Russia Needs to Feel the Pain.

We all know who Mike Pompeo is (was) and the fact that he is one of the more remarkably clueless operatives Trump staffed his admin with should not obfuscate the fact that the dude was CIA Director, even if for brief 16 months. Who Mike Pompeo is as a professional and as a human is well summarized in this short note in WiKi. 

Once a critic of Donald Trump, whom he called an "authoritarian", Pompeo became one of his biggest supporters after Trump became the Republican nominee

So, as you can see he fits extremely well into the Beltway mold where principles and integrity are only good for proclamations in a front of TV cameras. Of course, Pompeo's tenure as the Secretary of the State was an unmitigated disaster and the guy led the concentrated effort on part of Trump Administration to ruin Russian-American relations. He surely succeeded, and now, being out of a job, he continues to preach pseudo-religious BS about Rupture and, in general, continues to parade himself as Washington's political creature who lost, despite heading two of the most important foreign policy organizations in the United States, any touch with the realty. They just don't learn there. 

Now this "intellectual", using Beltway's lingo calls on the US to make Russia and Russian people "feel the pain". On FOX, of course. 

Remarkably, when asked about HOW to inflict the pain for CIA's and NSA'...oops, sorry, Russian cyber attacks on the US, Pompeo for two minutes spoke in platitudes about "capabilities", "strategery", and other buzzwords and catchphrases but never disclosed even minute details about any substantive measures which could be implemented by the US to punish those nasty Russkies. So, here is the deal.

Neither Pompeo nor whoever interviews him within the United States have any clue what real pain is. As I already stated many times, no American military of state person ever directly defended the United States in any serious capacity nor ever saw a real suffering and pain in the United States since 1940. I am not sure what they taught Pompeo in the West Point, but for a conflict of such a scale, plus, of course, the United States were having a blast while the rest of the world, and especially Europe, were being utterly destroyed, the losses were more than acceptable But even 1990s in Russia make anything what the United States ever experienced, including ever debated Civil War, which pales in its scale and scope compared to Russian Civil War, look simply insignificant in terms of what 1990s brought to Russia. I was there first half of a decade, so I know what I am talking about. Here are some news for Pompeo. 

Shock therapy gave Russia one of the worst and longest economic depressions of the 20^th century, an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe for a peace time crisis, and a criminally inequitable privatization of public assets. The reasons why things happened this way in Russia generally aren’t well understood in the west. Even among better informed intellectuals, the failure of shock therapy is often thought to be vaguely related to some sinister flaw in the Russian society.  

The numbers of Russians who perished, as a direct result of IMF-driven "reforms", in 1990s from hunger, alcoholism, drugs, suicides, slave trade, de facto "warm" civil war and criminal, both organized and random, activity is counted in millions. As major Russian outlet KP gives number from respectable demography professional Vladimir Timakov:

В итоге цена либеральных реформ для России: 12 миллионов неродившихся детей и 7 миллионов сверхсмертность. Каждый день наше население сокращалось больше, чем на 2 тысячи человек. Это целый поселок или городок. Если сравнивать все страны бывшего СССР, то тяжелее чем в России ситуация была только на Украине.

- Казалось бы, такие гигантские потери возможны только во время войны.

Translation: As a result the price of the liberal reforms for Russia: 12 million children which have not been born and 7 million dead people due to excessive mortality. Each day our population was shrinking by more than 2,000 people. This is a whole village or a small town. If to compare all countries of former USSR, only Ukraine had situation (demographic) worse than Russia. 

--It seems that such losses are possible only during the war. 

Read the title (Google Translate) of the article in KP. So, when some pompous windbag from D.C. wants to scare Russians with pain, let him (or her) experience one tenth what Russians experienced and recovered from and then one can talk about if he even has (he doesn't, most Americans don't) the grasp of the scale of what Russia survived time after time in the 20th century. America has no even remote parallels to those historic experiences. But the main question still remains--HOW is Mike Pompeo going to make Russians feel the pain. Indeed, how? Maybe like this: American diplomat Parker Wilson (in Russian)...breaks and then... steals a railroad sign near Ostahkovo Rail-road Station in Tver Region. It wasn't FSB which caught him in the act, it was regular video monitoring by Tver's Police Department which caught the act and then identified who did it, endangering lives of railroad passengers. Russian Foreign Ministry already issued a statement and US Embassy, evidently, already sent the guy back to the US. 

Is that what Pompeo had in mind? WTF is going on with these people, are they even sane? Can you imagine Russian diplomat stealing a rail road sign around Boston or NYC? But then again, judging by Pompeo's views and opinions, one really must start questioning not only reasoning, however ridiculous, behind those statements, but simple human psychological normality of these people. It is a downright bizarre behavior which is a testament to a complete impotence of American elites not only in running their own country but in conducting foreign policy based on reality, not some childish fantasies that the US can make Russia "feel the pain". Something tells me that this is exactly the other way around and this time those are not words, but actions.