Bulletins and News Discussion from August 12th to August 18th, 2024 - Marshall Plan: Now As Farce - COTW: Ireland
Image is of one of Ireland's only manned navy ships, the Samuel Beckett. Image sourced from this BBC article.
Putler has been HUMILIATED by the Kursk offensive and this proves that Russia's army is in tatters and unable even to defend its own territory. However, it is simultaneously true that Russia poses an existential threat to countries thousands of miles away, as this recent Politico article demonstrates. Ireland - a country that immediately springs to mind as one surrounded by enemies - is being bullied due to its lack of military.
Despite bearing responsibility for 16 percent of the EU’s territorial waters, and the fact that 75 percent of transatlantic undersea cables pass through or near Irish waters, Ireland is totally defenseless. And I mean completely unable to protect critical infrastructure, or even pretend to secure its own borders. [...] Ireland’s “navy” of six patrol vessels is currently operating with one operational ship due to chronic staff shortages. [...] Ireland simply has no undersea capabilities. How could it, when it barely spends 0.2 percent of GDP on security and defense? And it has, in effect, abdicated responsibility for protecting the Europe’s northwestern borders.
For all we know, the dreaded sea-people from the Bronze Age Collapse could soon emerge from the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, things are even worse up in the skies. Ireland has no combat jets, and it’s the only country in Europe that can’t monitor its own airspace due to the lack of primary radar systems. Instead, the country has outsourced its security to Britain in a technically secret agreement between Dublin and London, which effectively cedes control over Irish air space to the Royal Air Force. This must be the luck of the Irish — smile and get someone else to protect you for free.
While this is very silly, rearmament has long been a part of US imperial strategy on an economic level. Desai, discussing the US imperial strategy in the WW2 period:
By 1947 [...] the domestic postwar consumer boom was nearing its end. While financing exports became more urgent, the 1946 elections returned a Congress unlikely to approve further loans. Now the Truman Administration concocted the ‘red menace’ to ‘scare the hell out of the country’, enunciated the Truman Doctrine of US support for armed resistance to ‘subjugation’ which launched the cold war, and Congress granted $400 million to prevent left-wing triumphs in Greece and Turkey in 1947.
One reading of history states that the US was so intimidated by the USSR that this forced a policy of massive arms production even outside of official wartime. Why this arms production is not occurring today can be puzzling, and (very reasonably) explained by neoliberals exporting industrial production overseas. However, a different historical reading can explain both the first Cold War, and the ongoing situation in which American weaponry is being almost purposefully given in insufficient numbers to give Ukraine a chance of victory and thus only prolonging their suffering (while generating massive profit for the military-industrial complex):
In this sense the Cold War was not the cause of US imperial policy but its effect. It combined financing exports with fighting combined development by national capitalisms as well as communism. When such ‘totalitarian regimes’ threatened ‘free peoples’, ‘America’s world economic responsibilities’ included aid to countries battling them.
By selling massively expensive weapons to Europe, America could simultaneously guarantee export markets for its industries, trap Europe into reliance on American industries at the expense of their own, and divert European funds away from constructing factories which could compete with American ones. Providing a way to defend against Soviet communism (and now Russian "imperialism") is merely a happy side-effect, and so the lack of effectiveness of American weaponry is causing no great panic among the military-industrial complex, nor an urgent plan to quintuple artillery shell production or Patriot missile production - the deals for F-35s and such are still there, and they are what matter.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Ireland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section. Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war. Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language. https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one. https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts. https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel. https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator. https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps. https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language. https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language. https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses. https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are planning to use charges with warheads containing radioactive substances to attack the Kursk and Zaporizhzhya NPPs — RIA Novosti, citing the Russian security agency
...
A large number of Western journalists gathered in Sumy and Zaporozhye amid Kiev’s preparations for an attack on the Kursk and Zaporozhye nuclear power plants, Lebedev, coordinator of the pro-Russian underground, told RIA Novosti
The AFU has already been attacking the znpp area and associated infrastructure with conventional weapons, they started doing that in 2022 not long after losing the site. What is the point of doing so with dirty bombs? This accusation doesn't make any sense - it is barely an escalation from what the AFU has already been doing the whole conflict.
To be clear, I have no doubt that the AFU will continue attacking these areas, I just doubt they will do so with dirty bombs. Or, being more charitable, what is the possible strategic or tactical advantage of using dirty munitions to attack these power plants vs conventional munitions?
what is the possible strategic or tactical advantage of using dirty munitions to attack these power plants vs conventional munitions?
Woah. I am not sure that questions like this are viable. What strategic or tactical advantage did ukraine telling everyone their plans for the offensive in 2023? What strategic or tactical advantage are they gaining by attacking Kursk? What strategic or tactical advantage did they get by doing terrorist attacks on the Crimea bridge? What strategic or tactical advantage did they gain by feeding conscripts into bakhmut for 9 months?|
These are not strategic or tactically aware people. ukraine has vibes based military leaders that depend on "strength of will" and other ideological nonsense. They truly believe they just have to want it hard enough.
Well, as 72T mentioned below, the Russian state has said that the Ukrainians are planning dirty bomb attacks a number of times before, none of which has borne out, thankfully. Other times Russia has been concerned about dirty bombs used on civilian targets, which is ugly but makes a certain kind of sense both as a tactic for Ukraine as well as for the Russians to fearmonger about. In contrast, this potential decision is more incoherent. You raised a number of questions, all of which have tactical and strategic drivers that made a certain amount of sense for the ukrainian state at the time, however poorly they look in hindsight.
You're right that this is not really an answerable question, but nevertheless I don't think we do our analysis any favours by just credulously accepting statements by the Russian state without thinking it through. This particular plan by ukraine as depicted in this statement makes no sense, hence I'm more inclined to think it's propaganda or based on very low confidence intel.
this is, what, round 3 or 4 of the dirty bomb accusations? not that I believe they're fake necessarily; just because the general public didn't immediately know that the world almost ended numerous times during the Cold War doesn't mean that those incidents didn't happen.
assuming they're true, it's bizarre that Ukraine keeps entertaining the idea. but I'm getting less worried about it over time because NATO's forced disarmament courtesy of Russia is proceeding apace so that direct NATO involvement with conventional warfare is getting more difficult to conceive of, and the US isn't interested in ending human civilization because of a conflict making them a ton of money without visible Western casualties in Eastern Europe. maybe it would have been an effective tactic in 2022, but in late 2024 it's already iffy and in a couple more years of war and destruction of NATO stockpiles, it'll be laughable