SPENGLER ON THE UKRAINE WAR: ‘It Became Necessary to Destroy the Country to Save It.’ 

Peter Arnett’s celebrated quote — “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” — was a fabrication during the Vietnam War but has a macabre application to Ukraine. American fecklessness and Russian rapacity together will leave a grease spot where Ukraine used to be. It was all tragically, idiotically unnecessary.

I argued in 2008 and on many subsequent occasions, including the February 2014 note in PJ Media reposted below. The obvious course of action in Ukraine was to permit its people to vote for a divorce, as the Czechs and Slovaks did. Instead we elected to keep the NATO option open for Ukraine, knowing that this was a red line for Russia. Never mind that Putin is a wicked fellow; he is a predictably wicked fellow with a well-defined understanding of Russian national interest, and his response to Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership was entirely predictable.

Flashback: Peter Arnett: Whose Man in Baghdad? “Remember the phrase ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it’? It has become totemic. Arnett was the originator of the phrase. The trouble is, as first B.G. Burkett and then I discovered after a little investigation, the report was wrong. It wasn’t the U.S. that destroyed Ben Tre, (a town, not a village) but the Vietcong. And the soldier Arnett was most likely quoting remembers saying ‘It was a shame the town was destroyed,’ not the fatuity Arnett made famous.”