Russia

Amazing Coincidence

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Anyone remember the Russian submarine Kursk (K-141)? In the year 2000, it was severely damaged by an on board explosion and sank in relatively shallow water. All hands were lost.

(And yes, I know that Wikipedia is unreliable and should not be used as a reference. But it is the best brief encapsulation of the facts that I have found on this subject.)

Within days of the disaster, both the British and Norwegian military had offered the use of their underwater rescue teams. The Russians flatly refused, even though both of the foreign teams were probably the best trained and equipped in the world for retrieving crew from a stricken submarine. This proved to be a terrible mistake on the part of Russia, as budget woes since the fall of the USSR had caused maintenance to be cut back to the point that their own specialized rescue submersibles were no longer able to do the job.

What is more, then President Vladimir Putin found himself at the center of a great deal of negative PR. On vacation when informed of the disaster, he made the decision to continue relaxing while the rescue efforts started. It wasn’t until five days after the explosion that he made a public statement about the incident, lending to the impression that he was unconcerned about the lives of fellow Russians.

The humiliation of the Russian government was complete when it came to light that they didn’t even have the means to raise the wreckage from the sea floor! Two private Dutch companies had to do the work, making the initial refusal of help all the more poignant for the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives in the disaster.

I’m bringing up this bit of ancient history because I see some amazing parallels between the Kursk disaster, and the current problems with oil gushing from a damaged offshore well.

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Strategic Success

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We have won our war with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. That’s who we declared it against and we won it.

We have won the peace after that war insofar as Iraq’s post-Saddam political arrangements are broadly democratic and not exclusively sectarian based. The authoritarians of the region do not like this and it is a good sign.

The objections to Iraq at this point seem to be that we have not had an outbreak of unicorns and free beer in the region and different countries who are badly ruled have not immediately seen the error of their ways. By that standard, the US did not win WW II because Stalin and Mao did not turn into just rulers and were also not overthrown.

We have budgeted for a certain size foreign policy mouth, that is a certain capacity to take on major problems and solve them. We have fully engaged said mouth and are chewing in our usual mix of brilliance and incompetence. It is our enemies’ strategy to induce us to over-extend ourselves and thus fail on all fronts. We should not go a bridge too far.

It is in our best interest regarding Iran that it be a full member of the civilized community of nations, that it fully exploit its energy resources and its geographic position to transit central asian energy resources to world markets. This is orthogonal to the issue of Iran being a nuclear power. Russia’s interest is to have Iran a pariah, forcing central asian energy flows to go through it. The PRC’s interest is also for Iran not to have central asian energy transit flows. Our major beef with Iran is that its internal stability currently depends on it being a pariah. Too much global connectivity leads to regime change and the mullahs know it. They will threaten and do any sort of thing to maintain tensions sufficient for them to continue to rule. Add nuclear weapons to this mix and you have a danger to the US because, for historical reasons, we are convenient scapegoat number one.

So let us not adopt the intellectual framework of our enemies. Our strategic task as americans and allies is to conceive of how to limit our reach to go no further than our grasp. So far we haven’t made this mistake. That’s what victory looks like for a military hegemon.

Mini-Book Review — Jones – The Human Factor

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Jones, Ishmael, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Encounter Books, 2008, 383 pp.

This book is the career memoir of a former Marine and stock broker who entered the “non-State Department” clandestine service of the CIA and was a deep cover case officer from the ’90s through the late ’00s. It covers the story of his training, deployment, and activities overseas focusing on radiological and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the course of tours in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and finally a “combat tour” in Iraq. Serving overseas with his wife and children under the cover of a “software solutions expert,” he contacted disaffected or bribe-able scientists and business-people from rogue nations. By casting his inquiries as commercial and academic opportunities, he was able to gather a steady stream of intelligence on WMD programs in the Third World.

The central theme of the book, however, is how staff at the home office (from top to bottom) either intentionally or inadvertently got in the way of his doing an effective job. Most authors are the hero of their memoirs but Jones does an admirable job of giving his pride in his accomplishments a reasonable airing without masking the real value of his book. The CIA is a large modern business with a primary mandate to stay out of the newspapers and off TV. How it does so is a tale both depressing and all too familiar.

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Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby

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Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby

Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, late of the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), author of A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia and On Horseback Through Asia Minor. He was also a pioneering aeronaut, author of A Ride Across the Channel: and Other Adventures in the Air. Col. Burnaby met his death in the hand-to-hand fighting of the Battle of Abu Klea, 1885. Queen Victoria fainted when she heard of his death.

Captain Frederick Augustus Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards was no ordinary officer. For a start he was a man of prodigious strength and stature. Standing six-foot-four in his stockinged feet, weighing fifteen stone, and possessing a 47 inch chest, he was reputed to be the strongest man in the British Army. Indeed, it was even said that he could carry a small pony under his arm. … Nor was this son of a country parson entirely brawn. He also displayed a remarkable gift for languages, being fluent in at least seven, including Russian, Turkish and Arabic. Finally, he was born with an insatiable appetite for adventure which he combined with a vigorous and colourful prose style. Inevitably, these two latter qualities brought him into contact with Fleet Street, with the result that during his generous annual leaves he served abroad on several occasions as a special correspondent of The Times and other journals … .

From The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk.

I am halfway through “A Ride to Khiva” and I am very grateful to Google Books, which provides full text, out-of-copyright books, at this point everything published before 1922. Through this wonderful service, I have been easily able to make the acquaintance of this extraordinary officer in his own prose, via Kindle.

One quote from the book. Burnaby is in St. Petersburg, and he sends a written request to the Russian Minister of War, Gen. Miliutin, asking his leave to travel across Russia and on to Khiva, which is (at that point) still beyond the Russian frontier. Miliutin responds in the negative, and offering as his explanation that he cannot answer for the security of travelers beyond the Tsar’s domains.

I should have much liked to have asked Gen. Miliutin one question, and to have heard his answer — not given solemnly as the Russian Chancellor makes his promises, but face to face, as a soldier — would he, when a captain, have turned his face homeward to St. Petersburg simply because he was told by a foreign government that it could not be responsible for his safety? I do not think so; and I have a far higher opinion of the Russian officers than to imagine that they would be deterred by such an argument if used to them under circumstances similar to those in which I found myself.

Burnaby, of course, goes anyway.

For further details, see The Life of Colonel Fred Burnaby By Thomas Wright (1908), and The True Blue: The Life and Adventures of Colonel Fred Burnaby, by Michael Alexander (1957).

Irony?

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Instapundit then Blog Prof; summary:
Gateway Belmont Club Arthur Chrenkoff

The Poles remember:
“The WW2 memorial service was for the victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre where thousands of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were murdered by the Soviet NKVD, a massacre that Russia has never apologized for.”

An accident happens:
President, wife, the head of the Polish army, the head of the presidential administration, The Army chief of staff, National Bank President, and Deputy Foreign Minister are now dead.

Truth will out:
Putin will investigate.

Life is so full of accidents, it is generally best not to first fasten on conspiracies. History often seems told by someone with vast reserves of irony.

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