>>165
(www.theguardian.com, Sun 20 Feb 2022)
The long, bloody history of proxy wars
should be a warning to Johnson in Ukraine
ttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/20/the-long-bloody-history-of-proxy-wars-should-be-a-warning-to-johnson-in-ukraine

...In truth, it’s not even a big secret.
“In discussions with allies, senior Biden officials have made clear that
the CIA (covertly) and the Pentagon (overtly) would both seek to help any Ukrainian insurgency,”
the New York Times reported last month.
Asked recently whether Britain would arm resistance fighters, Johnson replied: “It’s possible, I don’t want to rule this out.”

...Then again, western powers are pretty hopeless at fighting proxy wars via resistance groups.
Think of Ronald Reagan’s disastrous Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Think of the Cuban Bay of Pigs, or
how Iraq’s Shias and Kurds were urged to revolt in 1991 by George HW Bush and subsequently betrayed. Saddam Hussein slaughtered them by the thousand.
Western politicians, prating about principle then as now, utterly failed them.

Resistance groups can be hard to control. They travel unexpected paths.
The most notorious example is Afghanistan, where some US-armed mujahideen groups fighting the post-1979 Soviet occupation went on
to create the Taliban, who turned on their creators like Mary Shelley’s monster.
Perhaps Johnson, unlike the former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who was behind the US covert mission, knows what he’s doing.
Or is he, in familiar style, already making promises to Ukrainians he cannot and will not keep?