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Wackos with Guns

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The pictures and stories coming from Donetsk, Ukraine, are horrifying. Bodies flung from Malaysia Air flight 17 have been lying in the fields right where they fell from the sky, rotting in the summer sun for days. Wreckage is everywhere, some of it disturbed in what appears to be looting as much as recovery. How can this happen?

The short answer is that the area is not under the control of any organized or trained government, but held by a group of separatists with guns. Some have been described as “visibly intoxicated” as they fired into the air to shoo off international investigators. It seems ridiculous, but the families – indeed, the entire world – is being held hostage by a few wackos with guns.

That’s the state of the world right now as we all draw much closer. A little bit of chaos in one part of the planet affects everyone – even when the number of people involved is small.

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Too Clever by a Lot

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“Blowback”. It’s a word we’ve accepted in the US through the many misadventures of proxy wars that came back to bite us. Mujahideen “Freedom Fighters” eventually became Taliban and al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein went from being a trusted bulwark against Iran to a dangerous dictator. Iran itself went from being our puppet to a dangerous force supporting an awful lot of mayhem.

Today Malaysia Air Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, almost certainly by Russian separatists. Russia, under Putin, thought they had a clever strategy for arming a bunch of poorly organized, untrained rednecks with sophisticated weapons while they claimed to not be involved at all. It went about as badly as anyone with any forethought could have imagined as they apparently shot at just about anything flying by. What will put an end to this “cleverness” operating in place of a reasonable diplomatic and military policy? If this event, and the way it’s propagating through today’s internet media, doesn’t do it nothing will.

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Stability

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As the crisis in Iraq worsens nearly daily, a quiet calm seems to have come over US politics. Republicans want to blame Obama for this, but know that they can’t. More to the point, there doesn’t seem to be anything proactive we can do, at least not anything different from what we tried twice before. There is simply far too much blame to go around for it to land squarely on anyone here in the US.

What is different this time? Apart from the horrible loss of life a decade ago, apparently for little gain, there is a big change in the US. Our energy independence makes any arguments based on “strategic resources” much thinner than the blood of American soldiers. Between this crisis and Ukraine it has become clear that we have limits and have to learn to be OK with that.

But there is more to it. It should be obvious by now that US foreign policy can no longer be about control but stability. And that, by itself, should be a pivotal change.

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Better News Ahead?

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It’s a new month, which is as good of a time as any to look around to see how the ongoing stories of the year are progressing. For an election year it’s been very dull, with Congress clearly running on their record of getting nothing done. As we slip into the daze of summer, there hasn’t been good news on the biggest stories running, the economy and Ukraine. But both stories have a chance of improving in the near future.  Here’s what to look for.

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Credit Where It’s Due

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Part of the problem with the news today is that nearly everything in the world is interconnected. Stories have a tendency to bleed into each other for a variety of reasons, such as their equal usefulness as political tools or because the actors are involved in many different things at once. A good conspiracy theorist can link two stories together in ways that they probably shouldn’t be.

This may be one of those moments. Caveat Lector, let the reader beware.

There is little doubt that the theft of credit cards from Target last Winter could be traced to Ukraine – and, in so doing, the network of organized crime we might call the “Russian Mafia”. It is more accurate to refer to them by their own name for themselves, Bratva (Ukrainian for “Brotherhood”) because they are an international syndicate based in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine and operating nearly everywhere.

An estimate of their take from credit card fraud puts into perspective the scale of the problem in Ukraine,  We can estimate the resources they have as well as the stake they are fighting for as they resist the introduction of order and the rule of law. It also points to the US role in Ukraine – which is to say without sending in troops.

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