War thoughts

My last post about an inflection point almost intuits that the World Central Kitchen (WCK) disaster was about to happen. Sometimes you can feel something in the air. Not that you know for certain something is going to happen, but the trend lines are there. There was something about the way this war was progressing that worried me. My concern was that until this moment the IDF still had the credibility of making the self-defense argument, even with scores of thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties, because Hamas was using civilians as weapons of war. I argued that any sort of famine would transgress that moral boundary, because the obligations change from an active engagement combat circumstance to a prisoner of war situation, and as such, the IDF becomes responsible for ensuring the basic human needs of the civilian population. My worst fears were realized. The WCK catastrophe, although certainly unintended, severely damages any credibility the IDF had when they claimed to be taking precautions and following international law and conventions of war. The details that are starting to emerge appear damning, and I fear it's going to get even worse. The 'fog of war' is no excuse. Apologies don't cut it. Unless heads roll, and ideally Netanyahu's would be top of my list, Israel is in deep trouble on multiple levels. The trust deficit, both domestically and internationally, is reaching a critical point. The passionate protests we've been seeing in Jerusalem in the last 24 hours (with violence surprisingly erupting) that demand his resignation suggest a lot of Israelis agree with me. I hope it has an impact so that this listing ship of state can get back on course. None of this fundamentally changes my support for Israel or my view that the war is justified, especially as long as there are hostages involved. But operational carelessness are undermining the goals. It's hard to see any path forward unless something changes.

I had other thoughts this week about war, namely Russia and Ukraine. Since the start of that war more than two years ago (if you don't count the invasion of Crimea in 2014), I've been trying to find an intellectual framework for Putin's aggression that makes sense of it. Some people have characterized it as an imperial war, Putin's desire to re-make the old Soviet Union, to re-establish a Russian Empire. Others have characterized it as a vanity project for Putin who fashions himself as a modern day Peter The Great. They've focused on his mythological view of himself and his desire for an historical legacy. Still others have taken a more pragmatic approach and see the war as a political move to divert the attention of everyday Russians away from his economic failures in favour of patriotism and a quasi-religious Nationalism. Of course, all of these perspectives probably play some role in Putin's motivation. No doubt it's changed over time, as the war shifted from being a lightning strike against Kiev in the first few days of the invasion, which failed miserably, and became a war of attrition. But I'm starting to think that Alexei Navalny's view was always the right one (even before the war). The war is about class warfare. It's about a monarchical oligarchy trying to protect its power and privilege. It's a throwback to 18th-19th century Russian aristocracy. The one that was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. The war being waged is not actually Russia against Ukraine, in reality it's Putin against his own underclass. The tip off for me is that Putin wears a business suit, while Zelensky, in his role as Ukraine's commander in chief, wears army fatigues. The symbolism is unmistakable. This week, with a stroke of the pen sitting at his desk, Putin called up an additional 150,000 conscripts to prepare for the meat-grinder of Ukraine. According to a US intelligence report an estimated 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine to the end of 2023. If accurate, the figure would represent 87 percent of the roughly 360,000 troops Russia had before the war. I wonder how long Russians are prepared to accept this until they reach their breaking point.