Inception.

In Christopher Nolan's outstanding 2010 flick Inception, main protagonist, Dom Cobb, played ably by undeniably talented Leo DiCaprio, was using the so called totem, to have an idea if he was dreaming or was inside reality. If the totem toppled--Cobb wasn't dreaming. 

Totem was this Ariadne's thread allowing not to lose connection to the reality even in the dream. You may ask why I am waxing here Siskel-Ebertish in mostly geopolitical and military blog? The answer is simple: I allow myself once in a while go to Foreign Affairs publication by the Council on Foreign Relations site to get a gander on the state of America's allegedly most super-pooper, most sophisticated and most powerful minds behind what passes in the US as a foreign policy. Needless to say, that in the last few years those visits are increasingly rare, not least because I cannot tolerate American political "scientists" pseudo-intellectual newspeak--same phenomenon as economic lingo which is a newspeak covering the nature of the institutionalized robbery which passes in US as "economy" (see Michael Hudson's writing on this issue), plus, as I already stated not for once (hey, forget about me, many people stated this, such as Daniel Larison yesterday) I am not interested in wasting my time explaining a systemic delusion which is being presented as a viable "science". But today I ran into Richard Haas' (CFR's biggest honcho) piece about.... blah-blah-blah, yada-yada-yada accelerating something something history, something something to look intellectual and profound  etc. It is not profound, because Haas obviously doesn't know the real history of the 20th century and he is both energy, military and economy blind, using Arthur Berman's definition, but then something caught my eye and I took a screen shot:

Forget Haas' bloviation about WWII or WWI--drawing (pseudo)historic parallels is a fool's errand, not to speak of the fact that actual history of interwar period, not to speak of the realities of WWII is generally beyond the grasp (or is not allowed to be properly exercised in analysis) of US foreign policy "elite", most of which knows "strategy" and warfare from a white board abstracts in their Ph.D theses written away from warfare realities, any warfare. But it was so symbolic to see to the right of the Haas' "text" an image of what in Inception was Cobb's only connection to the reality--a rotating totem. Even in the closing moment of Nolan's masterpiece we are not given direct answer to the state Cobb and his reunification with his children are--is it still a dream or is he finally able to hug his children in a real world? 

I am on the record that far from experiencing any real respect to US foreign affairs establishment, I seriously think that these people live in a dream, in which the modern United States still can be compared to an industrial colossus, unscathed by horrors of 20th Century wars, which is capable (or at least it thinks so) to guide the world to a better future, dispatching its "finest fighting force in history" to remote shores and that it is just the matter of "selling" (that means outright lying) US foreign policy to Americans. Obviously Haas, being preoccupied with geopolitical and pseudo historic "profundities" doesn't use a single number to grasp a reality that the United States in China and Russia alone look at combined GDP and military capability which dwarfs that of the United States (Europe is not even an asset in all that) and is completely capable to deny the US access to Eurasia other than the US being incorporated as one among big equals into the new world order. But for Haas and CFR to really grasp the reality, albeit even he admits that the business is usual is pretty much over, he must wind the totem at the image to the right of his article and wait until it ether topples over, thus indicating the state of residing in reality, or will continue to rotate, indicating the most likely outcome of still dreaming, or residing in the dream in which cause and effect are not connected. But then again, ignoring causality is what makes the present state of the United States and her "elites", who should know better, but don't, so precarious. But I am sure we all know what it is to know about "exceptionalism" and how it destroys the nation which refuses to take a look at the rotating totem.          

Is There Anybody (Else) Out There? (c)

By now we have to learn one simple fact, which, evidently neither Daniel Larison (for all his valiant effort) nor Andrew Bacevich understand, when they call out warmongers in present American media-political establishment. Most of them are warmongers, including in Congress, and this can not be changed. Sure, I get it and I respect Bacevich, but what is the point when he singles out yet another political "scientist" turned journo calling for war on Iran? 

The teaser for a recent Bret Stephens column in The New York Times accurately summarizes its contents: “If Iran won’t change its behavior we should sink its navy.” We’ve done it before and, by golly, we can do it again. Stephens offers his readers this sanitized version of history to make his case: “On April 14, 1988, the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, a frigate, hit an Iranian naval mine while sailing in the Persian Gulf. The explosion injured 10 of her crew and nearly sank the ship. Four days later, the U.S. Navy destroyed half the Iranian fleet in a matter of hours. Iran did not molest the Navy or international shipping for many years thereafter.” Stripped bare of context, that paragraph is factually correct. But stripping it of context, as Stephens does, transforms it into a form of untruth, not a blatant lie perhaps, but an exercise in sleight of hand. Indeed, the very purpose of his column is not to enlighten, but to deceive and manipulate.

I have news for Bacevich (I am sure he knows it)--there is NO context in US history of 20th and, especially, 21st century. There never was--did Andrew Bacevich look at the American historiography, bar some few superb exceptions of note such as Glantz and House, of World War Two lately? A DEFINING feature of an American political class and punditry, apart from utter lack of professionalism, is an astounding ability to exist in causality-free world. The fact that cause precedes the effect is a concept many American pundits may find intolerable.

Enter this comparative politics educated political philosopher Stephens--what can possibly this neocon boy write about other than some delusional BS on US "foreign policy", which long ago became the foreign policy by and for Israel. Apart from having zero tools required for any competent opinion of foreign policy, the way it is formed and conducted by competent people, including this tricky teeny-weeny military part, what can possibly neocon shill from New York write? I long ago stated, that you cannot argue with these people--they exist in their fake universe and are not configured to argue as in using knowledge and reason--they have neither. Most of them are humanities "educated" journos with zero military-academic and operational experiences who live off NYC media-Parnassus and Israeli interest groups in US. No, arguing, debating them is useless. The only way to deal with them is to do what they only can do, in the breaks between writing their sophomoric crap on US "foreign policy", personal (sophisticated) attacks. Most of them are cowards who wouldn't enlist to fight, nor will their children. None of them have any clue nor credentials (this is important) to competently speak on any tactical, operational or strategic issue. In the end, they have no clue about weapons. 

Pointing this out, as did Phil Giraldi in 2011:

“Neoconservatives are characteristically better versed in reading and writing about battles than actually fighting them, though that deficiency has not inhibited their initiation of vast schemes to remake half the world through force of arms.”

Statecraft, especially military craft today, is the realm for truly gifted and exquisitely educated, cultured and experienced--what could possibly some second-rate journo from totally discredited and corrupt US establishment media offer of value on the issue of war remains a puzzle. Until these warmongers and ignoramuses begin to be called for what they are--people who must have their mouths shut on any American war due to them being utterly unqualified, until all their "educational" credentials be exposed for what they are--useless concoction of a humanities' abstracts and glorified English degrees, until they are called out as Israeli shills and until they are forced into debate, which they will lose, on actual military art--until then these SOBs will continue to act as people whose useless opinions matter. But we also have to understand that this type of arrogance and ignorance is what dominates today corridors of US media-political power because it is a demand by the system. In the end, there is simply nobody else out there who could have seriously challenged this state of the affairs--the experience of the last 27 years provides an overwhelming empirical evidence of that. But that is the whole other story.   

Robert Fisk Has No Clue.

Robert Fisk's short bio on The Independent site tells that about him:

Robert Fisk is the multi-award winning Middle East correspondent of The Independent, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. Occasionally describing himself as an ‘Ottoman correspondent’ because of the huge area he covers, Fisk joined The Independent in 1989. He has written best-selling books on the Middle East, including Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilization. He was born in Kent in 1946 and gained his BA in English and Classics at Lancaster University. He holds a PhD in politics from Trinity College, Dublin.

 As many of you may have noticed, my public activity which manifests itself in writing is dedicated to issuing warnings about a systemic and dangerous inadequacy of most Western so called Russian "scholars", who have no military background whatsoever, when writing about Russia and her wars. Robert Fisk may be a good connoisseur of Middle East, an Arabic language speaker and even some kind of war correspondent, but professional military man he is not and he is certainly clueless on Russia. It is expected from people who have their degrees in English and so called Political pseudo-science. Let's face it—it is difficult to explain to the so called "humanities"-trained journo how physical properties of modern weapons influence tactical, operational and strategic considerations even on a single (forget global) theater of operations. It is even more difficult to explain it to a "products" of largely Anglo-Saxon "school of thought" (in reality ideological cliché generating machine) on Russia.

Fisk demonstrates his absolute cluelessness on real war and application of serious military power (yes, one needs serious military academic background or vast military service experience, or both, to grasp that) within the framework of the peer-to-peer competition between military superpowers in his newest piece in his native news outlet. In his "analysis" titled for some reason In the Middle East, Putin has a lot to thank Trump for right now, Fisk comes up with ridiculously shallow rationalization of why, indeed, Putin has to thank Trump and in doing so exhibits a complete lack of historic memory and understanding of the dynamics of Russia's involvement in Syria which was done completely on Russia's own volition and happened on Obama's watch in September 2015. Needless to say, operational and strategic benefits of Russians initially providing serious air power to Assad's troops became evident almost immediately, in the time when no one even seriously thought that Donald Trump would run for the office and win. But for Fisk those "little" details mean absolutely nothing against the background of some trivia which one inevitably gets in operational zones by talking to different people. But, obviously, the fact of Russians having a tactical, operational and strategic agency when dealing with the US in Syria is not known to Fisk. 

Fisk shocks his readers with some rather startling "revelation" about Putin and the reasons General Asapov was killed.

Twelve months ago, Putin’s top artillery technicians were searching through the rubble of eastern Aleppo to draw up painstaking maps of the fall of shot – the exact bomb crater and blast effects of air-dropped Russian munitions. I met one of their teams. Its reports were circulated, of course, to Russian military intelligence. But they first go directly to the Kremlin. Putin reads them. He is a micro-manager. There will be no Brezhnev-style Afghanistan disasters in Syria – or so the Russians pray – no slovenly retreats across the Amu Darya by political generals, no Kremlin lethargy. Russian officers speak good Arabic (and quite good English) – products of the Moscow School of Foreign Languages – and, like the Syrian army, their officers go to the front lines.

I don't know how to comment on that gibberish which references Soviet Afghan War's "political generals" or "disasters" (well established Western propaganda clichés) but somehow, I think, that "team" of Russians Fisk allegedly met and which supposedly told him that what is known in US as Battle Damage Assessment reports go directly to Kremlin, may have been pulling one on him, a simple joke on Russians' part. Putin may have been a serious intelligence professional but field military officer who would have no problems to easily navigate between imagery, ballistics and types of explosives he was not—it is a field which is covered in military, not intelligence, academies. So why would such reports go "directly" to Kremlin bypassing appropriate structures in General Staff remains a complete mystery to me. Does Putin, who is an extremely busy man, have the time to dwell over such data without appropriate professional military comments and briefings? I doubt it very much, but what do I really know.

But Fisk doesn't stop here with dubious claims. He does insist that Trump's exit from Iran's nuclear deal is what made Russian success in Syria possible.

As for what the “experts” like to call geopolitics, Putin immediately understood the need to uphold the Iranian nuclear accord when Trump tore it up. At one stroke, he became a closer ally of Iran, he could sympathize with Europe and he was able to present himself as steadfast in a treaty he signed with China. But he is entering a potential market war with the US – a dollar war – alongside a Europe whose governments may be prepared to stand up to Washington (some of them, at least), but whose big businessmen are already showing their usual cowardice in the face of American profit and loss. There is something scornful about all this. Putin is not going to worry about Russian mercenary deaths in Syria; their activities are intended to test American military willpower in Syria. Nor does America weep for its Kurdish mercenaries, or protect them in Afrin. Putin is not going to scream about human rights abuses in Gaza – the shooting down of unarmed demonstrators or the Israeli destruction of clinics or hospitals – when his own jets have been destroying clinics and hospitals in Syria. He sticks to the “war on terror” – and being an ally of all. The children may rattle their toys, but the tsar has the keys to the nursery. The crackpot in the White House neither knows nor cares nor, one suspects, understands. He long ago opened the door for Putin – and Putin walked straight through it.

One can sense both desperation and sour grapes, not to mention reading direct propaganda BS about Russian "mercenaries" willing "to test American military willpower" (why? And how?), in this admission of Russian and Syrian success in war unleashed by the US, Saudis and Israel. To "test" American military willpower Russia doesn't need "mercenaries", but Fisk doesn't know this, since he doesn't have any awareness of what was really happening on April 13 with Gerasimov conveying to Dunford all possible outcomes of US TLAM salvo hitting anything related to Russian forces in Syria. After all, the warning from Gerasimov (in Russian) that Russian forces will shoot down not only missiles but their carriers, including sinking surface targets, was not just some posturing. The warning was heeded, thankfully. As we all know—all those TLAMs "reached targets" and not a single one of those was shot down.  But the truth is--it wasn't Trump's "door opening" for Putin which expanded the field for Russia's diplomatic maneuvering in Syria. It was Russia's military power applied professionally which made it possible but as I stated so many times West's political and media class has no clue about the nature and application of military power and what consequences it produces—Fisk is no exception, he is the rule, in a sense of having no clue. In general, as I am being a public persona for 4 years the main motif of my writing is that West in general has some gigantic issues with causality, which means it is incapable of observing the cause and effect properly, whenever dealing with Russia. 

Here comes this issue of military power and strategy—Russians fight war in Syria not to "defeat" the US per se, albeit this defeat is a direct byproduct (intended or not is a matter for further discussion, but I state that it is intentional) of Russian activity in Syria. Nor Russians fight the war there to reestablish themselves as a major player in the Middle East—this too is a byproduct, however important, in Russia's war there. The main political objective of Russia, who fights jihadists for centuries is to draw the line for a very real Caliphate whose existence is clear and present danger to Russia's Southern underbelly. Fighting such a war with clearly defined objective is something unknown to Anglosphere "strategists" who used to live in a bubble of own delusions and who sure as hell should be aware of the role of the US and her "allies" in unleashing a horror of Islamism on the world. As mounting empirical evidence shows—Russians know damn well how to fight this kind of war and were doing this well before Trump allegedly "opened the door" to Putin. Truth is, once in Syria, one with even a modicum of military background or understanding of military affairs could see where this whole Russian war was going. Bibi flying to Moscow as if going to regular work should have given some clue about not necessarily hidden dynamics of that conflict. 

The foundation of this Russian success was Russian military power, whose application created most of the conditions and impetuses for a very effective diplomacy. Without Russia's cutting edge arsenal and military training of SAA no diplomacy or any other purely political action would have had any effect, as it never did in the last 20+ years with the "exceptional" and "indispensable" nation. Power matters and Russia demonstrated it starting from 2015 to a full extent, from an impressive operational tempo of her VKS forces, to a whole range of stand-off weapons and precision-guided munitions, to state-of-the-art C4ISR complex, to, finally, ability to control most of Mediterranean and Persian Gulf if push would come to shove.  Surely, Mr. Fisk, being a connoisseur of the Middle East should know what such power demonstration means there, nor should he be oblivious to the fact that Syrian AD shooting down a bulk of US and NATO missiles on April 13 has already come down in Arab world as a gigantic victory, the stuff of legends to be remembered proudly for generations. At the center of all that is Russia, or, if Fisk prefers, Putin and surely Iran knew this all along, as well as everyone knew that Trump will inevitably exit Iran Nuclear Deal—so, what door then did DJT "open" for Russia, when Russian-Iranian, initially tacit, geopolitical pact was in works a moment Russia deployed her force to Syria? If Mr. Fisk doesn't remember I may remind him, again, this was on Obama's, not Trump's, watch, a precise watch on which war on Syria was unleashed by Obama's operatives and DJT and his exiting Iran Nuclear Deal wasn't even in plans.    

Donald Trump may well be clueless and a "crackpot" but it was not on his but Obama's watch that atrocity in Libya happened, these were Obama's people who unleashed Nazi coup in Ukraine, in the end it was Obama who couldn't forgive Russia for playing a crucial role in eliminating Syria's chemical weapons. It was Obama who "opened the door" to Putin, or, more generally, Russia, which finally shed the last illusions about American benevolence and decidedly got to the real business of defending her national interests. Doing so, Russia's geopolitical weight and scale considered, not to mention her military history, she initiated massive tectonic geopolitical shifts going from strength to strength and that is what makes this piece by Fisk not only filled with many lies and propaganda (what's new?), but makes it into lament for already massive losses by Anglo-American conglomerate. Against these events, Trump's exiting Iran's Nuclear Deal is just an episode, however important, in a long and arduous process of American military and economic decline which only accelerated now. In the end, not even Obama or Bush the lesser, who is directly responsible for a mayhem in the ME, but American foreign policy consensus and a cabal of "experts" who serve it (Fisk will fit right in there) "long ago opened the door for Putin – and Putin walked straight through it."