The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Ukrainian government is lowering the draft age for Ukrainian men from 27 to 25. The measure is “part of an effort to bolster its depleted armed forces after two years of fighting Russia’s invasion and facing renewed assaults.” According to the Journal, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in action, but military analysts say the true total is likely far higher.”
The first thought that struck me was that the Ukrainian conscription age was so high. After all, here in the United States, the U.S. government conscripts 18-year-olds to fight in its wars. It’s worth noting though that at the start of the Ukraine-Russia war, the Ukrainian government prohibited men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, just in case the government might need to conscript them to fight in its war.
The second thought that struck me was the need to conscript people at all. Conscription is force. It forces people to fight when they don’t want to fight. Why are Ukrainian men being forced to fight in this war? Why aren’t they doing so voluntarily? That should tell us a lot about the nature of this war.
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The third thought that struck me was that the number of Ukrainian men who have been killed in this war has to far exceed 31,000, as military analysts indicate. If they’re having to lower the draft age to get more soldiers, the death toll has to be extraordinarily high. In fact, see this Wall Street Journal article describing how many front-line Ukrainian troops are now middle-aged, given the large number of younger Ukrainian soldiers who have died in the conflict.
The fourth thought that struck me was the most important: The U.S. national-security establishment — that is, the U.S. federal killing machine under which we Americans have been born and raised — is responsible for this massive death toll as well as the massive death toll among Russian soldiers, not to mention the enormous destruction of Ukraine itself.
Why are Ukrainian men being forced to fight in this war? Because they know that this is not a war for freedom. It never has been. This is a war to establish the Ukrainian government’s “right” to join NATO, an old Cold War dinosaur that should never have come into existence and, at the very least, should have gone out of existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, dying to protect the “right” the Ukrainian government to join NATO is different from dying to protect the freedom of the Ukrainian people.
In other words, contrary to popular opinion, Russia did not invade Ukraine to conquer the country and subjugate the citizenry. If that had been the case, it’s a virtual certainty that Ukrainian men would not have to be forced to fight. When people are faced with an invader who is trying to enslave them, most of the time they are willing to fight to prevent that from happening, even if it costs them their lives.
Consider Switzerland, a country that is entirely devoted to defense. In the event of an invasion of Switzerland, there is no doubt that at least 99 percent of the Swiss citizenry, who are armed to the teeth, would take up arms to oppose the invasion.
It’s when wars involve stupid political goals that conscription must be resorted to. People have to be forced to fight and die in order to achieve those stupid political goals. The “right” to join NATO is one of those stupid political goals. It has nothing to do with genuine freedom. It has everything to do with joining an old, corrupt, deadly, and destructive dinosauric Cold War bureaucratic entity. My hunch is that those Ukrainian men who have to be conscripted or who succeeded in fleeing the country know that.
And it’s not as if Ukrainian officials did not know what was going to happen if they insisted on joining NATO. For at least 20 years, Russia had made it clear that Ukraine joining NATO was a “red line.” That meant that Russia would invade Ukraine if Ukraine persisted in joining NATO.
Longtime readers of my blog know that I have long recommended a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and a former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Glennon’s thesis, to which I subscribe, is that it is the national-security branch of the government that is actually in charge of running the federal government, especially in foreign affairs.
Given such, it was the Pentagon and the CIA that used NATO to expand eastward by absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, which enabled the Pentagon and the CIA to install their troops, missiles, and other armaments ever closer to Russia’s border. The final trigger to war was NATO’s intention to absorb Ukraine, which the Pentagon and the CIA knew would cause Russia to invade, just as Russia’s installation of missiles in Cuba would cause the Pentagon and the CIA to invade that country.
It’s worth noting that the Pentagon and the CIA nullified the promises that U.S. officials had made to Russia at the end of the Cold War to not expand NATO even one inch eastward. What better proof of Glennon’s point than that?
What was the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s motive in inciting a war between Russia and Ukraine? The motive was: (1) to “degrade” Russia, which was the same motive that U.S. officials had when they manipulated Russia into invading Afghanistan in 1979 — that is, to give Russia its “own Vietnam” by causing tens of thousands of Russians soldiers to be killed or injured; (2) to create another one of their many crises to justify their existence and their ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess; and (3) to discourage Americans from engaging in deep soul-searching over the 20-year U.S. disaster in Afghanistan.
As I have long maintained, the biggest mistake America has ever made was converting our federal government to a national-security state. That’s why we have all been born and raised under one of the biggest killing machines in history. Just ask Ukrainians, Russians, and so many other victims of this killing machine all over the world.
