EatTheRich
President
American conduct in this war is reminiscent of British conduct in the Crimean War. There the British showed up with force sufficient to prevent Russia from occupying Istanbul or the Dardanelles Strait, but the British always managed to desert their Ottoman “allies” just in time to see them once again beaten down by the Russians, to the hearty adulation of the conservative press, cheered by the successes of Russia which was then as now the citadel of world reaction. Then it was largely to coerce concessions by Turkey to Austrian ambitions in the Balkans, which gave British imperialism a counterweight to its big rival France and hastened a dreamed-of partition of the Ottoman Empire on more favorable terms a la the later Sykes-Picot. Now the dithering provision of aid intended to prevent a decisive Ukrainian victory comes partly to coerce Ukraine into neoliberal economic reforms and anticommunist repression, but mostly to preserve an ongoing war whereby not just Russia but also the U.S.’s rival Germany is bled dry.Where boldness is required, our leaders consistently provide timidity.
Another war this might be instructively compared to is the Iran-Iraq War. Russia is in the position of Iraq, acting (albeit on a bigger stage) as a regional bully and using its superior military to wage cruel war on the civilian population and crush a nascent democratic revolution. Ukraine is like Iran, a post-revolution regime with the military support of all friends of freedom and a politically heterogenous mix of reformist radicals and reactionaries in the government, whose worst elements are seeking to turn the war of revolutionary defense into a war on the element of democracy; and, just as American aid to Iran (although thankfully the bulk of the aid now isn’t going to Russia as the bulk went to Iraq back then) was channeled to advance the reactionary clerical, military, and accommodationist elements at the expense of the burgeoning democratic forces, today aid to Ukraine is channeled toward encouraging capitulationism, reliance on the reactionary NATO alliance, and the reactionary (neoliberal, national chauvinist, and anticommunist) elements seeking to undermine the democratic uprising to which Russia responded with such fury.
Just as the Ottomans and the Iranians would have been foolish to refuse the offered aid (putting aside the political impermissibility of the specific plan for Iran to buy arms from Israel when the money would go to fund counterrevolutionary terror in Nicaragua), Ukraine cannot now reasonably refuse American aid. But it will put itself in the best position to utilize that aid in the revolutionary manner that will make its fight most effective (as the Ottomans drew their greatest strength from the support of Western Europe’s workers and peasants and Iran from the alliance with oppressed nations such as the Kurds and from the mass, militia-based defense of the 1979 popular revolution) by openly criticizing the meager aid provided, the tailoring of that aid to U.S./NATO military goals for the Ukrainians (keeping the war going while keeping the Black Sea free for oil/gas interests and Turkish military maneuvers), and the reactionary war aims of the imperialist powers, and going over the heads of Biden et al. to appeal to the masses to mobilize through their unions to create workers’ councils coordinating to supply massive, effective aid, if need be by taking action against the imperialist state to impose a policy reform on it.