A Ukraine Miscellany XIII: War and the Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure

In light of battlefield defeats, the Putin regime has turned to punitive attacks, and a form of total warfare. Using airstrikes and drones, he's now targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, primarily hitting water and power stations. The goal is to generate suffering, break morale, and degrade Ukrainian society's will and ability to continue the war. He wants to force them to the negotiating table – all the more as Putin is desperate for a way out of the conflict. NATO can keep pouring weapons into the country but if Ukrainian society is falling apart the will to continue will fail.

All war is ugly and horrific but in the techno-industrial era all war quickly degenerates into total war as everything is related and interconnected. Society, the economy, and the war machine are a mutually dependent system. Fighting an opposing army isn't enough. One is driven to fight against not just military forces but the entire industrial base that makes their operation possible. This played no small part in understanding why World War II became so brutal and so destructive and any serious war since has quickly slipped into this mode.

In some cases such as America's war in Vietnam, the Americans engaged in total warfare strategies but of course the Vietnamese did not possess the ability to even entertain such a notion. They had to effectively sacrifice massive and disproportionate numbers to inflict casualties on the invader/occupier forces and thus break their will to fight.

But the Ukraine War is different. Even if Ukraine doesn't possess the ability to wage war in such a fashion it is backed by those that do and yet thus far (apart from the Kerch Bridge) the NATO puppet masters have held back from direct attacks on Russian infrastructure. They want to control the war and escalate it on their terms. Washington wouldn't mind in the least if the Ukrainians sacrifice themselves on a large scale (as the Vietnamese did) in order to defeat Russia. Moscow for its part has become desperate and backed into a corner, and Putin is trying to break Ukraine beyond the point of NATO's help. You can be sure the military strategists in Brussels and Washington are well aware of this and are reworking their calculus. If you understand this, you understand why Zelenskiy's role is so important. It is his task to keep the people fighting and willing to die – and to keep the means for this, the weapons coming.

This targeting of civilian infrastructure constitutes (by modern standards) a war crime and indeed the true ugliness and brutality of war is revealed in such episodes. Putin has a great deal of blood on his hands and this winter there will likely be even more deaths that result not from bullets and bombs but from cold, disease, and despair. He is truly a criminal and a murderer.

But one is left somewhat bewildered when digesting Western coverage of these events. There is a real moral outrage that is being expressed. But how can this be? Western leaders and their media have already given tacit approval to such actions and on a much wider scale. Apparently these crimes are not evils in and of themselves. They are only subject to moral condemnation in certain contexts.

From 1991-2003 the United States systematically destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and put the country under draconian sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million Iraqis and over a half-million Iraqi children. The US State Department headed by the war criminal Madeleine Albright openly defended these actions even as others such as UN Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday resigned in protest – accusing the United States of genocide.

After the US invasion in 2003, even more infrastructure was destroyed, and then with economic degradation of the country, many of these facilities were further harmed by looting and sectarian violence.

Even today some thirty years after the US established the illegal no-fly-zones and began the genocidal destruction of Iraq, there are still significant problems with the country's electricity infrastructure.

And this isn't just about lights and air conditioning. The destruction of this infrastructure affected water supply and sewage treatment plants. This created the conditions for water borne diseases and other health-related perils.

By the time the US temporarily departed Iraq in 2011, the death toll from the 1991-2011 time period was well over two million dead.

The populations of Iraq and Ukraine are roughly the same.

When this war is over, will Putin have killed two million Ukrainians? And yet Putin is the criminal and America is the moral agent and actor in world geopolitics.

There's something very rotten about the way the media covers these wars.  

Even Wikipedia has attempted to edit away these realities and has allowed criticisms of these numbers to stand. Halliday still has a bio-page, but his name has been all but eliminated from the related pages and the salient discussions on these points. Apparently the people on the ground (like Halliday) just imagined the suffering and the death on a massive scale. And this doesn't even touch on American use of Depleted Uranium and the cancer and deformity clusters that would emerge in not just Iraq but in every battle zone in which the US operates.

Putin is in the process of destroying Ukraine's infrastructure and the West is outraged. Why weren't they outraged when the Bushes and the Clintons did the same to Iraq? If Putin needs to face trial in the ICC, as I've said before that's fine – I'd like to see it. But it would be a farce and a travesty unless Clinton, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Schwarzkopf, Franks, Powell, and many others in the US government and military did not also face trial.

It would seem that these crimes and even their memory have been subjected to an Orwellian cleansing. They are not to be spoken of and if anyone dares to raise the question, these events have been sanitized – the memory of the public is so short and so paltry that it's now possible to lie to people about events that took place within their lifetimes and in some cases, events that took place only a few years ago.

I do not wish to minimize the suffering of the Ukrainians. I pity them and I believe they should be angry – with Putin of course, and yet also with Zelenskiy who has sold them out to his NATO masters, the real architects of this war. If anything, these episodes should remind us what war is and why Christians must have nothing to do with it. But that's not how such stories are played and there a host of false Church leaders who will use these episodes to their own ends.