Mr. Obama's foreign policy, personified. All that's missing is an M16 in hand. (IMAGE: IndiaPulse) by Preston Clive It's going to be a real, legitimate, by-the-book proxy war, after all! The miserable situation in Ukraine has escalated to the degree where we are moving towards a period strongly resembling the pre-Vietnam war stretch running up to 1963 where the boots on the ground were limited and simply called "advisors." The US 173rd Airborne Brigade Commander Colonel Michael Foster said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday that America would be sending in the ballpark of a battalion of military advisors to train and help prime the Ukrainian military in their ongoing battle with Russian backed and equipped separatists in the east of the country. “Before this week is up, we’ll be deploying a battalion minus… to the Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces for the fight that’s taking place,” Michael Foster said. “What we've got laid out is six United States companies that will be training six Ukrainian companies throughout the summer.” So clearly we now have a situation--with the addition of the UK commitment already reported around a week ago--where the US and the UK are dipping their feet into the muck of the conflagration, and telling Vladimir Putin to his face that he now is not simply kicking his poor, limply defended neighbor around all by itself--it has company now. Its big brothers are not hanging it out to try a la Czechoslovakia in 1938. Eastern Ukraine will not be the Sudetenland, and PM Cameron and Barack Obama are not Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier. What is interesting about this situation is that all sides are committed now. Locked in, ideologically. All sides are in it to win it before the eyes of their home countries. Backing down before the eyes of the world would constitute a supreme humiliation on the part of anyone forced into it. So we're now primed to haphazardly stumble into a situation whereby a company of advisors take an errant 105mm howitzer shell and get blown to smithereens and this very lukewarm "proxy" war goes instantly hot for all parties. * * * Something curious has taken place within the brain chemistry of Barack Obama since he has become President. The progressive anti-war candidate, passionately sensible in his revulsion for pointless wars and trigger-happy politicians, who spoke eloquently about the fact that the USA cannot engage it's military and spend the treasure of lives, hardware and precious taxpayer dollars on every global hotspot simply because the situation is unjust and/or heartbreaking to observe--there are too many of those around the world to fairly administer them all. . . that man spoke the conscience of the nation while it was losing in Afghanistan because of a foolish war in Iraq. Now this same man is committing military hardware and personnel every which way but Saturn. And that might not be too far away--if the militaristic Zygglakbriddians follow through on their threat to breach the Saturnine No-Fly Zone through the northern polar Hexagon for military deliveries. Whatever it is that has taken place in the man's brain, diagnosis is urgent. Never has an antiwar president proved himself to be so completely helpless versus the seductive power of the office, never has a man so obviously enjoyed the power of the red phones, the cryptography, the classified briefings, the black ops, the saying of one thing and the doing of another, the feeling of power and super-elite thrill of having ultra-black, top secret teams at his beck and call, the paramilitary tinkering in the political winds of lands far away, and on and on. He cannot put the rush he gets from indulgence down; he is as addicted as a compulsive shopper, eater, smoker, drug-taker. In other news, pro-Russian hackers Cyber-Berkut, have produced documents which apparently prove that US defense contractors have been trying to move lethal aid in to the Ukraine and has enlisted the help of its European allies to do so. The group, likely staffed or at very least partially funded by Putin's paramilitary-covert ops budget, has been historically opposed to NATO and any hint of its eastward expansion--a major nut around the Ukrainian bolt that is irking Putin-- and has even DDoS'd the NATO website in the past. You can read the hacked documents about the weapons movement plan here. Preston Clive 3/3/2015***