a mandate to train, assist and provide intelligence to help combat the Lord’s Resistance Army,[103] reportedly from the Army Special Forces,[103][104] at a cost of approximately $4.5 million per month.[105] Human Rights Watch welcomed the deployment, which they had previously advocated for,[106][107] and Obama said that the deployment did not need explicit approval from the U.S. Congress, as the 2010 Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act already authorised “increased, comprehensive U.S. efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability”. The military advisors will be armed, and will provide assistance and advice, but “will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”[108]
        The advisers will operate in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, subject to approval by those states. The military advisors will not operate independently of the host states. General Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said that his best estimate was that Joseph Kony was probably in the Central African Republic, not in Uganda.”

  2. We have a very good military if the mission is to take territory and destroy any one and any thing in their way. We’ve done that consistently. Guerrilla war. Not so good. Empirish type keep the people down. Not so good.
    Our planes are getting old. The F-22 is good but we don’t have enough of them. The F-35 is a fucking joke for what it cost.
    We don’t have enough manpower and equipment to take Russia. Even if we did they’d probably nuke us.
    I hope these idiots don’t believe we can beat Russia. I personally, as your friendly White Nationalist, want to ALLY with Russia. Let’s get Russia in NATO. Kick out all the diversity from the Northern hemisphere and have WHITOPIA!
    Except we should keep the Asian girls. Some of those are quite cute. Especially cute are the White/Asian mixes. I have a friend married to a Japanese Woman and his two girls are very cute.

    1. C’mon now Sam, i thought you were about not polluting your genepool! Asians are not Whites at the end of the day.

    2. lol you were complaining how your “friends” Asian-White hybrid child didn’t look entirely White lol! The child was apparently was completely lost b/c he didn’t look entirely white and haf lost those genes…..
      WN’s seem to be a funny but idiotic bunch of people!

      1. “…lol you were complaining how your “friends” Asian-White hybrid child didn’t look entirely White lol!…”
        You read incorrectly I never “complained”. I said they looked cute. Attractive.

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