Wars are facilitated by those who do not fight in them.
Change that dynamic and there will be less of them.

Dan

So...Putin decides to send in the troops and its everyone else's fault?

Refreshing to see some nuance in amongst the mainstream media's incessant talking up of war and its simplistic branding of Putin as the aggressor.

The real aggressor is America, but of course we're never told that. Ever since Putin took over the Russian leadership and began to revert his country's Yeltsin-led slide into weakness and exploitation by the West, America has pulled out all stops to control and contain Russia.

Putin is finally drawing a line. His efforts to engage in diplomacy have been ignored. His requests that NATO halt its eastward trajectory have been treated with contempt. If his recent treaty proposals had been taken seriously, as they should have been, Russia would not be taking the action it is today.

When is the west going to start examining its own complicity in this current escalation? And start making some long overdue concessions to try and end this seemingly-intractable stalemate?

Yes, I agree, it's all a re-run of the same old lies and propaganda the media bombarded us with before the Iraq invasion.

And BTW, is this a typo?

<< Of the stable of papers run by Rupert Murdoch, only one of the 175 – the Hobart Mercury – supported the war. >>

Shouldn't it read that the Hobart Mercury was the only one NOT to support the war?

When the shooting starts, I wonder how the left media are going to blame Trump. It will be interesting to watch the wriggling, if we're alive to see it.

If the Russians really wanted a war, they wouldn't have started running excercises on the eastern side of the Ukranian border, they would have jumped in boots and all before the West had woken up. They can't afford to have a war anyway.

I see certain parallels between now and 1938. And today's Russia and prewar Germany!

Hitler only need a pretext that he was liberating German speakers from their overlords to take territory. As the liberal democracies did little more than thump lecterns and threaten retaliation. Retaliation for which there was no appetite nor preparedness.

How many liberal democracies would be willing to hit the nuclear button to prevent Russia from expanding into the eastern Ukraine because, that's what it might take? And would Putin stop there, if nobody wanted to take military action in a boots and all war? Or call his bluster and bluff? A la President Kennedy, during the Cuba missile crisis?

And should there be war how safe would we be, even if we declared our neutrality!? And how would we survive when we have to import so much of the staples of life!? We are so ill-prepared for a pandemic, let alone a war or its threat!

We don't even have a maritime naval fleet, but are entirely dependent of foreign fleets for all imports, exports and critical energy supplies ! And in context to the latter, our parliaments have largely sat on their hands or traded away any semblance of independence in energy or manufactured goods.

The latter made all but impossible by a price gouged energy component! AS MSR thorium was ignored for over half a century as if coal was all there was as affordable energy!?

Now we race against time just to have a nuclear submarine fleet. And are powerless to prevent the Chinese navy from sailing anywhere in our waters!

Ying tong, ying tong piddle li po, piddle li po.
Alan B.