Of course it’s best not to start a cooking fire in the first place, but if it happens, do we stand around until the whole house is engulfed in flame or do we use the fire extinguisher hanging in the pantry?

Same deal with preventing forest fires. Better to cook over a stone fire pit and completely cover up the embers when we’ve finished. But if a spark does get caught in the wind and lands in a patch of dry grass, don’t we try to stomp it out and call 911, or do we wait until it turns into a conflagration?

So why are we waiting for the kitchen fire in Ukraine to turn into a raging fire that engulfs Europe before the US and NATO stop sitting on their hands?

Today Russia bombed a maternity and children’s hospital. President Biden–this is a war crime! It’s time to give Ukraine all the air power it asks for–and time to send in US air support if Ukraine asks for it. We started the Vietnam War over a so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident that President Johnson presented to Congress and the American people as an unprovoked attack on an American vessel. In reality poorly trained young Navy gunners most likely were shooting at high waves.

There is no ambiguity what Russia is doing in Ukraine, putting two nuclear reactors at risk now and bombing apartments and hospitals. It’s time to give President Zelensky everything he asks for!

The Pentagon nixed Poland’s plan to ship Ukraine their MiG fighters by way of Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Once again, US leadership dithers over technicalities while children die in Kiev and grandmothers flee for Poland. Gary Kasparov gets it–the West is more worried about upsetting Putin than the lives of Ukrainians who courageously stand as the bulwark of Western democratic ideals.

Are American college radicals right after all? Is oil at the heart of the matter? Russia has it. Ukraine doesn’t.

“Again?! Is this a joke? Ukrainian civilians are being massacred and NATO is still wondering how to keep the man massacring them happy. Sorry, but NATO is going to have to do things Putin doesn’t like. They delayed so long risk is required now.”

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 9, 2022

So Joe, wake up! Get those MiGs to Ukraine by hook or by crook. YOU are the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world. It’s time you act like it!

As former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN’s Jim Acosta today, the fact that American- and NATO-supplied missiles are being used to shoot down Russian aircraft means we are ALREADY at war with Russia!

To know that the US has an entire wing of AC-130 Spectre gunships, including the legendary 16th Special Operations Squadron (the 16th SOS), sitting on the tarmac at Hurlburt Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, drives me to the height of frustration. I worked with the 601st Photo Flight documenting the success of the 16th SOS as they destroyed tens of thousands of trucks traveling in convoys down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the later years of the Vietnam War. The 40-mile Russian convoy lurking outside Kiev would be no problem–16th SOS Spectre gunships would take out the lead and trailing trucks with pinpoint precision, then use their sensors to locate fuel and ammunition trucks and take them out. The convoy would be trapped in place.

Joe! Russia is the country that starved out Napoléon in Moscow, chasing his army back to France in disgrace in the 19th Century. In the Twentieth Century, the Russian people held off the mighty German army at Stalingrad, undeterred by freezing weather and scant supplies. Taking away a few oligarchs’ yachts will not stop a madman like Putin. He is killing Ukrainian woman and children with impunity.

Joe! We are already at war! Why to you let heroic but outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers fight off Russian invaders alone?

What is the point the US having the mightiest military in the history of world and deploying it since Vietnam in the wrong places, propping up corrupt governments or trying to install our puppets–Laos, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan?

Why are you leaving Ukraine to fight alone against a Russian invasion? The war has begun–don’t be another well-intentioned but weak-kneed Neville Chamberlain!

The Big Buddha Bicycle Race was honored
by the Military Writers Society of America
with a Silver Medal in Literary Fiction in September of 2020

“A brilliant companion to the most iconic depictions of life in a war zone, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Robert Altman’s film M*A*S*H, and Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam. It depicts the sharply drawn characters, daily work drudgery, combat tragedies, political posturing, and the social upheaval of Americans in Southeast Asia in the heady days before the fall.”

Daniel Charles Ross, Military Writers Society of America (April 2020) 

https://www.mwsadispatches.com/library/2020/the-big-buddha