Canadian Cincinnatus

The most underreported story today: Russia’s systematic meddling in the Presidential election

In Europe, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin supports every fringe party and movement, both far-left and far-right, as long as they destabilize the status quo. For this reason, many anti-EU parties are funded by the Kremlin. For instance, in Greece, both the ruling Coalition of the Extreme Left, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party are bankrolled by Russia. Until recently, this sort of interference was unknown in North America.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin has succeeded on getting his tentacles inside every major political party in the US. First, there is Jill Stein of the Green Party. Last year, she attended the Russia Today 10^th anniversary dinner. Afterwards, she sent this creepy message from Red Square:

“It’s been so wonderful to see people come together from across all borders and from the across the political spectrum, really, come together around basic human values, around human rights, around the need for international law, including the need to reign in U.S. exceptionalism and totally reform and revise our foreign policy so that it is based on international law, human rights, and diplomacy”

This from a country that recently invaded two other countries, that has conducted a scorched earth war in Chechnya, has threatened Denmark with a nuclear attack, that has practiced a nuclear attack on both Sweden and Poland, and whose current leader ascended to power by orchestrating a terror campaign against his own people that killed 293 souls.

Then there is Gary Johnson, the leader of the Libertarian Party. On Russia Today, he defended the Russian takeover of the Crimea, stating that the Ukraine (a sovereign country) is to Russia what Puerto Rico (a territory taken from another country) is to the US. I guess Johnson is unaware of the Budapest Accord, which guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine handing over its nuclear weapons to Russia. Both the US and Russia are signatories of this agreement – and therefore guarantors of Ukraine’s borders.

The real problems however are only encountered when you move up to the A-list of Presidential candidates. With Hillary Clinton, the concern is that Russia has the e-mails she had on her private server. The blackmail potential is huge. Against this, it must be noted that Hillary Clinton’s stated foreign policy has not to date favoured Putin.

More worrisome is the hack on the DNC server, which seems to have been done by Russia. Is Vladimir Putin is trying to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s direction by creating turmoil in the DNC? (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had to resign over the contents revealed.) If Hillary Clinton’s principal opponent were a normal candidate, he would have immediately condemned this inexcusable foreign meddling. Instead, Trump made a stupid joke about it, regaling in his opponent’s misfortune.

Speaking of the Trump campaign, it has so far been the epicenter of Kremlin influence. Mike Morell, the former head of the CIA, said this:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. [Emphasis added]”

An unwitting agent. An assessment like this - by a former CIA head of a presidential candidate - is unprecedented in American history. Trump supporters dismiss Morell, claiming that he is in the tank for Clinton. Of course, they do not consider the possibility that causality may flow in the other direction, that Morell only favours Clinton because he is horrified by Trump. This is what John Schindler says about Morell:

“His depiction of Trump as “an unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin is shared by many American intelligence personnel, including most of the ones I know. And I know a lot of them from my own time in the Intelligence Community. Among seasoned Russia-watchers and those acquainted with counterintelligence, I don’t know any spies who would substantially disagree with Morell’s comments on the Republican nominee.

In a recent column analyzing Trump’s bizarre comments on Crimea and Ukraine, I explained that his falsehoods uttered on national television meant that the GOP’s candidate “Either is clueless about Crimea and Ukraine, being totally unfamiliar with the basic issues, and decided to pontificate on the subject regardless while on national television. Or he is consciously parroting Kremlin propaganda.”

Morell has chosen my second option for Trump, characterizing him as Putin’s man. The term “unwitting agent” is spy-speak for what Lenin (supposedly) famously termed a Useful Idiot, that is, someone who is duped into spouting propaganda that he may not fully understand. This is a harsh assessment but more charitable than the accusation that Trump’s is a witting agent of the Kremlin.[again emphasis added]”

Who is John Schindler? He is a former NSA man and a former professor of the Naval War College who has written extensively about Hillary’s e-mail scandal, carrying the torch on this issue since the beginning. He believes Clinton has committed numerous felonies. And he wrote the above lines in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Roll that in your Trump cigar and smoke it.

There are also worrisome reports about Donald Trump’s finances. According to Edward Lucas – probably the best observer of Eastern European affairs writing today:

“His carefree ways with other people’s money — including numerous near-bankruptcies in past decades — mean that American banks shun him. 

Yet his debts have grown over the past year, from £270 million to £485 million; which suggests he may have borrowed heavily. 

His cash assets, meanwhile, have shrivelled. So where is the money coming from.

The short answer is Russia.

As the leading American newspaper, the Washington Post, reported: ‘Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.’

Trump’s son, Donald Jr, boasted to a property industry conference in 2008: ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’”

Then there are the numerous Kremlin-connected operatives in Donald Trump’s campaign, with the now-gone Paul Manafort being only the ugliest and most notable member. According to Schindler, Manafort was so closely connected to the Kremlin that he was probably run by a GRU (Russian military intelligence) operative when he was in the Ukraine working for Putin’s puppet there. He may have even helped orchestrate violent protests against US Marines in the Crimea in 2006. There is a word for somebody like that.

Then there is Carter Page, the Trump advisor with direct financial ties to Gazprom, the state-owned gas company that Vladimir Putin uses regularly as a foreign policy tool to enforce his will on other countries and to enrich his friends.

Third, there is Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s foreign policy guru, a retired Lieutenant General, and former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency. According to Schindler:

“It seems that Flynn remains furious at Obama for firing him, and that anger may be the driving force behind his cozy relationship with the Kremlin. General Flynn has frequently appeared on RT (formerly Russia Today), the Russian government’s news channel aimed at the outside world. RT is unadulterated Kremlin propaganda—not a normal news network—as evidenced by its showcasing avowed neo-Nazis and having its own Illuminati correspondent.

Since Flynn is a Cold War veteran and a career spy, he knows exactly what RT is—he has no excuses. Yet this has not deterred him from appearing there regularly. To top it off, last December he attended RT’s 10th anniversary gala in Moscow, including a photo op with President Vladimir Putin.

It’s safe to say Putin would have a word for any top retired Russian intelligence general who regularly appeared on official U.S. television and did a photo op with President Obama. It’s not a nice word, and that general would be well advised to avoid drinking tea.

To make matters worse, neither General Flynn nor RT were willing to comment if he is a paid contributor to the network. If a possible vice president is an actual paid employee of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, that seems like something the American people should know.”

Again, to Trump supporters: this assessment also appeared in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

You know, people ask me why I so strongly oppose Donald Trump even though I am a deeply committed conservative. This is why.

Conservatives have made a big deal of Hillary Clinton’s well-documented venality. And if she were facing off against any candidate but Donald Trump I would say the corruption charges against her would be disqualifying. But in the bigger picture, the Democrat Party has been corrupt for 150 years. There was Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine. There was the Daly machine in Chicago and there was fightin’ Tommy D’Alesandro of Baltimore. While Hillary Clinton may be high on the corruption scale, what she has done is no different than what Tom Pendergast did in Missouri 100 years ago. Another 4 years of Democrat corruption won’t kill the Republic.

But what would be unprecedented - an event unparalleled in American history - would be a President beholden to a hostile country, one with nuclear weapons aimed at the United States and who regards the US as its “greatest strategic adversary” (Putin’s words not mine). The only other example I can think of is Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in 1948. But he came a distant fourth in 1948.

The world situation is more unstable today than it has been since the end of the Cold War, largely because the American President for the last eight years has been so weak. If his replacement were somebody actively rooting for the other side, I do not think the center will hold.

This is why I don’t want Donald Trump in the White House. Every other consideration is secondary.

Finally, somebody else mentions the Moscow Apartment Bombings that launched Putin into power

One of the most dismal trends to emerge from conservatism in the past several years is the rise of the Putin-lover. I find these people hard to take. These purported conservatives hold up a former KGB thug who morphed into a gangster in the 1990’s as an avatar of conservatism. And why? Because gay pride parades are banned in Moscow – or something. Or I guess it is because he – the man who set up an Islamist strongman in Chechnya - is the Champion of Christendom.

In response, I usually bring up a revealing and horrifying incident from Putin’s past that has been driven down the memory hole – the Moscow Apartment Bombings.

What are the Moscow Apartment Bombings? Here’s a Cliff’s Notes summary: After spending a year as head of the FSB (the successor of the KGB), Putin became Boris Yeltsin’s Prime Minister in May 1999. By that point, Yeltsin’s popularity had plummeted to 2% in the polls. As well, his health was failing, Putin was a total unknown, and new Presidential elections were around the corner. Then a miracle happened:

“During the 12 days from September 4-16, however, everything changed. Four Russian apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. The controversies that wracked the country over corruption and privatization were suddenly forgotten. Eight years of post-Soviet Russian history was telescoped into the shocking images of bodies being carried out of the rubble of bombed apartment buildings.

Putin, the newly appointed Prime Minister, expressed perfectly the desire of the country for revenge. On September 24, Putin said, ‘We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport, and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we’ll rub them out (mochit) in the toilet…. The question is closed once and for all.’”

The bombings terrorized Russia, so much so that many Russians were afraid to sleep indoors. 293 people were killed and another thousand were wounded. But unexpectedly the bombings stopped as quickly as they had begun. On Sept 22, an apartment in Ryazan was targeted but the bombers were caught. They were FSB agents.

The official Kremlin story was that the Ryazan incident was not the attempted bombing it appeared to be but rather a “training exercise”. Of course, one of the serendipitous results of this terror campaign was that all of Russia’s economic problems were forgotten. On October 1, Russian forces entered Chechnya\ and Putin was elected President in March after an unprecedented rise in his popularity.

Curiously, no further bombings occurred or were attempted after Sept 22 ‘training exercise’. In the following year, the Russian Duma - now dominated by Putin supporters - sealed all records related to these bombings for 75 years.

Hmmm. The likeliest explanation is that a senior politician conducted a deadly terror campaign on his own soil in order to bolster his popularity and win an election. Let that sink it.

Given that Putin is a major player on the world stage today, and increasingly popular among certain fringe circles in the West, this story is more relevant than ever. For this reason, I am glad David Satter providing an in-depth retelling of this story over at The American Interest. Satter is a journalist and a foreign policy expert who specializes in Russia.

Go over to The American Interest and read the article. It should be read in full. Even though I knew a lot about this atrocity myself, I still learned a lot I didn’t know before. For instance, I did not know that rumours were actively circulating before the terror campaign that the Kremlin was considering such a thing. But apparently there were.

The quote above is taken from that article, which is in turn taken from an upcoming book on Russia, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road To Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin. It sounds like this should be mandatory reading to anybody who is interested in who runs Russia today.

Donald Trump and the strongmen

Yesterday, in his daily podcast, commentator Andrew Klavan listed five examples of things Trump has done that disqualify him for President. All five reasons are valid, but it was the fifth reason that struck a chord for me: that Trump often “has kind words for dictators.”

Mark Steyn has often said that he is the most pro-American. If that is true, then count me as the second most pro-American non-American. One principal reason I am is that - more than any other country - the United States has opposed tyranny and dictatorship. Obviously considerations of realpolitik require alliances of convenience with unsavoury regimes, but until recently, this was done reluctantly and only for pressing foreign policy reasons, and even then, not always. What was always the case was that no Democrat and Republican President ever romanticized a foreign strongman or considered him to be anything other than a lowlife and a thug. At least until Barack Obama, who has shown open favour to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Donald Trump seems to want to continue this abhorrent policy.

Trump’s affection for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is well known. Putin would be the former KGB goon who became the corrupt mafia leader of Russia; who rose to power via a terror campaign against the Russian people conducted by the FSB (the successors of the KGB); who openly murders his political opponents, such as anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaja (who was machine-gunned on Putin’s birthday) and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (who was butchered in broad daylight in Red Square); and who runs Chechnya through a vicious Islamist warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov.

If that weren’t enough, and to prove that he bromance with Putin isn’t some recent flight of fancy, in a 1990 Playboy interview he seems to agree with what the Chinese Communist government did in Tiananmen Square:

“What were your other impressions of the Soviet Union?

I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

You mean firm hand as in China?

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world–

Why is Gorbachev not firm enough?

I predict he will be overthrown, because he has shown extraordinary weakness. Suddenly, for the first time ever, there are coal-miner strikes and brush fires everywhere- which will all ultimately lead to a violent revolution. Yet Gorbachev is getting credit for being a wonderful leader and we should continue giving him credit, because he’s destroying the Soviet Union. But his giving an inch is going to end up costing him and all his friends what they most cherish-their jobs.”

So the Chicoms “almost blew it” because they ‘almost’ didn’t massacre the peaceful pro-liberty protesters? He also seems to blame Gorbachev for ending the Soviet Union. When asked about these comments during the election, he referred to the Tiananmen Massacre as a “riot”. Hey Donald, just a minor point of terminology: when peaceful protesters are machine-gunned in half and then run down with tanks, that’s not a “riot”, its a massacre.

Oh yeah, he also had kind word for Muammar Khaddaffi and Saddam Hussein.

I think it is obvious that such sentiments are completely contrary to the wording and spirit of the US Constitution, and would be abhorrent to America’s founding fathers if they were alive to hear them. The low regard for strongmen is one of America’s sterling qualities. It has propelled the United States to the first rank among the world’s nations. If you think America would have had as much success with a strongman in charge, think again. Why is it that all (and I mean all) the poor, decrepit nations of the world are governed by iron-fisted tyrants?

The worship of the strong man is also contrary to the principles of conservatism. Anglo-Saxon conservatism has two strands: libertarianism, and the conservatism of Edmund Burke. It is obvious that the worship of strongmen goes against every principle of libertarianism. To see what Edmund Burke thought about the worship of power, read this.

In other words, I regard Donald Trump’s infatuation with thuggish foreign strongmen as not only unconservative but contrary to the founding principles of the United States, principles that have made the US the world’s greatest nation.

Donald Trump should not be President.

Glenn Reynolds: “So if Putin is so popular, why is he creating a personal army outside of the general military power structure?”

In a surprise move, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is creating a new paramilitary police force:

“In less than a week, he liquidated the federal drug control and immigration agencies, firing more than 50,000 people, including his longtime ally from the KGB, Russian drug tsar Victor Ivanov. Putin then let Russians know that he had created a new force, called the National Guard, a powerful structure that includes more than 180,000 interior ministry troops plus special police units.

Putin’s shakeup creates a military and police force of up to 400,000 well-trained servicemen loyal to him personally. The newly appointed commander is one of Putin’s most trusted men, a former undercover KGB agent named Victor Zolotov, a man with the massive build and intimidating face of a bodyguard who has been responsible for the security of the Russian leadership for almost 20 years.”

As the good professor points out, “That’s usually what leaders do when they’re afraid of a coup.” The Daily Beast goes on:

“When The Daily Beast asked Putin supporters why Putin decided now to form what amounts to a vast Praetorian guard, they said (privately) that the Russian president is terrified a new Russian revolution will be staged by Washington.

‘Of course, the president is concerned, he can see that the United States wants to overthrow him, like they did to Gaddafi, or look what they have done in Ukraine—they dream of seeing Russia fall apart, so Putin takes measures to prevent a Ukrainian-style coup,’ Sergei Markov, a member of the Duma`s Public Chamber, told The Daily Beast.”

By Putin supporters, this article refers to Putin’s actual supporters in Russia, people who have some inside knowledge of Kremlin affairs, not Putin’s useful idiots in the West.

Returning, to Reynold’s question, Putin’s actions don’t seem to fit those of somebody confident in the support of his people, which contrasts with his sky high popularity that Russian public opinion surveys indicate.

This brings me to the thesis that I proposed a couple of years ago - that recent events have only confirmed: that the root of Putin’s recent bellicosity was the near-disastrous (from his perspective) 2012 Russian Presidential election when he transitioned back to the President’s office from a stint as Russia’s Prime Minister. The whole election was supposed to be a propaganda love-in for Putin, sort of a big Stalinist Kumbaya moment.

The first sign of trouble was when he was booed at an MMA tournament, the kind of event that should attract Putin supporters. Then came the demonstrations against corruption and abuse of power. To counter this, Putin pulled out all stops. Every TV channel covered Putin’s re-election campaign non-stop while ignoring the protests, his opponents, or anything else that might indicate that things in Russia were amiss. The existence of his real opponent, Mikhail Prokhonov, was buried. Only 8% of Russian’s even knew that he was a Presidential candidate. There was widespread ballot-box stuffing. Stories circulated that Putin supporters were bussed from work to rallies as well as the polling booth (and sometimes to multiple voting stations). There were reports that “one third of all electoral commissions had substantial irregularities at the stage of vote counting and tabulation.” It was reported that in some polling places in Chechnya - that traditional hotbed of Putin support – Vladimir Putin received greater than 100% of the vote. The results were so suspect that even the Communist Party didn’t acknowledge the results.

And still - after all that - Putin only received 64% of the vote!

My thesis is that after this near-death experience, Putin quietly said to himself, never again. I think all of his aggressive geopolitical moves, in Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Syria, against Sweden and Finland and Denmark and Great Britain and the US, all of it is designed to foster an Us vs. Them mentality among the Russian people. This is a standard go-to gimmick that demagogues use to drum up popularity and it has worked so far, mostly because Putin has been allowed to win (except in the Ukraine where he increasingly appears to be mired in a Vietnam-style conflict). Nobody has given him a bloody nose – yet.

Of course, as George H W Bush can attest, popularity after a military victory can be fleeting. In spite of his approval rating was 89% after the Gulf War, he went on to lose the Presidential election of 1992 to Bill Clinton badly. If Putin suffers a defeat somewhere, I think this US vs. Them dynamic will boomerang against him hard. Especially as there is nothing else positive going on in Russia these days.

Of course, how much damage this thug creates on his way to the ash-heap of history remains to be seen.

So how do we defeat ISIS then?

In my last article, I pointed out that committing conventional forces to Syria would be strategically stupid. This naturally begs the question: how do we then defeat ISIS if not with large quantities of infantrymen at the point of the spear? This article is my answer to that question.

In short, I think the proper strategy is to contain them and use attrition to wear them down. President Obama gave a much-derided interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday morning, seven hours before the Paris Massacre, where he stated that ISIS has been contained. President Obama’s mistake is not that a containment strategy is wrong but that he had failed to contain ISIS. So how do we contain ISIS?

You contain them by stopping all immigration from Syria into your country. And if another country accepts Syrian refugees, you must then take steps to restrict Syrian refugees from coming in via those countries. This is already happening in Europe (though too slowly) but it needs to happen in the US and Canada as well. There are ISIS sleeper cells and sympathizers here already of course, but they can be ground down though patient but relentless police work and counterintelligence operations (including active counterintelligence measures). The key to victory on the domestic front is to cut off their source of reinforcements. I won’t lie to you and tell you that this can be done quickly. It can’t. It is a slow, grinding process but the initial damage has already been done so we might as well just roll up our sleeves and get on with the job.

The natural objection here is that many of the Syrian refugees are probably the most persecuted people on the planet. The Christian and other minorities in Syria are the people who feel the sting of the ISIS lash the most. This is all true. And I think we should help the Syrian refugees as much as humanly possible - as long as we don’t compromise our own security by doing so. The fact is, most Syrian refugees come not directly from Syria but from refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. If we take in any of these deserving people, it should only be after we have vetted them deliberately and methodically in the camps where they currently reside. If in doubt, we should lean towards national security. The isolation of ISIS must be our priority.

That I am right about the way to isolate ISIS can be seen by the Western country in closest proximity to Syria – Israel. It is relatively unconcerned about them. They realize ISIS is militarily incompetent, but as long as their border to Syria is closed, they have little to worry about from them. (In contrast, Israel worries about Iran and its nuclear weapons program. We should follow their lead too, as that is a much bigger threat to the West than ISIS is.)

OK, say we’ve isolated ISIS, now what? The next step is to slowly grind ISIS down in Syria and Iraq through a war of attrition. In a very perceptive article (read the whole thing, as a great man once said), Walter Russell Mead makes the excellent point that in such a campaign, time is our friend while it is an enemy of theirs. What he means is this:

“The goal of the terrorists has always been to escape the drab realities of ordinary history and events, to create a kind of magical space—a return to the 7th century, the age of the Prophet, of miracles and legends. Joining the group offered a real life version of a video game.

The problem the jihadis are now facing is that while it is easy to create this kind of illusion in the short term, it is very hard to make it work over the long run. History grinds that kind of illusion down and drags those who tried to sustain it back into the world of real forces, real obstacles, real (as Clausewitz would say) friction.”

Holding a piece of territory, as ISIS now does, gives them the disadvantage that they now must govern it. This is not a “magical space” anymore but a real space, with ho-hum logistical problems like sewage and food distribution. A logical, rational mind is best suited for such tasks. An apocalyptic religious fanatic is the worst suited. Give them time and their Islamic paradise will turn into hell on earth. (I know it already is a hell on earth, but this fact is currently obscured by the excitement of their military adventures. Unfortunately, euphoria based on military glory can only be maintained for so long, as Vladimir Putin is about to discover in Russia.) In waging this war of attrition, we need to do everything we can to hasten the process along – disrupting cell-phone communications, bombing the oil fields in order to deny them a source of revenue, launch destabilizing commando raids, etc. In this phase of the war our motto should be, the worse the better.

Our ultimate goal should be not simply to defeat ISIS by making the Caliphate implode from its own contradictions, but to make ISIS look like a bunch of incompetent bumblers. The more examples there are of Islamofascist losers, the fewer new Islamofascist movements will develop in the future.

This is a long war, where patience is as much a virtue as ruthlessness and speed. We cannot let ISIS goad us into their preferred course of action by the emotions of the moment. If we do, we are only allowing ourselves to become a cooperative adversary.

Putting boots on the ground in Syria is nuts

Since World War II, the wars that America remembers with least fondness are its counterinsurgency struggles: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They were seen as long, drawn out, and unsuccessful. They were considered failures because after the US got tired of the protracted struggle and left, the enemy just moved into the vacuum left behind. The wars the US remembers with fondness (or doesn’t remember at all) are El Salvador, the Invasion of Grenada, the Invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the air campaign over Bosnia, the early stages of Afghanistan, and the Iraq Invasion. This is largely because these wars were successful. With the exception of El Salvador, they were short, sharp conventional wars that resulted in overwhelming victory.

These examples demonstrate that the US fares much better in conventional wars than it does in counterinsurgency operations. The obvious lesson for American strategists in this history is that if US has enemies that it needs to defeat, it should avoid counter-insurgency campaigns (except when they can be done on a sufficiently low level so that they can be maintained comfortably over an extended period of time - like El Salvador), while maneuvering to defeat its enemies conventionally.

The problem with going into Syria to defeat ISIS is not that the US cannot crush the Islamic State militarily. On the contrary, one heavy armoured division, sufficiently supplied, could romp across ISIS-held territory in a matter of weeks. The problem is that ISIS won’t put up a fight because they know they will lose.

There is a story floating around that ISIS actually does what an apocalyptic confrontation, where they can defeat evil finally and for all time. Their ideology is said to favour the village of Dabiq, just north of Aleppo, for this apocalyptic battle. If I though that ISIS were actually serious about this, then I would be the most enthusiastic supporter of a ground invasion around. ISIS is a rag-tag force of incompetents and lunatics. In a pitched battle, they will lose - and fast. Killing them to the last man would be a great way to get rid of them for good. But I doubt they will be that much of a cooperative adversary.

The one type of war the Arabs have shown themselves to be good at is guerilla war. In all likelihood, instead of seeking the apocalypse, they will melt away among the masses, leaving the US Army with a Pyrrhic victory. A few months after that victory, the guerilla war will begin, with a car bombing here, a sniper there, and a suicide bomber yesterday afternoon. This will force the US into a long, grinding counterinsurgency operation that will take a decade to win, and will require over 100,000 men on the ground for that entire time. And in the end, all we will end up controlling is a strategically worthless piece of real estate (while magnanimously allowing the Chinese to buy the mineral rights, as was done in Afghanistan).

We have seen this movie before. Do we really want to see it again?

Referendum in Moscow on reinstalling statue of KGB founder

Feliks Dzerzhinsky was one of the original Bolsheviks who, in the October Revolution of 1917, overthrew the Czar to set up the world’s first communist government. Dzerzhinsky’s contribution to the fledgling Soviet Union was to organize Cheka, the communists’ feared secret police force. Due to various purges and reorgs down the years, the name mutated through various alphabet-soup acronyms. Today, this organization is best known by the three-letter acronym KGB. This name lasted from 1954 until 1991, when it was divided into the various components that exist today: the FSB, the SVR, and others.

It has been estimated that the Soviet Union deliberately murdered between 10 and 30 million of its own people for nutso political reasons. The main agent behind this atrocity was Cheka and its successors.  For his role in setting up Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky established himself as one of history’s greatest criminals. He was truly a loathsome person in every way. In his personal life he was apparently a sexual sadist. In this way, both his personal and professional lives were twisted and perverted.

As a result, a statue of him in front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, was removed in the early 90’s. This was newly liberated Russia distancing herself from an evil part of its history. Now we hear news that the City of Moscow is planning a referendum – the first on any topic since the collapse of the Soviet Union - on the restoration of Iron Feliks’s statue.

If one said that this is kind of like Berlin wanting to set up a statue of Heinrich Himmler, one would be wrong. It is not kind of like putting up a statue of Himmler, it is exactly like putting up a statue of the Reichsfuhrer. 

Given that nothing happens in Russia these days – especially in Moscow - without at least the tacit approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin, I would like to pose a question to all those conservatives out there who think Putin is a swell guy. Do you still think he is the champion of western civilization?

Well, do ya?

How much are all his military exercises costing Vladimir Putin?

One of the themes in my writings is that dictatorships are weaker than they appear on the surface (the reverse - that democracies are stronger than they appear – is also true).

For instance, some people – some even conservatives! – view Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as some kind of a Nietzschean superman who is so competent and capable that it is futile to resist his will. A related view - often held by these same people - is that the Western democracies are too decadent, weak, and corrupt to defend themselves - as evinced by weak, stupid and/or incompetent leaders like, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, and Obama. Both opinions are of course wrong, even when they are not bleeding into cowardice. The simple fact is that Western democracies seem weaker than they really are, and despotisms seem stronger than they really are, because we air our dirty laundry out in public and the dictators hide it. Even if the above appraisal of world leaders is completely accurate, I will bet on the strong institutions over the strong individuals any day.

In line with this, it should be remembered that the Russian economy is a one-note song and took a terrific hit with the collapse in oil prices. Since the Crimean takeover, Russia suffered a net migration of million people out of the country! With this backdrop, and in addition to his ongoing adventures in the Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been conducting ongoing military exercises at an aggressive pace. For instance, upon returning from his mysterious 10-day absence, he abruptly announced a full-scale military exercise.

In light of this, I wonder how much is all of this costing him. Most people do not realize that a significant part of the cost of running an army is operating those expensive modern weapon systems. They may be expensive to buy, but so is running them. Those Tupolev Bear bombers that Russia has been flying alongside everybody’s borders (propeller-driven aircraft designed by German POW’s after the war, I might add), don’t fly themselves. This is why most of the Russian Air Force and Navy was idle throughout most of the 90’s and early 2000’s. They couldn’t afford to operate the ships and planes. With the price of oil coming back down to earth, all of this activity must be imposing a terrific strain on the Russian state – a strain that the Kremlin is able to, for now, hide behind a wall of slick propaganda.

If the West had a real leader, he’d understand that this show of force is really an indication of weakness not a sign of strength. And he’d push back hard.

Why the arguments against arming the Ukraine are wrong and stupid

Right now, the fledgling democracy of the Ukraine is fighting for its life against Russian incursion in the East. Currently the war is in a phase that John Schindler, over at the excellent 20committee.com blog, has termed a “Special War”. To counter this aggression, one of the strategic options on the table is providing military aid to the Ukraine. Schindler argues for:

“Ukraine’s pressing military needs exist in a few areas. Conventional weapons — armor and artillery, and ammunition for them — Kyiv possesses in abundance; they have no need for heavy weapons from the West at this point.

However, there are a few areas where modest Western gifts of essentially defensive weapons — particularly light anti-armor and air defense systems, plus counterbattery radars and tactical electronic warfare gear — would prove a serious problem for the Russians.”

This sounds reasonable to me.

One counterargument is that arming the Ukrainians will ‘escalate’ the war. The premise of this argument is that the situation in the Ukraine is ‘spiraling out of control’, much like the summer of 1914 spiraled from a political assassination in the Balkans to a horrific 4-year bloodbath. For this premise to be true, the situation on the ground must consist of multiple actors, each making belligerent moves that inspire their opponents to make other belligerent moves, and so on, with each iteration ratcheting up the intensity towards an end that nobody desires. This is obviously not the case here. What we have is a peace-loving country that only wants to maintain its freedom and independence. We also have another country, much more powerful than the first, who is trying to destabilize and destroy the first. Third, we have a bunch of powerful onlookers paralyzed by fear. In reality, the trajectory of this war is being driven by one man, Vladimir Putin, who is adjusting the intensity of the Ukrainian War on a dial in the Kremlin.

A much more accurate historical analogy would be late 1930’s Europe. One of the lessons of those dark times is that appeasement against an aggressive dictator is counterproductive. Each time an opportunity presented itself to stand up to Hitler, the West chickened out. Each time, the West lost an ally and gave Germany more precious time to continue rearming, raising the stakes until World War II became inevitable.

In the case of 21^st century Russia, Putin invaded Georgia and the West did nothing. Encouraged, Putin took Crimea, and the West did nothing. Feeling no resistance, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. In 2008, the Russian military was a ramshackled outfit. Russians then began an ambitious modernization program. The Russian army of today is much more capable than it was 6 years ago. This is why the question posed by the isolationist - is the Ukraine worth it? – is so stupid. The premise is invalid. It is not just about Ukraine, just as it was not just about Georgia in 2008. It is about Putin’s next target, and the next, and then the next. Until NATO’s Article 5 is invoked. And now you have a nuclear standoff. And if you blink then, there goes the entire security structure of Europe itself. All the peace that Europe enjoyed under Pax Americana since World War II will have been swept aside.

What we are dealing with is Bonapartism. Though Vladimir Putin’s talents are in no way comparable to Napoleon’s, he has enjoyed enough success for megalomania to have kicked in. History offers few examples of conquerors who stopped. The only example I can think of is Otto von Bismarck. The usual trajectory is for such men to continue until they are killed. So in a real sense Putin is doomed. The only question is how much damage will he do before his demise.

It is for this reason that a proxy war in the Ukraine is the best course of action. The issue here is not even whether Russia gets to keep the Crimean peninsula (ethnically cleansed as it was by Stalin of its native Tartars) or Eastern Ukraine (containing a significant Russian minority). It is that the price Putin pays for his Ukrainian adventures must be maximized. The more he pays now, the less willpower and resources he can muster in the future. Eventually, the Russian people will turn on him.

Which leads to another popular counterargument: that we must leave Putin alone because he is popular with Russians. This is an absurd standard. Should the West have acquiesced to Hitler because he was popular with Germans? In either case, they were (or are) popular because they were (or are) winning. Everybody loves a winner, not so much a loser. Right now, Russians have been shielded from the bad effects of the war by the state subsidies and propaganda. It has been said that Russians are good at suffering, but this is only because they have had a lot of practice. It is not because they like it. After a defeat, or after the oil money runs out, their opinions will be different.

One objection to arming the Ukrainians is that this would be a dangerous move. You know what? This is correct. But you know what is even more dangerous than a proxy war in the Ukraine? A direct conflict between NATO and Russia. It is precisely for this reason that it is in everybody’s interest to keep the conflict with Russia as far east as possible, and, if possible, confined to non-NATO allies. That is why we should do everything in our power to help the Ukrainians win.

The exact parallel here is the Russian Afghan War. This was a proxy war, and against a much more formidable adversary. It worked then, and it can work again. The Ukrainians have a rich history of partisan warfare to draw upon. Dictatorships are brittle in a way that democracies are not. The Soviet Union could not withstand the defeat in Afghanistan in the same way that the Tsar could not stand the defeat against Japan.

Another argument made for abandoning the Ukraine is that the Ukraine, Kiev specifically, is historically the birthplace of Russia; that for Putin, the Ukraine is a holy cause, and that for the US to interfere there would be like for Russia to interfere in Mexico. How would the US like that? The proper answer to this is, do the Ukrainian people have a say in this? If Kiev is the ancient heart of Russia, why do the current inhabitants of Kiev hate Russia so much? The answer does not lie in the 10^th century but in the 20^th. Does not the Holodomor trump what happened a millennia ago? The Ukrainians hate the Russians because Stalin starved to death 2.5 to 7.5 million Ukrainians. That is why, after World War II, the Ukrainians fought an epic partisan war against the Soviet Union for a decade – another recent epic historical event to trump medieval trivia.

The same can also be said about Russia’s need for buffer states. Do not the inhabitants of these states get a say? There is a reason that the pepole in those countries hate the Russians and prefer the West. The have experienced freedom and know what Russian tyranny really is like. This motivation also speaks to Putin’s strategic stupidity. As I have argued before, for all of his tactical cleverness, Putin is a strategic dunce. He is allying with and helping Russia’s long-term strategic enemies (like Iran and China), while taking the only peaceful border he has, his Western border, which is composed of countries who want nothing but peace with Russia, and turning it into a war zone.

The West needs to understand what it faces squarely and begin to take straightforward action against a menace that has been allowed by wishful thinking and neglect to fester. A long overdue step in this regard would be to help the peace-loving Ukrainian people defend themselves from an unprincipled, power-hungry dictator, who bombed his own citizens to get into power.

How Greece can escape the Euro and prosper

A showdown appears inevitable between Greece and the EU now that an explicitly anti-EU left-wing party, Syriza, won the recent Greek elections. The new Greek Prime Minister, Alex Tsipras, has promised to end austerity, even if it means pulling Greece out of the Eurozone and reinstating the Drachma. Could this work out for Greece?

If I were a betting man I would say no. The chips are stacked against Greece, but there is a way it can be done, and with Greece coming out ahead.

The current problem with Greece is that the Euro is too powerful a currency for Greece’s weak and unproductive economy. The strength of the Euro is set by Germany’s dynamic, productive, export-oriented economy. Because Greece isn’t as dynamic or productive as Germany, its goods can’t compete on the international market so long as they are priced in Euros. The Euro also provides an artificial boost to the spending power of Greeks, enabling them to purchase foreign goods that would be priced out of reach (like German cars) if they had a normal currency.  The result is an atrophying, import-oriented economy.

There is a way out – but just barely. If Greece abandons the Euro for the Drachma, the Greek export sector will instantly get a boost. Unfortunately, this also means that the rest of the Greek economy will get hit in the face by a gale force wind because the price of every import good will skyrocket. The government budget will also come under immediate strain. Budget deficits will be forced to end overnight as the government is cut off from foreign capital.

The key to overcoming these difficulties is to power through them as quickly as possible. This means enabling the export sector in every way possible. This includes massive deregulation as well as aggressive tax cuts on producers. (I know, I know, a lot of Greece’s red tape emanates from Brussels. But with all eyes on the currently battle, nobody will care if EU decrees on toilet seats and light bulbs go ignored.)

As well, because the government has an apparent operating surplus today (i.e. not counting the interest payments), balancing the budget quickly isn’t as far-fetched as it seems - as long as you are willing to forgo paying interest on your debt. These can be renegotiated, as all the leverage will then lie with the Greek government. You want your money back Mr. German banker, then let’s talk.

Unfortunately, to pull this off, austerity will have to be maintained – and for the short-term, even tightened. Once the export sector kicks in, tax revenues will surge and the immediate crisis will have passed. But until then, the people will be hit hard, and for this program to succeed, they must grin and bear it. On the positive side, once the crisis ends, Greece’s economy will have been completely transformed from the sick man of Europe into a Mediterranean tiger.

Can Greece do this? Well, my homeland of Estonia did just that in 1991 when it separated itself from the Soviet Union. Radical free-market reforms were instituted and all subsidies to unproductive Soviet-era industries were dropped - instantly. As a result, by 1994 its GDP had collapsed by 45%. 45%! But by 1999, the GDP had recovered and was growing fast. The upside was that the economy of 1999 was completely different from the economy of 1991. Estonia had become the most dynamic economy of Europe.

One thing that enabled it to happen was national willpower. Everybody was willing to take the pain, because the alternative was unthinkable – national failure and shame. Pensioners, who had their savings wiped out when rubles became worthless, and who could barely make ends meet (especially if they didn’t have kids), had the memories of the Republic they grew up under in the 1930’s to see them through. We had to prove we were better than our hated Soviet overlords, but a lot of those old people had lived through Stalin’s reign so they were tough. Also, thanks to the Soviet Union, socialism was thoroughly discredited. Any Estonian who advocated for socialism was considered a traitor.

Does Greece have this willpower? I doubt it. In today’s Greece, socialism has not been discredited by history. In fact, socialism is looked to for salvation, as an antidote to the hated German-imposed austerity. And Alex Tsipras is not Mart Laar, Estonia’s most important Prime Minister of the 90’s, who won the Milton Freidman Prize in 2006, and who instituted the world’s first flat tax.

Here’s an anecdote of how radically free-market Estonia was before it joined the EU: when Estonia was invited to join the World Trade Organization, the government was told that it had to reduce tariffs and duties as a condition of acceptance. The Estonian delegation looked puzzled. But we don’t have any tariffs or duties on anything, so how can we cut them? In contrast, Tsipras wants to rehire civil servants and bring prosperity back by raising public pensions! Well, he can certainly try that if he wants to, but he had better have high-speed printing presses on hand to keep up with the resulting inflation.

Like in a lot of financial crises, a solution is at hand and it is possible, but only for those willing to take the bitter medicine that it requires.