Watching Ukrainian civilians get pummeled by airstrikes every day as America and NATO stand by and do nothing is Western hypocrisy in a nutshell.
NOTE: Originally published on Medium March 8, 2022.
Worse is seeing the military “experts” trotted out by media outlets tell brazen lies about how No-Fly Zones work to justify America’s rank cowardice in Ukraine. Writers like Fred Kaplan of Slate, Fred Kagan and the rest of the bigots over at the imperialism-loving American Enterprise Institute — they’re deliberately creating a mythos around No-Fly Zones to control the narrative around the war in Ukraine.
Anyone old enough to remember the decade-long No-Fly Zone imposed on Iraq in the 1990s should scent the lie America-First bigots on the neoliberal and neoconservative sets are telling.
No-Fly Zones are portrayed these days as all-out aerial assaults on a target. Libya is the classic case — the Obama Administration and NATO used a No-Fly Zone established to protect the citizens of a Libyan city under threat of massive bombardment by government forces to effect regime change in that country.
But NATO leaders lied about what was necessary to erect a No-Fly Zone — total destruction of the target’s air defenses was not required, it just made the job much easier. Libya remains broken and mired in civil war to this day.
Obama continued all the War on Terror evils of the Bush Administration and got away with it because as soon as Democrats gain power they govern just like the Republicans. The corrupt twin pillars of America’s dying democracy play sick games with our lives and tax dollars year in and year out, squandering the country’s wealth and power like all good American CEOs are trained to do to their companies before they take the golden parachute option right before the collapse.
Virtually every military pundit, ecstatic to finally have a big long war to comment on, is screaming about how a No-Fly Zone automatically takes America into World War 3. They insist No-Fly Zones always involve total attacks on the opposing air force’s bases and defenses, meaning America would enter a direct conflict with Russia.
This is pure myth. The air patrols conducted over Iraq to protect the Kurdish and Shiite minorities rarely involved widespread ground attacks.
For years Iraqi surface to air missile operators played a dangerous game with American pilots flying near the edges of the zone. They switched on their radars and even fired missiles sometimes to harass their opponents.
When American President Bill Clinton needed a foreign policy boost, he’d launch a few dozen cruise missiles at air defense targets in Iraq. What he did not do was expand the No-Fly Zone into a regime change operation.
Bush did that. It didn’t go well.
Military experts play a deliberate game with the public, pretending that any war means a big, all-out fight. This isn’t remotely true — every conflict involves two sides making moves they think will benefit them. The desire to avoid a conflict escalating into total war means that even when sides exchange lethal attacks, as America and Iran did in early 2020 when Trump assassinated Iranian general Soliemani, they remain limited.
The exact same logic holds true in Ukraine. What is really going on is that Russia has threatened escalation against any country that helps Ukraine.
But NATO countries already are, and without suffering Russian attack. Estonia, Finland, Poland — countries right next to Russia are sending Ukraine short-range anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Mig-29 jets might even move from Poland’s arsenal to replenish Ukraine’s, if America can figure out how to make the incentives work.
Turns out, supply chains are so tight that if for some reason America’s air force was caught on the ground by an attack, it wouldn’t be able to replace equipment losses for years. Yet another reason a real World War won’t be a quick affair, unless it goes nuclear.
American pundits are screaming that a No-Fly Zone means the start of World War 3, but this is exactly what Putin wants them to believe. He clearly sees NATO as an enemy and will push as far as he can to make life difficult for it going forward.
Russia, unlike America, doesn’t pretend that war is an all-or-nothing, total thing. There are gradations and negotiations are constant, frankly the Russian way of war is all about pushing the other side to negotiate, hence the brutal targeting of civilians.
War is politics and politics is war — Clausewitz was right, though even he didn’t realize the two are always identical, violence being merely an escalation in tactics. States are always war with each other and their own people, sometimes the fight just gets more brutal.
Powerful people are desperate to control how you and I think about war, because if you start to question the choices they make their house of cards falls apart. If the average person understood military affairs, wars would be close to impossible because the public would instantly realize how much they’re lied to.
In Libya, military leaders deliberately made a simple No-Fly Zone established over a portion of the country into a broader war. They insisted that to do one, you have to completely eliminate your enemy’s ability to threaten aircraft.
But it’s not true. No-Fly Zones exist for about a hundred kilometers around American aircraft carrier battle groups when they’re close to threatening shores, and China and Russia both prod them, their aircraft quickly escorted away.
The idea that shooting down a Russian jet automatically means World War 3 — well, it’s a lie. India and Pakistan have shot down each other’s jets without plunging into a total war. The Soviet Union and China fought several border wars during the Cold War.
Wars just don’t work the way the general public is taught to believe. And there are tactics that work just like No-Fly Zones, only instead of blowing Russian aircraft out of the sky you simply harass them without relief.
American and NATO combat aircraft could set up an Air Defense Identification Zone like the one Taiwan maintains around its coast. This gives a country an excuse to launch aircraft to shadow any unfriendly jet.
Taiwan doesn’t shoot down Chinese jets straying into this zone, it sends up its own fighters to simply watch them, let the Chinese pilots know they could. In Ukraine, American jets could stay well away from Russian fighters while using their radars to track every Russian aircraft flying west of the Dnieper River.
No pilot concentrating on hitting a ground target when Ukrainian missiles remain a threat is going to feel comfortable having his jet painted by a US combat aircraft’s radar. If morale is as bad as rumor has it (which I doubt) pilots might simply dump their bomb loads and say they were afraid of coming under attack.
While Russian jets will have fighter escorts, these aren’t going to break off and fly a couple hundred kilometers over hostile territory just to chase away American fighters patrolling in the distance. And if they do — great! US pilots can pull back and leave them to Ukraine’s SAMs.
I am willing to bet that there are plenty of American pilot around who would love to play this game. Even while not actively shooting at Russians, the mere threat of intervention would mean Russian forces have to send up more fighter escorts for their bombers and probably start flying lower to the ground, in the range of Ukraine’s surviving air defenses.
Americans ignorant of Ukraine’s geography don’t understand just how immense the country is. I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life playing wargames set in and around Ukraine during World War 2, and the challenges Russia is facing are extremely familiar.
You can’t guarantee air superiority over a country the size of Texas, not with modern SAM systems being so lethal. America couldn’t do it either. That, in addition to preserving their equipment, is probably a big part of why Russian aircraft stick mostly to the front line areas and leave cruise and ballistic missiles to hit targets deeper inside Ukraine. American and NATO jets could easily patrol in the west, helping Ukrainian jets spot and knock down incoming cruise missiles if nothing else.
Forcing Putin’s air power to deploy more to ward off the threat of sudden NATO intervention will wear it out. And creating a safe space in western Ukraine where refugees and newly-raised fighting formations can be free of air attack will do wonders for morale and Ukraine’s long-term prospects.
Basically, there is a lot more America and NATO could and should be doing to help Ukraine. As President Zelensky keeps repeating — Ukraine can actually win, if it gets help, and it is important to remember that Russia’s fight does not end with the capture of Kyiv.
Putin has chosen a course of action that guarantees he will plunge deeper and deeper into his death-fight with NATO and America. The old white men baying about the danger of World War 3 are playing into his hands, failing to understand that the only thing that will deter Putin is sufficient military force in Eastern Europe that he knows he can’t win the fight without going nuclear.
Their fear means sooner or later Putin will have to directly test NATO Article 5. Europe knows Trump or someone worse will likely be America’s President again, or America might simply rip itself apart. Sanctions appear likely to boomerang back on the West and trigger a recession, so a long-term united front against Russia will prove extremely difficult.
If I were Putin, I’d push NATO and America hard now too. I predicted he would going back to the start of Biden’s administration, though I didn’t think Putin would take the immense risk of launching an all-out assault on Ukraine given the now-proven dangers of provoking a national resistance.
But Zelensky is right — the craven West has Ukrainian blood on its hands. The argument that Russia will immediately respond to a No-Fly Zone by escalating the war to involve NATO doesn’t hold water.
It’s part of the real Big Lie in America: the lie that the federal government is competent or cares about Americans. The lie that America’s leaders give a damn about anything except their own power — even the Constitution.
Putin is taking a beating on the ground in Ukraine. But without substantial international aid reaching Ukraine and soon, his forces will win ugly, Syria style, leaving a broken and probably fragmented country in their wake.
The solution is not to close the skies over Ukraine completely and NATO couldn’t even do it if it wanted to. To help Ukraine in the air, countries must take any excuse to fly large numbers of combat aircraft over the country, at the very least by directly protecting declared humanitarian aid corridors that can act as miniature No-Fly Zones.
American and NATO jets do not need to shoot down their Russian counterparts to have a substantial impact on the air war. A declared Air Defense Identification Zone will protect humanitarian efforts and make Russia’s job that much harder.
Will Russia start shooting at our jets in this case? Possibly — but Putin might also attack Lithuania or even use nukes. You can’t set policy based on what an opponent might do, or else they’ll play madman and beat you every time.
If American jets are shot down, they’ll be over friendly territory. And they will be flying a great distance from the S400 batteries in Belarus, making them harder to track and hit. Aircraft can dodge missiles, you know, and American jets have sophisticated electronic warfare systems.
And if Russia does shoot an American pilot down?
Well, in that case it’s Russia that started the shooting, not NATO. And that will be a better test of Article 5 and European commitment to collective defense than an “accidental” Russian missile strike hitting a base in Poland, or Romania.
Which will probably happen if there is no negotiated end to this vicious fight soon. You think Putin will let NATO arm a Ukrainian insurgency without raising the stakes? Not a chance.
I hate to say it, but the desperate effort by American pundits and politicians to rule out the possibility of World War 3 is appeasing Putin. Constantly saying America can’t do anything more in Ukraine without triggering a wider war is exactly the mistake the Allies made with Hitler.
Who, incidentally, had chemical weapons sufficient to wipe out entire European cities. He only used his against people being murdered in death camps because the threat of retaliation was too awful even for him to contemplate.
Dictators have to consider their domestic popularity, just like democratic leaders. Hitler was obsessed with his fears of Germans turning against him and hid the truth of the war’s impact on Germans as long as he could.
Nuclear weapons are no different than chemical or biological arms. The more America shows fear of them, the greater Putin’s incentive to leverage their power. And American’s don’t understand that he doesn’t distinguish between economic and political warfare — until Putin feels the hard extent of his power, he will keep on pushing.
He’d be a fool not to now. The grand geopolitical collapse of our time has begun. It won’t end without a rearrangement of the international order.
In short, fear of World War 3 is exactly what is most likely to bring it about.
Ukraine is not a perfect country, but its people do not deserve this nightmare of being caught between Putin and Biden. And they definitely don’t deserve to be lied to by their so-called partners.
No-Fly Zones aren’t what we’ve been led to believe. The powerful want us to remain in ignorance because it lets them lie about what is and isn’t possible.
This protects their power while sacrificing innocent people. It is craven, disgusting, and pure evil.
It must stop. Ignore the American military pundits, so eager to praise Ukraine as it bleeds for democracy.
Send in the jets. Protect Ukraine.
Or the future will never forgive, and never forget.