Liberal Press Falls for Lies From Putin, Tehran, and the Houthis

Vladimir Putin is a liar, the Iranians are liars, and the Houthis are liars. Watching the daily news as a trained historian drives me nuts. The people our elites and the press pay attention to are serial liars. The reporting of Mr. Putin’s latest flow of proposals as though he might be telling the truth requires rejecting everything we know about the KGB-trained dictator of Russia. Listening to the latest reports from Tehran requires a gullibility that ignores a full century of the Iranian dictatorship chanting Death to America. The Houthis manipulate the Saudis and others as they keep building up their strength both in Yemen and now increasingly in the Horn of Africa.Our elites prefer to pretend that the words matter because it is the nature of diplomats to find excuses to talk. A Reagan-era negotiator with a military background told me with disbelief that in negotiating with the Soviets, a good meeting as measured by American diplomats was one which led to another meeting. The test was not if you were coming close to getting an agreement. The test was whether you could keep talking.A major reason for the deep preference for talking is that the alternative may lead to war and even a war to the finish.The British and French faced a similar challenge in dealing with Hitler in the 1930s. The elites who had been deeply shaken by the huge losses of life in the First World War simply did not want to drift into another major war if there was any way to avoid it.Churchill, who had read Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” knew that they were dealing with a megalomaniac whose ambitions virtually guaranteed war. Churchill’s analysis of Hitler’s ambitions led him to believe a major war was inevitable. Therefore, if you were part of the European elite who feared war, you were angrier at Churchill for being a “warmonger” than you were at Hitler, even though he was clearly taking steps to prepare for war.Today’s elites face similar dilemmas when dealing with serious, hostile opponents committed to fighting for as long as it takes.The West is afraid to defeat Mr. Putin because it might lead him to use nuclear weapons in a last stand for survival. Since Russia has around 6,000 nuclear weapons of various sizes and power and has a doctrine of tactically using battlefield nukes, there are sound reasons to be cautious. However, caution can lead to paralysis, and paralysis can lead to defeat.Mr. Putin has grown steadily more savage in his efforts to defeat Ukraine. He is deliberately waging a war of terror designed to destroy the electricity infrastructure and leave the Ukrainian people without heat in the middle of the winter. His mass bombardments are a strategy of terror deliberately aimed at civilians. His policy of kidnapping young Ukrainians and shipping them to Russia to be raised as young Russians violates all the norms of modern warfare.The West, including America, has helped Ukraine survive but has not provided enough support for it to win. Furthermore, the West has endured a steady increase in Russian use of drones and other devices to encroach on the West and create a series of attacks too large to be ignored but too small to lead to war. Mr. Putin’s strategy of constant crowding is designed to wear down the Western governments and convince them that getting along with Russia is a lot easier than trying to fight.The Iranian dictatorship is even more blatantly dishonest than Putin. The Western elite’s effort to avoid the reality that their Iranian opponents have been chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” for 47 years and have been trying to get nuclear weapons and missiles to achieve that goal is a sign of the cowardice that now predominates in virtually every country.If “experts” and the press started with an understanding that we are dealing with serial liars and everything has to be reinterpreted within that reality, we would have a much more accurate understanding of how real the threats are and how much trouble we are in.

Liberal Press Falls for Lies From Putin, Tehran, and the Houthis

Liberal Press Falls for Lies From Putin, Tehran, and the Houthis

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