Not Hiroshima, But Not Munich

TUCSON — Watching the rape of Ukraine — and listening to so many people in America shrug that off as less important than the price of gas — I hear John Prine’s reedy voice singing in my head: “Some humans ain’t human…”

From Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir the Barrel Bomber, Mother Russia has mourned a lot of her children. And it is only one patch on a world map bloodstained over millennia by senseless wars. When elephants fight, an African proverb says, the grass gets trampled.

Now we are at the limit. Lost amid war news, the latest U.N. climate report warns that without drastic global action over the next seven years, Homo sapiens are headed toward massive die-offs. That is moot if war in Europe escalates to nuclear showdown.

After four years of ignoble lunacy, America now has leaders to help get the world back on track. But it is dangerously short of followers. If the United States can’t live up to basic standards of democracy and decency, inhuman humans set the tone.

Putin’s onslaught is unambiguous naked aggression. A brave nation of 40 million can be overrun only at horrendous cost and “occupied” only by harsh repression. But all major conflicts result from hubris: misjudged “power” that leads to failed diplomacy.

Prine’s lyrics, from 2005, make the point: “…you're feeling your freedom and the world's off your back, (then) some cowboy from Texas starts his own war in Iraq.”

When Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1989, coalition forces took it back. George Bush the elder stopped them short of Baghdad, knowing what would happen if he pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall with no plan in place to clean up the mess.

In 2003, Bush junior aimed his war on terror at Saddam, who had dismantled his arsenal of mass destruction and had no role in 9/11. Dick Cheney and neocon ideologues predicted a “cakewalk” would democratize the Mideast, with rich oilfields as the spoils of holy war.

That resulted in perhaps a million needless deaths and millions more refugees. Brutality and outlawed torture by U.S. forces impelled minority Sunnis to create an Islamic State. Now ISIS and other terrorist groups, still growing, infest much of Africa and South Asia.

Today, Cheney’s conservative daughter is an unlikely Joan of Arc, defending America from corrupted Republicans who control what is no longer a grand old party — not neocons, just cons.

My guess is that Americans are more human than not. By November, when the stakes are clearer, even many now enraptured by a treacherous, narcissistic draft dodger will cleanse Congress of Trumplicans who snuffle at his feet for their own selfish purposes.

But that may be wishful thinking.

Far from the Russian borders Putin is determined to expand by force, Ukraine reflections are just outside my door in Arizona. Take, for example, Wendy Rogers, a Christian fundamentalist state senator who reduces complexity to simple black and white.

The Arizona Senate just passed a token censure of Rogers, who said unspecified “traitors” — presumably Democrats of her choosing — should be publicly hanged. She called Volodymyr Zelensky “a globalist puppet” of George Soros and bankers “who are shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face.”

Gov. Doug Ducey called her Ukraine remarks “wrong and dangerous,” but he still supports her. His political action committee spent $500,000 on her 2020 campaign.

After the censure, an unapologetic Rogers said she would destroy the career of any Republican who opposed her “simply because of the color of my skin or opinion about a war I don’t want to send our kids to die in."

We all know the Fox-stitutes — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the others who twist truth for pay. Sean Hannity seems to live in Trump’s golf bag. Worse may be hate mongers who reach many millions more by round-the-clock radio, on the internet and at large gatherings.

Rogers’ public-hanging remarks were at a Feb. 25 rally in Florida of the America First Political Action Conference run by Nick Fuentes, a heil-Hitler Nazi with a weird toothy grin. “Our secret sauce here,” he said, “it’s these young white men.” The crowd roared. Then he added, “Can we give a round of applause for Russia?” That sparked a drumbeat chant: “Putin, Putin.”

Fuentes was flanked by two House members. One was Paul Gosar from here in Arizona, a leader of the Jan. 6 insurgency who is so poisonous that his own family urges voters to shun him. I was more interested in the other one, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

She declared afterward: “I do not know Nick Fuentes. I’ve never heard him speak. I’ve never seen a video. I don’t know what his views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial.” Really? Just roll the tape. 

Greene snuggled up to Fuentes, beaming at the self-proclaimed Übermensch. She is the one who compared the Capitol police who thwarted Trump’s coup attempt to Hitler’s “Gazpacho.” She said Nancy Pelosi used them to spy on Republicans.  

That might be comic relief, but it’s not. World War II killed perhaps 80 million people, including 6 million exterminated Jews, and left survivors in misery among the ruins of glorious cities lost to future generations.

History matters. Hitler took an early bite of neighboring Czechoslovakia, then told Neville Chamberlain in Munich it was his last. The prime minister, back in London, triumphantly declared “peace in our time." It took two atomic bombs to end the war seven years later.

Americans refused to weigh in until Pearl Harbor. But after 1945, U.S. administrations helped rebuild shattered nations, set up a United Nations and forged military alliances that averted war (except for Korea, still unresolved, and conflicts America started on its own).

Trump nearly destroyed NATO. He brought troops home from Europe and toadied to Putin while insulting allies. He fired top military aides, then plotted a wag-the-dog war with Iran. Angela Merkel, born in Soviet-bloc East Germany, stepped up as interim free-world leader.

Joe Biden restored the alliance. He spurred Germany to double its military budget and, after its post-war pacifism, to export heavy weapons to Ukraine, the besieged country that Trump tried to extort by withholding arms unless its new president helped him slur Biden.

In a masterful State of the Union address, Biden explained the hard truths of high-wire diplomacy without a net. His generals know from hard experience the risks behind simple-sounding strategies, such as “no-fly zones,” which amount to a declaration of war.

Putin cannot be allowed to occupy Ukraine. Yet he has 2,000 active nuclear warheads, each with far more destructive power than those blasts that killed at least 200,000 Japanese under mushroom-shaped clouds or from long-lingering radiation.

Sanctions take time to inflict pain. Putin has muzzled all dissent. Anyone guilty of what he considers “fake news” — reporters for global news organizations or individuals on social media — faces 15 years in prison. Protesters can be conscripted and sent to Ukraine.

But three times more Americans watched the Super Bowl, an annual gladiator classic with no world impact, than heard Biden’s hourlong speech. Even many Democrats complained bitterly that he short-changed their own narrow domestic priorities.

Idiotic online posts and letters to editors blame Biden for Covid-19 despite all he did to reverse the mass death of Trump’s depraved indifference and Republicans’ refusal to protect others. They fault him for the resulting inflation, corporate gouging and supply disruptions. In fact, his first year produced some of the best economic numbers in generations.

Widespread criticism of his Afghanistan “debacle” pushes me to despair. Skewed reality about distant conflicts, repeated widely in news media, favors politicians who offer glib simplicities that lead to more needless war. Trump is a perfect example.

A Facebook “friend” replied to a post of mine, attributing to Biden everything Trump saddled him with at the close of a war he opposed from the outset, tried to stop in 2008 and promised voters he would end.  “Such ‘seasoned statecraft,’” he wrote, “has me searching diligently for a ‘horselaugh’ emoji.”

I’ve covered conflict before, during and since the Vietnam War. When an attacking force suddenly surrounds a capital and a leader flees, panic is inevitable. The test is what comes next.

I started to explain why military experts call the airlift a spectacular success under the circumstances but cut it short: “Oh, fuck it,” I wrote, “Life is too short. Democracies get the leaders they deserve. If so many people can carp at a guy who is actually doing a damned good job with the worst load any president has taken on since WWII, ours is no longer worth saving.”

Yet even in the face of Putin’s onslaught, the crazies in Congress, sworn to protect all Americans from foreign and domestic threat, play clown-car politics.

(My sidekick editor covered conflicts for decades before working in senior U.N. positions. After a final read, she just messaged: “When will I hear your fist slamming on the desk?” She’s right. Now.) 

What is WRONG with us? Adam McKay’s film, “Don’t Look Up,” was long and a bit subtle for Hollywood. But so much tepid, cynical response, niggling at details, scares the crap out of me. For its message, it is probably the most important movie ever made. We are hurtling toward climatic endgame. And now two nuclear powers face High Noon. We need to look up.

As Biden spoke solemnly about sacrifices volunteer troops make, including his own decorated son, Beau, Rep. Lauren Boebert from Colorado and Greene from Georgia screeched like magpies to interrupt him. When he mentioned coffins of servicemen killed by a terrorist bomber, Boebert yelled: “You put them there. Thirteen of them!”

Yet other Republicans defend them. In a deadlocked Senate, a coal baron from West Virginia, one tiny state, votes against his own party to block a voting rights bill. At Biden’s address, he sat with Republicans. Arizona’s Democratic senator, funded heavily with Republican money, also helps undermine American democracy.

We are all now playing for keeps. It is hard to imagine Putin can survive if what John McCain called “a gas station with nukes” is reduced to an impoverished pariah, with pissed-off ex-oligarchs and suffering millions. But he controls the message: Russia is a victim.

Putin is a stone-cold butcher with a pit viper’s focus. The Chechnyan capital, Grozny, leveled to rubble, showed what he is capable of doing to workaday families just living their lives. In Russia, casts of characters and plots change, but long-term turmoil is a recurring theme.

John Reed titled his book on Russia’s revolution: “Ten Days That Shook the World.” Putin’s rape of Ukraine has already surpassed that, with much of his armor bogged down, harassed by nationalist defenders. His impossible dream of historic glory likely won’t end any time soon.

Putin commands the biggest chunk of geography on Earth, one eighth of its habitable land mass, across two continents and 11 time zones, with borders on 16 sovereign states. His hidden wealth likely makes him richer than Elon Musk. He has more nukes than the United States.

But Russia’s population is 145 million, less than half of America’s, and its economy, which now ranks close to Texas, is already hurting badly. His obsessive concern for his health suggests that for all his bluster, he is not likely to risk nuclear chicken with the United States.

Russia is what Barack Obama should probably not have called it: a regional power. That infuriated Putin, pushing him to restore lost grandeur.   

The real global threat is not a bear but rather a dragon. Dealing with Xi Jinping is no job for amateurs. American voters need more guidance than what now emerges from the “media” cacophony.  Some is excellent; some is ridiculous.

On MSNBC, for instance, Andrea Mitchell has watched the world since forever. Richard Engel reports at close hand with empathy. But one anchor just remarked that China, which hovers over Taiwan and skirmishes with India, is opposed to invading neighbors. Ask Tibetans about that.

Until 2017, China and the United States coexisted peaceably. They share common interests despite opposing philosophies. Each badly needs the other, and neither wants economic disruption.

Trump alternated between effusive praise and crude bullying, depending on goals of the moment. He lauded Xi’s effective, “transparent” actions to curb Covid-19 until he let the virus run wild in America and needed a scapegoat. By 2021, China was plainly hostile, expanding military bases abroad and extending its reach from the ocean floor to the dark side of the moon. 

Biden understands XI after dozens of private meetings and crisscrossing China’s airspace with him. China wants to project a better image than what it is: a race-based tyranny that uses genocidal ethnic cleansing, strict censorship and harsh repression to blot out dissent. It can be swayed by hard-edged criticism but only in private. Public shaming provokes backlash.

Xi and Putin made a grand show of friendship and new cooperation at the Olympics. But Xi, plainly in charge, is not motivated to follow his junior partner into quixotic folly.

Common wisdom says the Chinese characters for crisis and opportunity are the same. Although linguistic scholars disagree, they are close. An unstable oil market could push China toward greater commitment to mitigating climate collapse with alternative energy.

The rub is in America. Oil and coal producers motivated by profit, not principles, bankroll a distressing number of politicians. And for a lot of self-focused Americans, someone else’s war in a place they can’t find on a map is far down their list of priorities.

In the end, it all comes down to John Prine’s lyrics, which raise the fundamental question to be answered in November: In today’s dis-United States, how many humans ain’t human?