re: #93 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

I’ve been catching up on videos on the YouTube World War Two channel: youtube.com as their progression to VE-day comes near.

But after all the many videos I am left with the sad realization that western leaders were stuck in old ways of thinking, both the elected officials and many flag officers.

Churchill is rightfully criticized by many but I think many people just don’t reduce the issue to a very simple one: an old man who could not think differently than what he was programmed in his younger days.

Roosevelt was not much better, though he had a bigger picture of the 20th century problems than Churchill.

Churchill’s obsession with Greece just strikes me as an old man trying to fix his problems he made a few decades earlier when he was in the Admiralty.

That he and the UK were more intent on keeping their colonial ways was picked up on by Americans at the time (see Gen. Stillwell.)

See also Gen. Montgomery’s decisions in Europe.

Trying to apply this to us today: One of the real shortcomings in our discussions today is to simply approach Putin, for example, as the bad guy, and not understanding the bigger picture.

The war in Ukraine is as much, or more so, about resources than it is about nationalism.

Putin can use nationalism and religion (the two seem to go together) to sell the war to his people, but the real battle is to control both agricultural and mineral resources.

And we today are fighting wars that will play out for the rest of the century.

But I feel that our leaders are doing a rather poor job of laying out visions for the future and why we have to make the choices we must make.

And Biden tries with his jobs-jobs-jobs campaign rhetoric, yet as is pointed out by many who seem to know quite a bit about the real world, we cannot consume our way out of our challenges.

So getting back to WWII - the Europeans caused the US to be so Europe-focused that Roosevelt and the US officers did not see that the war in China was going to be so important in coming decades.

I wonder what we are ignoring today, that will come to haunt us in 50 years.

Russia has no economy as we remove oil from the energy production equations. The Saudis know this and are working with Biden to create an economy driven more by geen energy.

Ukraine alwaays has oil but Putin wants control of the grain. That is Russia’s only hope for the future under Putin.

The shame is that without Putin, Russia woud likely have one of the strongest IT economies in the world. And be able to control its economy rather than extort its economy from others.

As for WW2, Eisenhower is my supreme hero, HIs understanding of the effect fossil-fuel driven vehicles had on warfare gave us a tremendous advantage. Unlike the political leaders, he recognized the reality on the ground that they seldom did. He was not afraid to shake things up and quickly, as seen with the aftermath of Kasserine Pass, our first real battle in the European theater and a total disaster for us..

He recalled the top commanders, getting them out of the way, told the younger ones left to move command much closer to the battle, concnetrate their forces and put Patton in control (Patton supposedly said he would judge the effort made by field officers based on how many of them were casualties). Eisenhower changed the way forces were dispersed and reorganized the intelligence collecting. All within about 2 weeks,

A month after Kasserine, at Battle of El Guettar, US forces finally took part in a successful batte against the Germans. For the first time, they took on the battle-hardened German army and showed what we could do.