"Both the fighters and the ordinary civilians, they kept looking up at the western sky. . . They were looking for the American warplanes that they felt sure were coming to help them. All that week, when people realized I was an American journalist, they would grab at my jacket: 'When are the Americans coming? They told us they were coming.'"
"There was all this shooting going on, people were in despair, and they knew the end was coming, and all of a sudden, this cheer goes up. And it spreads. Even over the gunfire, you could hear this cheering. I finally asked someone what was going on, and they said, 'the Americans have arrived at last, they are on the outskirts, but they're coming this way.' So this rumor had started. . . Well, this was a very difficult thing to hear."
Timothy Foote, a Time-Life journalist, as quoted in Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans p. 451-2, describing Budapest in 1956.
Perhaps history does not repeat itself exactly, but sometimes it comes hauntingly close.
If tyrants could be stopped by the number of reports of the spotting and siezing of oligarchs' yachts, Putin would be six feet under by now.
If wars were won by talking about how strong and comprehensive sanctions are and how unified NATO is, white flags would be flying from the Kremlin.
But wars driven by expansionist ideology and dreams of an empire are not deterred or beaten by sanctions. And, besides, Germany and several other European nations are still paying Russia for substantial parts of their oil supplies, and two countries representing 2.8 billion people are not imposing sanctions.
Every former and would-be general doing commentary on the war is enthusiastically exclaiming their astonishment at just how bad the Russian army is performing.
(Continue at https://www.edelsteinrandomthoughts.com/2022/04/never-again.html)
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