Daily News Gems is my personal blog in which I comment, every now and again, on topics of particular interest to me, namely, newspaper history, baseball, American politics, and a selection of other burning issues of the day. -- Bill Lucey
President Joe Biden speaking on the situation in Afghanistan and on the response to Tropical Storm Henri on August 22, 2021.
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
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History wasn’t going to repeat itself on Joe Biden’s watch.
At least not if he had anything to do with it.
The 46th U.S. President and fourth guardian of the war in Afghanistan was determined not to meet the same fate as Lyndon Johnson, when the tall, big-eared Texan left office in 1968.
Johnson biographer and historian Robert Caro reports that there were 23,000 Americans in Vietnam when LBJ took office. By the end of 1965, that number leaped to 184,000; by the end of his presidency, there were 586,000 American troops in Southeast Asia. 58,000 Americans were killed, 288,000 seriously wounded.
Was it worth it? Hardly! North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam (who the U.S. supported), surrendering in April, 1975.
By the time Joe Biden was sworn in as president, he was faced with the same difficulty bedeviling George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. All of these presidents wrestled whether to send in more troops, more money, more weapons in dealing with the Afghan civil war or end American’s participation in a tribal conflict and withdraw.
Biden had the courage to step forward and rip off the band aid and withdraw the troops. He chose such an action knowing full well the land mines he was about to confront.
“There never was a good time to withdraw U.S. forces” Biden said in his August 16th address to the nation.
Biden could have kicked the can down the road, like three of his predecessors have, and left it to his successor to deal with the mess when he was out of office.
Instead, he did something novel-he took ownership of the war in Afghanistan.
“I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” Biden said.
I’m sure the decision wasn’t an easy one, knowing leaving meant possibly the reemergence of the scourge of the Taliban, and more alarming still--the reemergence of the terrorist group, al Qaeda.
But to hear newspaper reports, opinion columnists, and nauseating television talking heads, you would think it was Biden’s war to begin with.
Why wasn’t the media asking what has been accomplished in the 20 years before Joe Biden assumed office?
The answer is fairly simple. The Taliban, after 20 years, is still alive and well in Afghanistan. They never really left, they were scattered in the crevices of the countryside, the villages, and small towns, particularly in the south of the country, their stronghold, while the U.S. military held the larger populated urban areas.
What does the U.S. have to show for it after 20 years? Glad you asked! 2,461 U.S. service members have been killed, 20,000 injured, another 3,846 U.S. contractors killed.
The final U.S. tab? Between the Afghanistan and Iraq--$2 trillion.
I wish the same journalists condemning Biden would discuss what are mission in Afghanistan has been?
After getting rid of terrorists who attacked on 9/11 and preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists, it was to make the Afghans self-reliant by providing them with billions of economic assistance, the best military training in the world, along with state-of-the-art weapons.
Between 2002 and 2017, in fact, the United States reportedly gave the Afghan military an estimated $28 billion in artillery, including guns, rockets, night-vision goggles and even small drones for intelligence gathering.
An Afghan National Army soldier stands in afternoon formation awaiting instructions at a checkpoint in western Afghanistan, Dec. 31, 2019.
Photo By Jeffery J. Harris/U.S. Army
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What else is to be done in a country divided with factionalism and tribal warfare? U.S. forces, after all, helped equip the Taliban with a convenient anti-colonialist rallying cry for others to join their crusade in rooting out foreign occupation.
Clearly, we overstayed our welcome!
It’s obvious now that the Afghans were never interested in autonomy or taking the baton from the U.S. to lead their country as they saw fit, far removed from Taliban influence.
Once President Biden announced he would abide by the deal President Trump struck with the Taliban to withdraw all troops, Afghan troops folded like a deck of cards.
Knowing the U.S. were heading to the exit doors, heaps of Afghan troops, instead of hunkering down and taking responsibility for their country, accepted cold hard cash from the Taliban and handed over their weapons, practically without as much as a whimper. Knowing the Taliban would eventually control the major cities, others surrendered without a fight in exchange for not being subject to harsh retribution once the Taliban reigned supreme.
Large pockets of Afghans additionally didn’t feel President Ashraf Ghani (before he fled the country) came to power legitimately; his presidency was tainted with fraud and corruption. And he didn’t accomplish what he set out to do, which was to unite the country. Before Biden was elected, Ghani, according to many observers, was prone to cruelty and spite. When the U.S. asked him to form a negotiating team in 2018, it took him two years. A senior Afghan leader told journalist Dexter Filkins (from the New Yorker) that Ghani was surrounding himself with people who were determined to “destroy the peace process.”
When Ghani was reelected in 2019, less than two million Afghans voted for him. Many Afghans didn’t feel waging war for such an ineffective leader was worth fighting for.
The U.S., in other words, flushed $83 billion down the toilet (in weapons, equipment, training) over the last 20 years with little to show for it.
Reuters reports that the Taliban control more than “2,000 armored vehicles, U.S. Humvees, and up to 40 aircraft potentially including UH-60 Black Hawks, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones.”
Biden, correctly, said from the East Room of the White House that it’s up to Afghans to make the decision about the future of their country. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Biden stated on August 16. “We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. “
What Joe Biden realizes now is what the Soviet Union came to realize when they finally withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 1989. After 10 years of occupation, 13,000 of their soldiers had been killed, 40,000 more wounded and the public outcry for remaining in such a quagmire in a foreign land, propelled the Soviet Union to exit the country and direct more money toward fixing a deplorable health care system back home, work on arms reduction, and other freedom of speech initiatives that needed serious attention.
Similarly, Joe Biden realizes with an ambitious $1 trillion Infrastructure Bill passed by the Senate last month, the $2 trillion spent on Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent much more wisely on American soil, including policies to address climate change, funding to expand high-speed internet access; much needed repairs to roads, bridges, and airports; modernization of the nation’s power grid, repairing and replacing aging public works projects and more mechanisms directed at pollution control.
Biden also acknowledges the paradigm of U.S. foreign policy is changing, which means we have to change with it, which includes tracking and directing more of our resources toward al Shabaab (a jihadi militant organization in Somalia), al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nursa (another jihadist organization fighting against Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War), along with monitoring ISIS attempts to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. All of these new global fears were articulated by Joe Biden in his remarks to the nation on August 16th.
As Abraham Lincoln said in 1862: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”
It’s almost hysterical that while Joe Biden is receiving the brunt of the blame for pulling out of Afghanistan, his boss for eight years, Barack Obama, receives hardly a mention for his deception.
On December 14, 2014, President Obama said, “thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”
Only it wasn’t the end.
Instead of reducing our troops to 5,500 as he told the American public, he ordered more U.S. boots to stay in Afghanistan in July, 2016. So that by the time Obama left the White House (January, 2017), 8,400 troops remained in Afghanistan.
Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on national security issues wrote that the “Obama administration’s assertion that the fighting had ended was “among the most egregious deceptions and lies that U.S. leaders spread during two decades of warfare.” “The war,” Whitlock explained, “was nowhere near done, and Obama wasn’t willing to actually end it, lest he face exactly what Biden is facing right now.”
Instead of attacking him and slinging arrows in his direction, many should be thanking President Biden for finally ending our presence in Afghanistan, saving American lives, and doing what Barack Obama promised but blatantly lied about.
A man walks through the destroyed historic city center of Mariupol, Ukraine
Photo Credit: Maximilian Clarke/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Since the Ukraine conflict continues to grow more ominous by the hour, I compiled some historical facts about the Eastern European country.
Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was founded about 1,500 years ago by proto-Ukrainian Slavic tribes.
Historically, in December 1922, Ukraine together with Russia and Belarus, and Trans-Caucasian Federation were the founding members of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine is home to more than 100 different national or ethnic groups.
Ukraine's population is overwhelmingly Christian; the vast majority - up to two thirds - identify themselves as Orthodox.
Since the 17th century, Ukraine was divided among three Empires - by Austrians in the West, by Turks in the South, and by Russians in the East.
The Ukrainian national anthem is called ‘Shche ne vmerla Ukraina’ which translates in English to ‘Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished’
Ukraine’s name derives from the Old East Slavic word "ukraina" meaning "borderland or march (militarized border region)" and began to be used extensively in the 19th century; originally Ukrainians referred to themselves as Rusyny (Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Ruthenes), an endonym derived from the medieval Rus state (Kyivan Rus)
At the end of the World War I, Ukraine was divided into two: Western Ukraine became part of Poland and Eastern Ukraine, the larger part was absorbed by into the Soviet Union and renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both governments imposed their own language and government.
The Second World War claimed the lives of 5.5 million Ukrainians, including at least one million Ukrainian Jews.
Most Ukrainians live in cities (67.2 %). The largest metropolitan area in Ukraine is Kiev (3.2 million), Kharkiv (1.7 million), Donetsk (1.7 million), Dnipropetrovsk (1.5 million), and Odessa (1.1 million). The largest ethnic group are ethnic Ukrainians (78%) and ethnic Russians (17 %).
The state language is Ukrainian, an east Slavic language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, composed of a mixture of Latin, Greek, and Slavic letters.
The famous Carol of the Bells Christmas carol is based on a Ukrainian folk tune.
In the 8th-10th centuries, parts of what is now Ukraine were ruled by the Khazars, a Turkic tribe which converted to Judaism.
The territory of Ukraine became the site of almost constant warfare between Poles, Muscovites, Ottomans, Tatars, and Ukrainian Cossacks in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark, “the subsequent incorporation of most Ukrainian territories into the Muscovite State and its successor, the Russian Empire, cut off Ukraine from its roots in Europe and had ruinous consequences for Ukrainian religion, language, and culture, which were progressively Russified or banned.”
During the 16th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were captured annually and shipped to and sold in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, as slaves.
Ukraine experienced a major cultural, political, and economic revival in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the charismatic Ivan Mazepa served as leader of an autonomous Cossack polity known as the Hetmanate—until his defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was born a serf in 1814 in a small village south of Kyiv.
Ukraine was the birthplace of many prominent Jews—among many others the writers Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Bruno Schulz, Sholom Aleichem, Vasily Grossman, Isaac Babel, and Shmuel Agnon. Zionist leader Vladimir Zhabotinsky and former Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir were also born in Ukraine, as was the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer.
Twentieth-century Ukraine was the site of two genocides—the Holodomor of 1932-1933, during which millions of Ukrainians were mercilessly killed in an artificial famine engineered by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen, and the Holocaust, which took the lives of millions of Jews. Ukraine suffered 15 million “excess” deaths between 1914 and 1948, due to wars, genocides, and Stalin’s repressive policies.
Ukrainians formed the majority of Soviet political prisoners; they staged revolts in the concentration camps of the Soviet Gulag; they fought bravely against Stalin and Hitler; they resisted Muscovite and Russian imperialism for centuries.
The Ukrainian diaspora in the United States consists of about 1.25 million people, who, while concentrated in the formerly industrial Northeast and Midwest, are found in all 50 states.
Prominent Americans of Ukrainian descent include astronaut Heide Marie Stefanyshyn-Piper, actors Jack Palance, Natalie Wood, Vera Farmiga, and Liev Schreiber, policymaker Paula Dobriansky, Metropolitan Opera singer Paul Plishka, football great Bronko Nagurski, economist Greg Mankiw, inventor Igor Sikorsky, journalist Mike Royko, and writer Chuck Palahniuk.
The first literary tradition of the Ukrainian language was created by Ivan Kotliarevskyi at the end of 18th century and developed at the beginning of the 19th century by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevechnko. According to Sergei Zhuk, Professor of History at Ball State University, since a publication of Shevchnko's collection of poetry Kobzar in 1940, Ukraine witnessed a rise of nationalist movement which eventually untied Western part (Austrian) and Eastern (Russian) part of Ukrainians in one large patriotic movement, resulting in an independent state in 1991.
A peaceful mass protest, the "Orange Revolution" in 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new internationally monitored vote that swept into power a reformist slate under Viktor YUSHCHENKO.
Ukraine celebrated its 30th anniversary of independence in 2021.
Source: Congressional Research Service (CRS); Sergei Zhuk, professor of History at Ball State University; Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark; Monica White, Associate Professor of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham; Robert W. Orttung Research Director, Sustainable George Washington University Research Professor of International Affairs (IERES); “A History of Ukraine: It’s Land and Peoples” by Paul R. Magocsi
While President Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin lock horns over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, historians remind us that it wasn’t all that long ago when two other East vs. West leaders flexed their muscles and came eye-ball-to-eyeball, each waiting for the other to flinch.
61 years ago, the U.S. and Soviet Union, were on the brink of a nuclear exchange over missiles in the island of Cuba. Only after some shrewd diplomacy between both leaders, a mutual level of trust, and some skilled news management (mostly by the White House), was catastrophe avoided and a diplomatic resolution reached without war breaking out.
British historian Max Hastings' well researched and superbly written new book, "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962" recounts the high drama and nervous tension that took place between the White House and Kremlin.
The Cuban Missile Crisis might have been 61 years ago, but the skill with which Hastings revisits those 13 jittery days in October, 1962, you'd think you were watching a blockbuster Netflix drama.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk called it the "most dangerous crisis the world has ever seen." White House Counsel, Ted Sorensen, referred to it as the "Gettysburg of the Cold War"; while Kennedy Special Assistant and "Court Historian", Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it as the "finest hour'' of the Kennedy presidency.
The drama began on October 16, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was shocked beyond belief when he was presented with indisputable evidence that the Soviets had placed medium-range (1,100 miles) and intermediate missiles (2,200) in Cuba, a mere 100 miles off the coast of the United States.
Not only was Kennedy stunned, but he felt deceived and lied to. It was only in September of that year, after all, when Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney-General, met with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador, who conveyed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s personal guarantee that no surface-surface-missiles had been placed in Cuba.
Khrushchev was hoping to sneak the missiles into Cuba without the U.S. noticing; so that on November 7, on the 45th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he would announce to the world what he had done in a bold attempt to close the missile gap or “level the playing field.”
Fortunately for the U.S., the missiles were discovered early enough before they became operational. Still, Kennedy knew he had to act decisively and quickly before they became operational.
President John F. Kennedy meets with members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) regarding the crisis in Cuba.
Photo Credit: JFK Library and Presidential Museum, Boston
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Before deciding how to respond, Kennedy formed an Executive Committee (which became known as EXCOMM), comprised of members of the National Security Council.
The committee was made of some heavy hitters, including: Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense), Dean Rusk (Secretary of State), Maxwell D. Taylor (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Paul Nitze (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs) and Robert Kennedy (Attorney-General), among others.
The Cuban Missile Crisis has been held up by many historians, including Max Hastings, as classic case study of crisis management and what to do and not to do when international crisis strikes, which makes it still relevant today.
When EXCOMM first assembled, most members, took a hawkish stance, strongly advising the president that military action was needed, probably air strikes (to take out the missiles) followed by a land invasion.
From the very start, the room became uncomfortably heated. Most thought a strong offensive was the only way to send Khrushchev a message that the United States couldn’t be pushed around. Many additionally articulated the belief that if Kennedy didn’t respond aggressively to this blatant act of deception, who knows what kind of duplicity the Soviets might take in the future.
In addition to responding to the Soviets, John Kennedy, only 44 years old, needed to send his own country a message that he had the mettle for the job and couldn’t be bullied by Khrushchev despite his youth and inexperience in foreign policy.
Kennedy, after all, was coming off of the disastrous and embarrassing Bay of Pigs fiasco (April, 1961) when the U.S. military invasion in Cuba failed to overthrow Fidel Castro, the belligerent communist leader. Then, just six weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna (June, 1961), which was equally disastrous for the youthful U.S. President. He ended up engaging the Soviet leader in communist ideology and simply was unprepared (and over his head) for such a weighty discussion with the well-seasoned 61-year-old Soviet leader, who, many observed, walked all over him. Kennedy later, privately, told New York Times Washington Bureau Chief, James “Scotty” Reston, that the summit was the “worst thing in my life…he [Khrushchev] savaged me.”
So, when the Cuban Missile Crisis presented itself, you would think that Kennedy would feel the overwhelming need to take aggressive action in Cuba. The 1962 mid-term elections were looming, and many Democrats were already questioning Kennedy’s chances of re-election in the 1964 presidential election.
If Kennedy botched Cuba, he knew he was destined to be a one-term president.
Surprisingly, whatever course of action Kennedy finally decided on, politics and the upcoming elections took a back seat in his decision making.
The EXCOMM’s meetings resulted in multiple options being discussed, revised, debated, debated some more, before deciding on a course of action.
As the president’s advisors pushed for military action, it was Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, who first proposed something new, a naval blockade, as an aggressive action without having to fire a shot. When McNamara first proposed the idea, it did grab the attention of other EXCOMM members, but of all the options discussed, the naval blockade or quarantine appeared to be the weakest option.
History will look fondly on Kennedy for having the courage to weigh all the options carefully before endorsing the idea of a naval blockade, which called for the U.S. military forming a “ring of ships around Cuba” (that is, a quarantine) to prevent any Soviet ships from transporting additional cargo into Cuba.
Some of the best minds, the “best and brightest,” cheered military action, but it was Kennedy who ultimately made the decision to embrace the quarantine, giving Khrushchev time to rethink keeping missiles in Cuba before war broke out.
Kennedy would later say, “if we had to act in the first 24 hours, I don’t think probably we would have chosen as prudently as we finally did.”
The other remarkable feature of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the way Kennedy was able to manage the news, and keep his plans for a quarantine under a cloak of secrecy.
President John F. Kennedy delivers a radio and television address to the nation (October 22, 1962) regarding the Soviet Union’s military presence in Cuba. Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C.
Photo Credit: JFK Library and Presidential Museum, Boston
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Before taking his case to the American people in a nationally televised address on October 22, the White House was hearing whispers that the Washington Post and New York Times, in particular, were piecing things together and were planning to report on the U.S. response to Cuba.
Kennedy personally telephoned New York Times’ publisher Orville Dryfoos and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham to request they refrain from publishing any details of his ultimatum to Khrushchev. The Post agreed immediately, the New York Times, especially James “Scotty” Reston, reportedly had to think about it before deciding to hold his fire.
Philip Brenner, Professor of International Relations at American University, told me that even Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger wasn’t aware of the EXCOMM meetings (until the night of Kennedy’s televised address on October 22), because “Kennedy thought it would be easier for him to lie to the press if Salinger did not know the truth.”
Readers of Hastings book couldn’t help but wonder if the debates of the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened during Joe Biden’s administration, would the West Wing have been as successful in preventing details from leaking out?
James G. Hershberg. Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, doubts that it would. “There are far more extremists around in Congress, the media, social media, and blogosphere,” Hershberg explained, “who couldn't care less about being responsible, and would happily ignore or violate official pleas just to up their audience and promote their case.”
And Renata Keller, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, who focuses on the Cold War and international history, echoes Hershberg’s sentiments. “The close relationship that previous U.S. presidents (but especially Kennedy) had with the press has declined considerably over time due to a number of factors, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the rise of the internet and social media. I think it's harder to keep anything secret these days.”
In addition to his deft management of the news cycle, Kennedy fostered a level of bipartisanship when planning his response to Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was important for Kennedy to inspire “unity on the home front.” He telephoned Dwight D. Eisenhower and urged that the Republicans not make the Cuban Missile Crisis partisan.
Today, the word “bipartisanship” is an ugly word and rarely invoked in the halls of Congress. But the political climate in Washington was much different 61 years ago.
Just hours before Kennedy’s October 22nd address to the nation, Charles A. Halleck (Republican leader in Congress) and other congressional leaders were flown to the White House from all around the country (Congress was in recess) where they were informed of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Both Halleck and GOP Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL), among other Republicans, were shocked of the missile revelations, but pledged their support to the president on his stated course of action.
Anyone following American politics today would have a hard time believing that Republicans in the 118th Congress today would rally around President Biden if he were faced with the same international crisis.
Six days after Kennedy’s national televised address to the nation in his call for a quarantine; and after many sleepless nights and anxious moments--he and Khrushchev struck a deal on October 28th. The Soviets agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the United States agreeing not to attack Cuba.
An additional sweetener to the deal was the U.S. pledge to withdraw its nuclear arsenal from Turkey. This part of the deal, however, was agreed to privately and didn’t become public knowledge for quite some time. Khrushchev always maintained the missiles in Turkey could have destroyed Moscow, Kiev, and other major Soviet cities. The U.S. countered they were never operational and didn’t pose any danger.
Walter Lippmann, an influential columnist at the time, was reportedly the first to propose that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey in a New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1962 column, three days after JFK’s television address.
In fact, many argue, the “turning point of the crisis” came when the U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey. Others contend Khrushchev already made up his mind to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba before Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin struck a deal that both countries would remove its missiles from Cuba and Turkey.
What’s most astonishing reading about such a tense time in American diplomacy, is that the Cold War was at its zenith; one wrong move, one miscommunication, one blunder by either side, could have ignited a deadly nuclear exchange.
A misstep that practically triggered a war was when a U.S. U-2 plane, flown by Rudolf Anderson Jr., entered Cuban air space. The jittery Soviets thought he was spying on secret locations of tactical nuclear weapons near America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and was prematurely shot down (and killed) on an order given by Soviet Lieutenant Stepan Grechko.
Both Khrushchev and Kennedy were quick to intervene and defuse the U-2 plane incident and avert a disastrous showdown between the two countries.
The final important lesson many come away with after reading Hastings, “The Abyss” is that both Kennedy and Khrushchev, despite being rivals, never made their confrontation personal. Unlike many of his EXCOMM advisors, Kennedy found a way to place himself in Khrushchev’s shoes. The U.S. President never wanted to embarrass or humiliate his Soviet foe. On the contrary, he wanted to give Khrushchev enough rope to extricate himself from the perilous situation without bringing his country down in a heap of flames.
Relations between Biden and Putin are so biting, bitter, and personal, you wonder whether they’re equipped with the finesse to solve their issues with reason and sound judgement (like Kennedy and Khrushchev demonstrated) and removing their personal feuds from the equation.
In lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy would later write: “Respect is central to international relations, even between adversaries.”
The big lesson learned by Robert McNamara was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a “political problem” not a tactical problem. Kennedy’s former defense secretary stressed, going forward, nuclear weapons should never be used to solve “political problems.”
As Max Hastings so eloquently wrote, both Kennedy and Khrushchev, held fast to a motto every national leader should embrace: “BE AFRAID!”
“Neither John F. Kennedy, nor Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev,” Hastings wrote, “was deficient in personal courage, but what distinguishes them from Fidel Castro and from some military commanders on both sides of the Iron Curtain is that the two men were prudently haunted by consequences.”
FOOTNOTE: To give you some idea how obsessed President John Kennedy was with controlling the news cycle, here is a heated phone conversation he had with State Department spokesman, Lincoln White, who apparently issued a press statement, suggesting further action by the U.S. would be forthcoming if a peaceful solution was not found, angering JFK, because such a threatening statement was never authorized by the White House.
WSJ:. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart made no major advances Sunday in a four-hour meeting aimed at breaking the standoff over Ukraine, ``raising the specter of a prolonged crisis that threatens to bring broader instability to Europe.’’ Kerry said he received no assurances from the Kremlin that it would pull back thousands of Russian troops from Ukraine's eastern border. http://goo.gl/6i2lgA
Oliver Bullough, Caucasus editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and author of ``The Last Man in Russia,'' writes in the BBC Magazine how Vladimir Putin recreated the country of his childhood.
``Putin restored some Soviet symbols. He brought back the Soviet national anthem and Soviet emblems, and praised the Soviet triumph in World War Two. But he embraced pre-Soviet themes too. He befriended the Russian Orthodox Church, and name-checked anti-Soviet philosophers like Ivan Ilyin, whose remains he had repatriated to Russia and buried with honour.''
``Putin has succeeded in building a version of the country of his childhood, one that can act independently in the world, and one where dissent is controlled and the Kremlin's power unchallenged. But that is a double-edged sword, because the Soviet Union collapsed for a reason, and a Russia recreated in its image risks sharing its fate.'' http://goo.gl/bWLVha
Origin of Ukraine?
``Ukraina is literally translated as ``on the edge'' or ``borderland'' and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders. Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.''
-Anna Reid, author of ``Borderland: A Journey Through History of Ukraine.''
NEW ENGLAND CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: Mya Barry was born in April 2011 with opiates already streaming through her tiny veins. But it was not the heroin from her drug-addicted mother that killed the infant. Rather, it was the heroin-tainted milk bottle her parents allegedly handed her five months later in their overcrowded and squalid apartment in this South Shore town. The infant’s parents, Ryan Barry and Ashley Cyr, are charged with manslaughter for the 2011 death. They pleaded not guilty last year, and the criminal case is pending in Plymouth Superior court.
``Some 1,300 babies in Massachusetts — about three to four each day — were born in 2012 with what is called “neonatal abstinence syndrome,” suffering withdrawal pains as a result of exposure to illegal opiates such as heroin or prescription drugs such as Oxycontin or methadone, according to a first of its kind survey of local hospitals.'' http://goo.gl/hxBQt1
ESPN: Play Ball! Opening Day: Statistical Overview for the 2014 MLB Season. The Mets’ 34-18 Opening-Day record is the best of any team. The Mariners have won seven straight Opening Day games.http://goo.gl/EMmCHj
AP:Wrigley Field Turns 100 This Year. 10 things to know about the park, affectionately known as the `` Friendly Confines''http://goo.gl/EUifn8
60 Minutes' Video:Is the U.S. Stock Market Rigged?Michael Lewis reveals how the stock market really works. http://goo.gl/mzUsjP
This and STAT
World Bank: Nearly 68% of households in India's countryside do not have access to toilets.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) March Report:In 2013, 75.9 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.8 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 1.5 million earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour; about 1.8 million had wages below the federal minimum. 3.3 million U.S. workers last year earned the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, or less. http://goo.gl/6fsfOq
2012 Economic Census Advance Report released by the U.S. Census Bureau:The health care and social assistance sector continued to have the most employees with more than 18 million in 2012, an increase of more than 10 percent or 1.8 million people from 2007. This is the highest numerical increase of employees in any sector published in the advance report. http://goo.gl/Gxt8tl
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:By age 27, 32 percent of women had received a bachelor's degree, compared with 24 percent of men. Nine percent of men were high school dropouts compared to 8 percent of women. 34 percent of young adults were married at age 27, 20 percent were living together and 47 percent were single. http://goo.gl/BkVPeb
CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialists Intl: More than 2.9 million workers had temporary jobs in 2013, up 28% from 2010. About 10% of all new jobs created since the recession ended have been temp or contract jobs. http://goo.gl/r7Q5KV
Piers Morgan signed off for good on Friday, but not before firing off his final salvo for stricter gun laws.
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`` ``Over the past year,'' writes Maria Lipman, chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Society and Regions Program, ``Putin’s approval rating has grown from 63 to 80 percent; 51 percent said they trusted him, up from 35 in March 2013. Such is the instant benefit of the takeover of Crimea.''
``The adjoining of Crimea is broadly seen as a triumph of “historical justice” that, in the minds of most Russians, appears to be superior to the justice of legal norms and procedures. What is also important is that this triumph came at no cost whatsoever to the Russian people...''
``The seizure of Crimea is Putin’s personal conquest, while the Russian people’s contribution has been reduced to their renewed pledge of allegiance to the national leader...For now Putin has succeeded in halting Russia’s social and economic modernization and has pushed Russia to an anti-modernization course.’’http://goo.gl/s603MV
The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a nationally representative survey among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Highlights: 54 % disapprove of the way President is handling his job as president; 65 % think George W. Bush was a good commander-in-chief of the military; 44 % think the war in Iraq was worth fighting for, while 53 % think Afghanistan was worth fighting for. http://goo.gl/lozzbD
NYT’s: Key swing states controlled by Republicans are making it harder to vote through the embrace of restrictive voting laws, which has triggered the fury of Democrats who are attempting to push back against these electoral restrictions. In all, the Times reports, since 2013, nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote, including restrictions on registering, and proof of citizenship. http://goo.gl/SSpZIZ
USA Today Interactive: 14 political races to watch in 2014. http://goo.gl/F4rfVY
Brookings Institution INFOGRAPH: What happens to the long-term unemployed? Only 11 percent of those who were long-term unemployed in a given month returned to steady, full-time employment a year later. http://goo.gl/Hs58jL
This and STAT
ESPN: What did former Alabama QB AJ McCarron give former Miss Alabama Katherine Webb when they got engaged Friday night? http://goo.gl/hjzUss
BankRate: More than a third of people in the U.S. haven’t been to the bank in at least a half of a year. http://goo.gl/fhRFsn
Washington Post INFOGRAPH: Post-Cold War Spending-Spending on the military, 1988-2012 http://goo.gl/bOK7C2
12.9% of the 11 million ESPN Tournament Challenge brackets correctly picked Florida and Wisconsin to reach the Final Four.
March Madness Tweets: U.S. States ranked by Tweets mentioning either #marchamadness or "March Madness", per million population. Map compiled by Twitter's own Simon Rogers. http://goo.gl/QPd3MV
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight: Odds of winning Warren Buffett's Billion Dollar March Madness Challenge are 1 in 7,419,071,319, not 1 in 6,001,225,228. Nate regrets the error. http://goo.gl/5k61vI
ESPN STAT : ``Phil Jackson has 229 career postseason wins & 13 Finals appearances. Knicks have 186 Ws & 8 Finals appearances in their entire history.''
Bloomberg INFOGRAPHIC: Some 83 aircraft have been declared “missing” since 1948, according to data compiled by the Aviation Safety Network. http://goo.gl/E3pKsx
Bruegel (European think tank specializing in economics): INTERACTIVE MAP: The cost of escalating sanctions on Russia over Ukraine and Crimea. http://goo.gl/F91QIb
Kaiser Family Foundation: A State-by-State Look at How the Uninsured Fare Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). http://goo.gl/oyyKzD
RobainandLaw: Minimum wage and average salaries across the U.S. http://goo.gl/gxAKPl
Radio Free Europe: Six Regrettable Lessons To Take Away From Crimea Crisis: By By Daisy Sindelar. http://goo.gl/ajNEmH
Pew Research: The Rise of Federal Immigration Crimes
Unlawful reentry convictions in federal courts are part of a broader stepped up enforcement effort from the U.S. Border Patrol begun in 2005.6 Prior to this change, immigrants apprehended at the border were largely allowed to voluntarily return to Mexico—without any penalty.
Between 1992 and 2012, the number of offenders sentenced in federal courts more than doubled, rising from 36,564 cases to 75,867. At the same time, the number of unlawful reentry convictions increased 28-fold, from 690 cases in 1992 to 19,463 in 2012. http://goo.gl/2LjKCu
Crowd in downtown Moscow supporting Crimea's reunification with Russia/Photo Credit: RIA Novosti
``The U.S. mainstream news media is reaching a new professional low point as it covers the Ukraine crisis’’, writes Investigative reporter Robert Parry at Consortiumnews.com
``As the Ukraine crisis continues to deepen, the mainstream U.S. news media is sinking to new lows of propaganda and incompetence. Somehow, a violent neo-Nazi-spearheaded putsch overthrowing a democratically elected president was refashioned into a “legitimate” regime, then the “interim” government and now simply “Ukraine.”
``Yet, the danger of false narratives – as the American people saw in Iraq and almost revisited in Syria – is that policies, including warfare, can be driven by myth, not by fact. The real story of Ukraine is far more complex than the black-and-white caricature that the New York Times, the Washington Post and others are presenting. It is in the truthful grays that responsible policies are shaped and bloody miscalculations are avoided.’’ http://goo.gl/Ksya36
RIA Novosti:Crimea Gets First Installment of Russian Financial Aid
MOSCOW, March 18 (RIA Novosti) – ``Crimea has already received the first installment of financial aid from Russia, the republic’s first deputy prime minister said on Tuesday.’’-and are expected to switch to the Russian national currency in early April. http://goo.gl/sPWT1u
Gordon Adams, professor of international relations at American University's School of International Service, writing in Foreign Policy.
``American policymakers don't get it; the politicians don't get it; Fox News certainly doesn't get it; the advocates for various flavors and colors of democracy don't get it...It's not about democracy. It's not about annexation.
``Moscow isn't trying to start a new Cold War, either. They're making sure the states right around them are friendly, whatever their form of government. So it serves little purpose talking about the Sudetenland or standing up to Hitler. Putin is a bully, but he is not an insane, genocidal dictator engaged in an ideological search for "lebensraum." http://goo.gl/6Ou8ql
``The Crimea Precedent’’ By Max Boot in Commentary Magazine: `
`As of this writing the Russian stock market is up more than 4 percent today after a 3.7 percent bump up yesterday. At this rate the annexation of Crimea is going to spark a major rally for Russian stocks.''
``It is imperative that President Obama not stop with the extremely mild sanctions announced Monday. He needs to go after the assets of major Kremlin powerbrokers and their oligarch allies–and he needs to send a shot across Putin’s bow by barring at least one Russian bank from conducting cross-border transactions, as suggested by Mark Dubowitz.'' http://goo.gl/9xSaIF
Crisis in the Crimea: The Showdown Between Ukraine and Russia: An interactive map by Smithsonian.com shows the current hotspots and points of interest in the political crisis. http://goo.gl/dCxMtc
L.A. Times: Costs to Russia for Crimea seizure far beyond pinprick sanctions
``But Russian President Vladimir Putin's strategy in what might be the most destabilizing development in post-Cold War Europe appears to have little to do with economic logic, Kremlin analysts say, and everything to do with his single-minded campaign to project the image of Russia as a resurgent superpower.
In spite of the costs, recovering Crimea is "something very dear to Russian conservatives, who believe it is more important than leading a comfortable life that we build a strong state," said Sergei Utkin, department head at the Center for Situation Analysis at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Kremlin is "trying to show that Russia is back again on the world stage as a superpower," Utkin said in a phone interview from Moscow, a strategy he said he strongly disagreed with.’’ http://goo.gl/uOy3sv
Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan asks who's really the irrational one and lost touch with reality?
``Consider the world Putin saw, from his vantage point, when he took power after the Boris Yeltsin decade.
He saw a Mother Russia that had been looted by oligarchs abetted by Western crony capitalists, including Americans. He saw millions of ethnic Russians left behind, stranded, from the Baltic states to Kazakhstan.
He saw a United States that had deceived Russia with its pledge not to move NATO into Eastern Europe if the Red Army would move out, and then exploited Russia's withdrawal to bring NATO onto her front porch.
America and Russia are on a collision course today over a matter -- whose flag will fly over what parts of Ukraine -- no Cold War president, from Truman to Reagan, would have considered any of our business.’’http://goo.gl/jmy22z
Photo Credit: Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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The budget is not just about numbers, it’s about our values,” -President Barack Obama.
Obama’s budget “is the most irresponsible yet,” -House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.
Bloomberg News breaks down President Obama's $3.9 trillion budget request. http://goo.gl/mNqdDy
Highlights:
• Increased spending for employment, education and job-training programs to boost the economy.
• Includes $56 billion for “additional investments,” split evenly between defense and domestic priorities and including education, research and development.
• Enhance tax-credit programs for some families and childless workers and pump about $302 billion over four years into infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges.
• Projects the U.S. economy will most likely increase by 3.1 percent this year and 3.4 percent in 2015, while the unemployment rate may average 6.9 percent this year, falling to an average of 6.4 percent next year.
• The White House emphasized $598 billion in tax increases for the wealthy over 10 years, which includes adopting the so-called Buffett Rule, which would impose a “fair share tax” on upper-income families to collect a projected $53 billion over a decade.
• Proposes $7 billion for disaster relief and another $1 billion annually for wildfire suppression.
• Proposes $60 billion over 10 years to expand the earned income tax credit for childless workers and $66 billion to support preschool programs for all children.
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Who is Governing Ukraine?
Olexander Turchynov, Interim president.
Photo Credit: ITAR-TASS/Barcroft Media
Ukraine's new government is a mixed bag, consisting of 21 cabinet members; many are from Arseniy Yatsenyuk's Fatherland party. Some are drawn from the far-right nationalist Svoboda party; but there are also many new faces, including journalists and activists prominent in the "Euromaidan" protests in Kiev. The Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms party is not represented after it declined offers to participate in the new government.
The Guardian breaks down members of the new guard now running Ukraine. http://goo.gl/KREy4W
In his latest column, American conservative political commentator, author, and syndicated columnist, Patrick J. Buchanan, asks: ``What is the U.S. vital interest in Crimea? Zero. From Catherine the Great to Khrushchev, the peninsula belonged to Russia.''
Snippets from Buchanan's column:
``With Vladimir Putin's dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here.''
``Barack Obama should tune them out, and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow.''
``When Red Army tank divisions crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, killing 50,000, Eisenhower did not lift a finger. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech.''
``When Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, LBJ did nothing. When, Moscow ordered Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to smash Solidarity, Ronald Reagan refused to put Warsaw in default.''
``These presidents saw no vital U.S. interest imperiled in these Soviet actions, however brutal. They sensed that time was on our side in the Cold War. And history has proven them right.'' http://goo.gl/3mvgph
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If you’re aware of any outstanding works of journalism that you would like to see included at DailyNewsGems, send links to Bill Lucey at [email protected]
Graphic: How Russia Took Over the Ukraine:Published By Business Insider (Graphic from Agence-France Presse). http://goo.gl/fyJi2g
INFOGRAPHIC: Published By The Guardian, Russia and Ukraine: The Military Imbalancehttp://goo.gl/6pa8XS
BBC: Ukraine Crisis in Maps:1.) Strategic importance, 2.) Crisis Overview, 3.)Kiev's Central Role, 4.) EU and Russia, 5.)Key gas pipelines in Ukraine. http://goo.gl/rbRJ5y
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The Big Chill
Photo Credit: Published in The Guardian: Pro-Russian protesters in Simferopol, the Crimean capital Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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Dmitri Trenin,director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes in The Guardian: ``This is perhaps the most dangerous point in Europe's history since the end of the cold war. Direct confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian forces will draw in the United States, one way or another. ''
``Even if there is no war, the Crimea crisis is likely to alter fundamentally relations between Russia and the west and lead to changes in the global power balance, with Russia now in open competition with the United States and the European Union in the new eastern Europe. If this happens, a second round of the cold war may ensue as a punishment for leaving many issues unsolved – such as Ukraine's internal cohesion, the special position of Crimea, or the situation of Russian ethnics in the newly independent states; but, above all, leaving unresolved Russia's integration within the Euro-Atlantic community. Russia will no doubt pay a high price for its apparent decision to "defend its own" and "put things right", but others will have to pay their share, too.''http://goo.gl/Ij6s8v
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If you’re aware of any outstanding works of journalism that you would like to see included at DailyNewsGems, send links to Bill Lucey at [email protected]
Facts you need to know about Crimea published by www.russiatoday.com http://goo.gl/UxrcwL
Among the questions the article addresses:
• What is Crimea?
Now known as Autonomous Republic of Crimea, was for centuries colonized and conquered by historic empires and nomadic tribes. Soviet citizens got to know the region as an “all-Union health resort.’’
• Who lives there now?
Ethnic Russians – almost 1,200,000 or around 58.3 percent of the population.
• What's happening now?
``After the Ukrainian President was ousted and an interim government was established in Kiev, the Russian majority started protesting outside the regional parliament, urging local MPs not to support it. They want the Autonomous Region to return to the constitution of 1992, under which Crimea briefly had its own president and independent foreign policy.’’
• How was Crimea separated from Russia?
In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, (an ethnic Ukrainian himself), in an act which sparked a storm of controversy, transferred the Crimea peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR, extracting it from Russian territory.
• Ethnic controversy
At the dawn of the 20th century, Russians and the Crimean Tatars were the predominant ethnic groups in Crimea, followed by Ukrainian, Jewish and other minorities. Crimea was both a royal resort and a destination for many of the great Russian poets, writers and artists, some of whom lived or were born there.
• What happens next?
The goal of the ethnic Russian population protesting is to hold a referendum to decide whether the region should retain its current status as an autonomous region in Ukraine, become independent, or become part of Russia again. Ethnic Russians claim they still have the right to disobey orders or the ``illegal’’ central government.
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Agence-France Presse publishes INFOGRAPHIC:Map showing balance of forces and troop movements in Ukraine. http://goo.gl/NfTF8H
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If you’re aware of any outstanding works of journalism that you would like to see included at DailyNewsGems, send links to Bill Lucey at [email protected]
