By John Birmingham
Declaring reality to be incompatible with legitimate Russian interests, President Vladimir Putin has committed more forces to the war in Syria while telling US counterpart Barack Obama to "move along now, is nothing to see here". Moscow has ignored warnings from NATO and Washington that it is making things worse, with the Kremlin declaring it had learned the lessons from Afghanistan and that this time they would not waste 10 years denying reality.
"Russian forces have begun total war on reality already," declared Defence Minister Oleg Smersh.
Illustration: Glen Le Lievre.
The initial Russian assault opened with repeated denials that a widely observed military build-up in the Syrian port city of Latakia was even a real thing. Unmoved by pictures of Russian fighter bombers and helicopter gunships suddenly appearing without explanation at the city's airport, Minister Smersh at first retorted that it is simply impossible for such things to happen.
"Whoever heard of such big heavy things appearing anywhere with no possible way to explain how they got there?" he asked. "Do you now how much one of those gunships weighs? They are very heavy, especially when full of bullets and exploding bombs. Did all these things somehow magically fly to Syria? Please, have some dignity."
When the same fighter bombers made unauthorised incursions into Turkish airspace, President Putin declared himself implacably opposed to admitting anything of the sort.
"Pfft? Turkish airspace? What even is that?" he asked the UN General Assembly last week. "Can you see this so-called airspace. Can you touch it? No. It is invisible. So is not even real thing then."
Western military analysts responded with a series of face-palms and head-desks, having no other answer to the Kremlin's new strategy of so-called "hybrid war".
First used in the annexation of the Crimea, hybrid war is a sophisticated meshing of doctrine, strategy and tactics to create the impression that invading a neighbouring state was all the idea of two or three drunken military tourists and should not be taken seriously by anybody, especially those countries now full of thousands of Russian tourists and heavy armoured divisions.
The Kremlin's newest war fighting strategy was perfected in the war with Ukraine, when Putin first declared there was no war, then that there was no Ukraine, and finally that he didn't do it, nobody saw him, you can't prove anything. The Syrian government, meanwhile, welcomed the arrival of thousands of Russian tourists with their own air and artillery support.
Facing demands from the Senate Armed Services Committee to explain what America was doing to counter Russia's lead in reality denial, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Biff McBeefburger, insisted the US remained an implacable foe of reality and cited the hundreds of millions of dollars which had already been spent training three or four guys to be Syria's moderate opposition forces.
"Those three or four guys represent everything we've tried and failed to achieve in Syria. Don't tell me we're not the world's best at keeping our heads in our asses," said McBeefburger, arguing that while the Russians had always relied on the sheer size and bulk of their delusions, America retained a significant advantage in the sophistication of its denials of reality.
"Not everyone can tick a box in the Pentagon and make a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital blow up on the other side of the world," said McBeefburger. "But we can, and we did and nobody can take away our confused and furious denials of what actually happened."
While the Russians had always relied on the sheer size and bulk of their delusions, America retained a significant advantage in the sophistication of its denials of reality.
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Tony Abbott should write a book. He seems at bit of a loose end, what with all of the sniping and undermining he's not doing. It would save him a lot of time riding his push bike to and from his favourite shock jocks as he tries to shore up his legacy, and it would save the rest of us having to follow his slightly embarrassing efforts to prove we all loved him. He does seem possessed of the indomitable self-belief all writers need to ride over the bodies of their critics and the disinterest of most readers. Still, in between assuring 2GB's sizeable audience of angry old white people that history would regard him as well as he regards himself, he might have been put off the whole book idea by Campbell Newman.
The former Queensland premier, whose hugely unpopular one term administration was something of a how-to-manual for Tone, has had no more luck pimping out his memoirs this week, than he had convincing Queenslanders to to vote him after sacking so many of them and trying to the lock the rest up in pink prison jump suits.
Newman's widely unread cri de cœur has even been "banned" by one hipper-than-thou inner-city book barn, an outrage the rejected politician described as "undemocratic" – revealing yet again that his understanding of democracy is "a process by which everyone does what he tells them to".
Still, it's been strangely soothing to have Toned Abs back up in our national grill. As predicted it didn't take long to miss him. He might have been a terrible prime minister, but he was great entertainment. His successor promises to be nothing of the sort.
Perhaps, if he doesn't get packed off to London to help polish up Sir Phil's Vegemite Knighthood, he could join the ranks of barking maddies on talkback radio, or even cohost the Nine network's curious take on The Panel, tag-teaming Mark Latham. They'd make an absolutely cracking double act.