But I could write that about any war in modern history, and as Lincoln said after Gettysburg, the world will little note nor long remember what I or anyone else will say, but we cannot forget the scars of this seemingly endless struggle.

“One more year of war” is not just a heading.  It is a reminder that it is one of many, and we still are no closer to its end, in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in the Sudan, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.  Even the Quaker slogan of “War is not the answer” doesn’t begin to tell us what is.  If we knew that, then perhaps we’d do it.

President Joe Biden will make an extraordinary wartime visit to Israel this week as he seeks to demonstrate staunch support for the country as it works to eliminate Hamas while also pressing for ways to ease humanitarian suffering in Gaza.

The dueling objectives, spelled out by his top diplomat Monday evening, bring with them significant risks for the president as he works to prevent the crisis in the Middle East from widening.

Aides said Biden had expressed a strong interest in making the journey after being invited over the weekend by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Biden has known for four decades. He spent Monday deliberating over the trip at the White House with his top national security and intelligence advisers.

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was convening a marathon session with top Israeli officials to discuss opening Gaza to humanitarian aid and preventing civilians from getting caught up in Israel’s response to the terror attacks.

In announcing Biden’s Wednesday trip after more than seven hours of negotiations, Blinken said that the United States and Israel “have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza.”

The US president will also travel to Jordan, where he will meet with King Abdullah II, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The top US diplomat in recent days met separately with the three leaders – all of whom have condemned the situation in Gaza.

The security risks of a diplomatic visit to Israel were starkly illustrated Monday when Blinken, in his meeting with Netanyahu, was forced to shelter in place after air sirens warned of incoming rockets. White House officials said they’d carefully weighed the risks of a presidential visit, and deemed it safe enough both to execute and announce ahead of time.

The president’s visit will build on Blinken’s seven nation, multi-day tour of the Middle East, which comes as the US tries to strike a delicate balance of providing unwavering support for Israel’s military operations while mitigating the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stopping the war from spreading to further fronts.

Biden will “make it clear that we want to continue to work with all our partners in the region, including Israel, to get humanitarian assistance and again to provide some sort of safe passage for civilians to get out,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Monday evening.

The risks, both politically and physically, are great, but it demonstrates his leadership on this crisis from the point of view of the United States and its allies.  Meanwhile, the GOP is trying to figure out who’s driving their bus off the cliff.

In 1956, a group of armed Palestinian and Egyptian men ambushed a young Israeli officer in the wheat fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip. They shot him, dragged his body into Gaza, then returned it, mutilated, to the kibbutz. The next day, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, delivered a short but searing eulogy, standing over the officer’s grave. “The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul,” Dayan said. Alluding to the Biblical story of Samson, he added, “Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”

At 6:31 a.m. last Saturday, the heavy gates of Gaza tore open again. Some fifteen hundred Gazan fighters led by Hamas bulldozed the border fence, stormed into Israel, and perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the country’s short but bloodied history. In Nahal Oz, a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone on an early-morning run returned home to find his parents and his two sisters slaughtered. Many neighboring families were murdered with similar brutality. Others were abducted and taken into Gaza, the injured displayed like spoils of war. At the nearby kibbutz Kfar Aza, the bodies of residents, including children, were recovered on Tuesday; there were “cribs overturned,” an eyewitness said. A scorched smell still hung in the air. “It’s something I never saw in my life, something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time,” an Israeli commander told reporters.

Within days, that trauma and outrage had come to coexist with a bombing of Gaza and an enormous civilian effort to provide survivors from the border communities with food and shelter. The Israel Defense Forces summoned roughly three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, and many more have volunteered for service—laying aside, for now, the deep divisions that have roiled the country since January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government introduced controversial steps to curb judicial oversight of its powers.

As Israel struck Gaza from the air in full force—and cut off all food, water, and electricity to the coastal strip—and as the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty hostages remained unknown, there were growing calls in Israel to “pulverize” Hamas, as one security analyst put it. The rage is understandable; the implications of such statements, less so. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported on Wednesday that Israel has been mobilizing for a possible ground invasion, under the command of a former head of its Gaza Division. Sixteen members of Netanyahu’s coalition signed a letter this week calling for “total Israeli control of the Gaza Strip.”

In 2005, after years of repeated attacks and violence, Israel withdrew its military from Gaza and uprooted Jewish settlements there. A military reoccupation now would only incur further mass casualties at a time when Israel is still counting its dead. It would also play directly into the hands of Israel’s archenemy—Iran—by taking an unimaginable toll on Palestinian lives. This could force Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to enter the conflict, potentially dragging the wider region into war.

Israel faces an impossible dilemma: how to restore a measure of security and deterrence while also insuring the safe return of the hostages. But it risks falling victim to the optics of war by sending troops to reinvade Gaza, thereby creating an illusion of victory. As Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—hardly a dovish figure—put it on Tuesday, “We shouldn’t dance to the tune of Hamas, of Iran. We shouldn’t do the obvious.”

The problem is that, in Netanyahu, Israel has a leader who has repeatedly placed his own political survival above the good of his country. As Hamas launched its devastating assault on Saturday, it reportedly took him less than an hour to scuttle an offer from the opposition to form an emergency unity government. The Prime Minister did not visit the sites of the atrocities. He does not appear to have gone to the hospitals to comfort the grieving families, and he did not take responsibility for his part in the colossal intelligence failure. He did not mention that in the days leading up to the attack three military battalions had been diverted away from the southern communities and into the occupied West Bank, to guard Jewish settlers there.

Instead, Netanyahu sent an emissary to speak to the media—Yossi Shelley, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s office, a man few Israelis had heard of before. Asked to explain the government’s slow response to the attack, Shelley said that the attendees of a music festival in the desert—two hundred and sixty of whom were slain—had “contributed in a significant way to the chaos.”

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke out forcefully against the atrocities. “Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage—hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality,” he said. The Pentagon ordered a Navy carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean, to protect Israel. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yediot, praised Biden’s speech for projecting what had been missing from Netanyahu’s response—empathy. The next day, Netanyahu finally agreed to the terms of a unity government with the centrist leader Benny Gantz. Those terms leave Netanyahu’s far-right partners in the government but create a war cabinet that includes only Netanyahu, Gantz, and Israel’s relatively moderate defense minister, Yoav Gallant. By day five, the Israeli military had retaken control of the last of twenty-two sites to have come under attack. Some communities had been entirely vacated, with surviving inhabitants saying that they’re not sure they will ever go back. In Kfar Aza, the scenes of massacre inside homes were belied by the picture of an idyll that somehow still prevailed outdoors: tidy lawns, strollers, picnic tables.

When Dayan delivered his eulogy in 1956, he warned kibbutz residents on the Gaza border against a false sense of complacency. “Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path,” he said. It’s hard to imagine serenity ever returning to the area. But the desire for revenge should not overflow.

Doonesbury — Scan this.

“So much in the world depends on you.”

Of all the many moving words in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, those eight may have been the most urgent and important.

Zelensky came to Washington to speak for his nation. He came to Washington to ask for assistance. But above all, he came to Washington to recall Americans to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?

Political scientists have dubbed the past 20 years an age of “democratic recession.” There are fewer democracies on the planet. Antidemocratic predators have gained in wealth and strength. Even within the surviving democracies, extremist forces have undermined citizens’ confidence in their own system of government.

The ideal of partnership among democracies has declined, too, and perhaps even more than confidence within individual democracies. Narrow and selfish nationalism has displaced international cooperation and collective security. The slogan “America First”—seemingly discredited forever along with its fascism-friendly promoters of the late 1930s and early ’40s—was revived. Unsurprisingly, “America First” summoned forth reciprocal chauvinism from countries on the receiving end of American tariffs and American disrespect.

This mood of democratic recession enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. He regarded Ukraine as weak and vulnerable, and Ukraine’s allies as divided and ineffectual. When he ordered the invasion 10 months ago, Putin apparently expected to roll into Kyiv in days. He seemingly expected the rest of the world to grumble, then come to terms. Russian energy, Russian cash—those were, in Putin’s mind, the hard realities. Everything else seemed to him just so much vapor.

What a mistake.

The Ukrainians fought. Their ferocious and successful resistance surprised Putin. Perhaps it surprised the Ukrainians themselves. Certainly, it surprised the rest of the world, democratic and nondemocratic alike. A surge of sympathy rapidly translated into the greatest joint military assistance effort since 1945. Weapons, money, intelligence, economic support, humanitarian assistance—all flowed into Ukraine, by the tens of billions of dollars, pounds, and euros. Collective security was suddenly upgraded from an antique slogan to an organizing principle.

[…]

Zelensky argued that assistance to Ukraine is not charity. It is an investment. That statement is obviously true by the material metrics of national security. At a comparatively small cost in American and allied assistance, the Russian military has been given a mauling it will not soon care to repeat. Ukraine’s resistance has helped secure Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, too, because the lesson inflicted on Moscow will surely reverberate in Beijing.

But the “investment, not charity” argument is even more powerful when measured less materially. What the Western world is getting in return for its aid is a powerful recommitment to its own best self. We didn’t believe the Ukrainians could do it, in part because we didn’t believe we could do it. But they did. And so did we. And we look now at both Ukraine and ourselves in new ways.

The extremists and conspiracists and populists, the authoritarians and kleptocrats and theocrats who have all gained so much ascendancy in recent years, they do not speak for us. That small man in the olive-green jersey at the rostrum of the House of Representatives, hespoke for us. And the reception given to him today by the president and by Congress told the world that his words had been heard and received and understood by the great democracy-minded majority of Americans.

“So much in the world depends on you.” Sometimes, Americans forget that.

Zelensky reminded us. He came to say thank you. It’s a little embarrassing to hear that thanks, because what Americans gave, fundamentally, was just money. Zelensky’s people have given blood, home, comfort, and security—every precious thing that human beings can sacrifice. The answer we owe Zelensky, the answer Zelensky should hear from this country, revived by his visit, his cause, and his country’s heroic fight, is: No, no, no—thank you.

I am a pacifist.  My stand against war is unwavering.  But I am also a realist and I know that when you are the victim of an unprovoked attack by a regime led by a dictator, you fight back.  And as I watched this brave man stand in the well of the House of Representatives to say thank you and pledge to keep fighting, I felt that what we have done not only pushes back against tyranny, it made me feel good about our country and what we’re doing for the people of Ukraine.

The World of Stationery, scheduled for this Tuesday in Ukraine, has been postponed due to unforeseen events. The outlook is not good for the Agile Rock Conference on Saturday, either. From the New York Times:

But the troops opened fire on Ms. Pomazanko, 56. Bullets ripped through the wooden gate and fence around her house, killing her instantly. Her body still lay in the garden on Sunday, where her 76-year-old mother had covered her as best she could with plastic sheeting and wooden boards. “They were driving up the street,” said her mother, Antonina Pomazanko. “She thought they were ours.” Ms. Pomazanko’s killing is just one of scores being uncovered days after Russian troops withdrew from the outlying suburbs of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, after weeks of fierce fighting. On Sunday, Ukrainians were still finding the dead in yards and on the roads amid mounting evidence that civilians had been killed purposely and indiscriminately.

Bucha has now joined Srebrenica, Lidice, the Katyn Forest, Osweicim, Nanking, My Lai, Wounded Knee, and thousands of other places the world probably has forgotten—or never knew about in the first place—in a bloody atlas of world barbarism. It is a scalding reminder that actual war does not consist of really cool videos of drone strikes. It is a shameful demonstration of what happens when war is brought down from the contrails of a B-52 to the fields and the asphalt on which tanks roll, and above which the bullets fly. Europe has not seen a full-on ground war since V-E Day. And now, as the generation in this country who saw it back then is dying away, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are getting a look at war beyond the vicarious thrill of watching things blow up in foreign lands.

On October 20, 1862, the New York Times reviewed a new photographic exhibition by Matthew Brady, who had returned only recently from the banks of Antietam Creek in Maryland.

We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. The crape on the bell-pull tells there is death in the house, and in the close carriage that rolls away with muffled wheels you know there rides a woman to whom the world is very dark now…Those who lose friends in battle know what battle-fields are, and our Marylanders, with their door-yards strewed with the dead and dying, and their houses turned into hospitals for the wounded, know what battle-fields are. Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.

That’s the point at which we arrived over the weekend, when the pictures and videos from the streets of Bucha rolled in.

Russia, under the rule of Vladmir Putin, has consciously chosen to be an outlaw nation. It has consciously chosen to make war in this place at this time. It has consciously decided that the opprobrium of the world is a small price to pay for whatever twisted imperial fantasies it has cherished since the days of the Tsars. And in this, it has allies at the highest levels of some European nations. It has economic partners who see none of this bloodletting as an obstacle to business. It has pundits and journalists in this country who are willing accomplices. It decided on killing because the impulse to kill to obtain what we want is hardwired into human evolution, and human advancement, and human technology, like a flaw in the manufacturing process.

Humans are doing these things to other humans, as they have since we first lurched out of the Rift Valley. We have evolved enough to be revolted by the whole business, at a remove, of course, and largely ex post facto. We have evolved enough to produce the technology that brings us the images of that of which our species is capable. But still the pictures come, and still the reminders echo with the words of the NYT reporter at that exhibition so long ago, but so present with us now, again.

Of all objects of horror one would think the battlefield should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.

I don’t know what will happen and what consequences Russia or Vladimir Putin will face when this war ends and whether it will make a difference in future conflicts.  But seeing the images coming out of Ukraine should be — must be — enough to unite the sane world — what’s left of it — to demand justice.

How we deal with both tells us a lot about us as a civilization.

• It was dusk, the sun had not yet risen. Olena was sitting on the balcony of her Kyiv apartment and smoking: “I saw something floating slowly. At first I thought that a crow was injured. And then I heard a buzz.” She had never seen a drone up close before 2/
• She figured that by the time she ran into the room and returned too much time will have passed – the drone might disappear. But she had plenty of preserves right by her feet on the floor! So she grabbed a jar and hurled it as hard as she could at the UFO 3/
• “Probably out of fear. Because I was scared. And what if they start firing at me from there! I feel sorry for those tomatoes… I don’t know where the stories about cucumbers came from.” Apparently those were pickled tomatoes with plums, her favorite recipe. 4/
• Olena is a small household goods store worker. She thinks the drone may have been launched by the Russian marauders who had allegedly been seen in the area. END

I’ve heard of hand-to-hand combat…

The spirit of the Ukrainians and the support they’re getting from the world-wide community reminds a lot of historians of the Battle of Britain during World War II. The toll on the British population and the devastation by the bombing from the Luftwaffe was overwhelming, but they never gave up, and Zelenskyy is being compared to Churchill.

I’m the last person to discuss military strategy, but in the big picture, I don’t think Putin thought this through.

I’m trying to think of something to calm my jitters.  Maybe a picture of a painting of a calm place will help.

Areas across Ukraine were under attack on Thursday morning. President Biden condemned President Vladimir Putin’s actions, saying he would speak to the American people on Thursday.