Yesterday, Tucker posted a thrilling hour-long interview with Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It was absolutely fascinating, the kind of interview confirming you’re not crazy after all, a sort of balm for the soul, as it were. Warning: if you start watching, you won’t want to stop. For obvious reasons, given the Colonel’s expertise, the wide-ranging interview focused on Ukraine, but at times also verged into most topics of interest to C&C readers.
In case you aren’t familiar with him, according to his Wikipedia page, Colonel Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel and government official, and is now an author, military consultant, and media commentator. His war experience included leading an early tank battle in the Gulf War and he was a top military planner in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. His 1997 book
Breaking the Phalanx argued for radical reforms inside the Army. Macgregor also advised U.S. military strategy during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In other words, Macgregor has more real-world military experience than just about any other war commenter you’ll find infesting social media these days.
Colonel Macgregor is not new to the debate. He has appeared countless times on social media over the last couple years, as a heterodox commenter lending his war veteran perspective on the Proxy War. But this Tucker interview might be his most high-profile interview yet. I think you’ll be surprised at my conclusion.
But first, let’s take a look at a few of the best bits, in case you don’t have time to watch right now.
At Tucker’s prompting, Colonel Macgregor evaluated the current state of the Proxy War. He doesn’t see a lot of bright spots, and for solid reasons:
We’re sending 33 Patriot missiles . These are missiles used to shoot down opposing forces. People in air defense will tell you that you shoot two missiles to make sure you get the target. Well, you run out of our missiles in 2-3 days. You can’t possibly defeat the thousands of projectiles being hurled in your direction. And of course, your radars light up and become targets.
This is a no-win situation.
Although the Russians were not prepared in February 2022 for this kind of war, they are now. And they’re continuing to prepare, which includes continuous mobilization. They’re up to 750,00 troops in and around Ukraine. That number is going to rise in the next year to 1.2 million.
Our intransigence, our demonstrated hatred and hostility toward Moscow and for Russia, has convinced the Russian people — as well as the leadership in Moscow — that they are going to have to fight us, and anyone allied with us.
So they’re preparing for that eventuality. That’s why it’s so important we wake up and understand that what we’ve done has backfired. Whatever we’ve set out to achieve has failed.
What we need to do now is stop this, and come to a settlement (that we may not like). And it needs to happen, and soon, before this thing gets out of control. Eventually, if we keep this up, within the next 6-8 months, we’ll see hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on the Polish border.
Listening to Macgregor’s confident, well-reasoned analysis, which smacked of commonsense expertise, it occurred to me that our strategy in Ukraine was
perfect — perfect for the Russians, that is. If Biden had
wanted to give Moscow a TED Talk on exactly how to beat NATO, he could never have dreamed up a better — worse — way. Biden has presented the Russians with a limited, slowly escalating engagement, against a corrupt, weak opponent, where NATO’s best weapons systems were gradually introduced, giving the Russians time to adjust, learn, and adapt, while continuously adding vast numbers soldiers — who are all becoming skilled battlefield veterans.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers are
not becoming veterans, they are dying in droves. Even if we have a few thousand NATO troops stealthily involved, that’s
nothing compared to the incalculable number of Russian troops gaining practical experience in fighting a modern, high-tech kinetic war. It’s a completely different kind of war than anything in human history. As Macgregor noted, in this new kind of war, all units are visible on the battlefield all the time. If something moves, it gets shot at and destroyed.
To fight the war this way was woke incompetence beyond imagination, sheer madness, badly misplaced hubris, possibly the worst and most reckless military strategy ever conceived in the Joint Chiefs’ transsexual, pride-flagged conference rooms —
ever.
As I said, it was a jam-packed, tightly-edited, hour-long interview. There’s a lot there. Toward the end, Tucker showed Colonel Macgregor a clip of an American psyoperator who went to work for Ukraine, a man who dresses like a woman, in Ukrainian uniform, who explained how our war generals (and certain folks in the comments) see things:
Fake woman ‘Sarah’ Ashton-Cirillo describes himself as a political operative, now a Ukraine military spokesman
As the two men watched, former Florida resident ‘Sarah’ Cirillo, now a Ukraine army spokesman, explained in the clip (in part):
CIRILLO: “If you look at Putin’s mouth, you’ll notice blood drips from it. He’s a vampire, carrying out genocide against both Ukraine and Russians alike. Vlad Putin bathes in the blood of innocent children and enjoys it. And this is why the dictator of the Russian Federation must be deposed.”
That over-the-top nonsense came from an official Ukrainian military announcement.
After noting the profound irony of a fake woman spouting fake war propaganda, Tucker asked Colonel Macgregor to respond to the trans spokesman’s “Vlad the Vampire” claim. Macgregor’s scathing reply should be pasted on the sides of buses:
We estimate that at least 60,000 children from Ukraine have disappeared, vanished, since this war began. Where are they? What about all of the women who have been sold into prostitution who once lived in Ukraine? This war is a disaster. The people bathing in blood are in Kyiv and Washington, not Moscow.
Was he wrong? If anything, he understated the case. Macgregor didn’t even mention the 400,000 dead Ukrainian men. Where is the Proxy War’s moral high ground actually located? It’s not located in Kyiv or Washington, as the Colonel aptly pointed out.
At the risk of spoiling the clip, here’s how Macgregor finished up, by putting his finger right on the heart of the problem, Biden’s “America last” policy:
The president announced yesterday, on one of these tweets (somebody tweets for him, obviously), that the people that have lost everything hiin Haw, thousands of them, lost everything, are going to receive a one-time payment of $700. Now, I haven’t been to Haw in a long time, if ever, but I know that $700 isn’t going to take care of a family for very long. But in the meantime, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, continue to flow into this black hole called Ukraine.
Which I think is an exercise in fraud, deceit, and criminality, to be blunt. When’s it going to stop? When are we going to take care of Hawaii? Let’s go back to Ohio, where we had the derailment and the chemical spill? 4,000 human beings living in this area, and the water’s still not fit to drink, as I understand it. We wouldn’t even invest the money to move those people to a safer area, even if it meant temporary housing, or permanent housing, until this thing is cleaned up. What have we done?
This is the problem. It is America last. On every level. The last people who are consulted. The last people who are benefitting from anything happening in Washington. This cannot go on. It’s got to end. And I think it will end. But unfortunately, it’s like everything else. We’ll have to be pushed over the cliff, into the abyss. And I think that’s where we’re headed.
On that cheerful note, Tucker concluded the interview.
Here’s my take. That interview looked more than anything like Macgregor’s audition for vice-president. And that is exactly what the Biden Administration fears — which is the silver lining. If I quibbled with anything Macgregor said, it would be his conclusion that we’ll have to reach an absolute disaster before anything changes. Team Biden can’t afford to let the Ukraine war stretch into election season, where the discussion will focus on the undeniable failures of the Proxy War, failures not just on the battlefield, but also in the area of domestic priorities. Biden’s policy
inarguably is “America last.”
But what do
you think? Is Macgregor vice-presidential material? Or would it be another Admiral Stockdale disaster?
Tucker interviews Colonel Macgregor about Ukraine and it might be his most important episode yet; Lahaina hates Biden; masks back in Atlanta college; and a joyful story of internet justice.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
As the drip, drip, drip of the unraveling Proxy War narrative continues, Politico ran a story yesterday headlined, “Ukraine’s top Freedom Caucus ally gets cold feet.”
