However this story ends, clearly Putin has joined the likes of Hitler and Pol Pot. We have just witnessed that defining moment in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that is bound to leave Putin’s Russia morally decimated. The United States, for example, did not lose the wars in the battlefields of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, but at My Lai and the notorious prisons that it ran in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, that left its moral compass in disarray and showed its hypocrisy. The fact that morality matters little in politics or diplomacy is something we all take for granted until, of course, some cataclysmic event changes everything, leaving those on the wrong side of history scrabbling to recover from the aftermath of their decisions. However, gravity has a strange way of bringing things down to earth, even egos a fact that may now be dawning upon Putin. One of the most significant lessons we learn as children is that all of our actions have consequences a lesson that adults unfortunately tend to ignore. Zelenskyy, a stand-up comic by profession, has shown by example what true leadership means, something Putin despite his years in office has just not been able to replicate. In the battle of the Vlads, one cannot miss the irony that Russia is saddled with the wrong Vlad. Letting him roam about, killing whomever he wanted to kill, under whatever circumstances, would have amounted to criminal negligence on America’s part.We have little choice but to take a fresh look at our military and the implications on national security in the context of the events in Europe His hands dripped, as it were, with blood. All the same, given his latter role in the destruction of Syria and the subversion of Iraq, Soleimani made himself an indispensable target. Letting him alone for some considerable period was possibly pardonable from an American standpoint, in that you can’t swat all your enemies at once. The truth is, the malignant Soleimani got away for a long time - the whole of the present century, practically - with targeting Americans and the American interest. There are subtler versions for instance, that of the fourth-century Roman military strategist Vegetius: “Let him who desires peace prepare for war.” Like Lord Fisher, Vegetius is sending a message: You won’t hurt us without cost to yourself. The main point requiring nutrition and sustenance is in any case the Fisher point, however outrageously expressed. Besides, it takes attention away from impeachment! Then there’s the second facet of my guess - namely, that because Donald Trump issued the shoot-to-kill order, there had to be something wrong with it: some reflection on his mental processes, some indifference to real-world consequences. That dead people have anything useful to tell live people is no longer a widely accepted assumption. The endlessly silly debate over Confederate statues is case in point. The first part of my guess is that an inadequate number of people care anymore about history and its lessons, save when the past can be used, potentially, to shame adversaries. Why didn’t they? My guess comes in two parts - and it’s only a guess, due to my longstanding inability to get inside others’ minds and crawl around, according to the pattern practiced at the New York Times and elsewhere.
The proposition is so logical you would suppose one or two of the Democrats’ presidential candidates would have gotten it, along with a majority share of media writers and talkers. That, as it happens, is what Trump meant when he said he wasn’t trying to start a war he was trying to prevent one from breaking out. It was time he understood that bad actions have bad consequences, the objective being to prevent their recurrence. Soleimani had more than merely crossed Uncle Sam he had contrived the deaths of approximately 600 American military personnel. Trump grasped the point when he ordered the taking out of Maj.