Group thinking our mindless way to yet another war — this time with Russia

06 January 2017

Stupidity fascinates me

It is somewhat like discovering that your cutting edge artificial intelligence robot is dumb as a brick in unanticipated ways.

Consider the United States' warmongering against the Russian Federation

The United States' most recent drum-beating began when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost the United States' 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

During that notably nitwitted campaign, a hackers' group (with evidently Russian characteristics) managed to expose ethical corruption in the Democratic Party's National Committee.

The assumed Russian foray led Clinton supporters to suspect that the Federation had intentionally slanted the American vote toward Donald Trump.

And in dribs and drabs, the American intelligence community climbed on board. We have been led to infer that America's voting existence has been existentially threatened. OMG.

In reality, the Russian ploy, if it happened, was a comparatively typical Great Power foray into mildly screwing with one's adversaries. The United States does this kind of thing every day.

From that comparatively trivial basis, all hell has broken loose. American Group Think is urging us to flirt with the edges of nuclear war.

Forgive the length of what follows

I found it necessary to spell out Russia's likely response to American retaliatory excess. Intelligent strategy is not an American strength. Explaining how our current geopolitical course may backfire took a few words.

An imbecilic Senate tone

Yesterday, I watched clips of the "good ole boy" United States Senate Armed Services Committee interview of the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper.

You can watch the entire session, here.

Senators lobbed broadly construed, mostly inane questions toward Director Clapper. And Clapper, playing his Respectable Authority role with graceful competence, lobbed back evidence-lacking answers.

The staged circus act seamlessly fit its intended "Russia is evil" meme.

The crowning moment came when

Senator Lindsey Graham good-ole-boy asked Director Clapper whether such nefarious Russian activities could possibly occur without President Putin's knowledge.

Clapper, staying on script, replied that they could not. Meaning that — not only is Russian leadership comprised of awful people — they have a truly heinous head in the infamous Mr. Vlad.

This is not a smart thing, Senators

American Group Think has created one strategic disaster after another for decades. Ever since the end of World War II.

Today, we are witnessing another permutation of our love affair with Stupidity's violence. One influential American leader after another is announcing that Russians did awful things to us and that they must be made to pay.

Left out of this calculus is the reality that the Russians (if they did it) didn't actually do much. And second, that screwing them in actually painful ways is just going to escalate the situation to genuine seriousness.

Short-sighted American leaders are blowing matters out of reasonable proportion.

The down side to being idiots

Knowing one's adversaries is an initial step to competent strategizing. Here, President Putin has repeatedly proven that he is tactically superior to his chosen foes.

This means that we Americans need to be prepared to deal with a wily opponent. One has to anticipate the ways that thoughtlessly propagated American strategy might come back to bite us.

Unforeseen ass-bites

In President Putin's shoes, I would do what our Islamic insurgent foes have done. Use America's own military prowess to over-extend its strategic reach.

This can be easily done in Eastern Europe. Putin has previously used Russia-sympathizing populations in adjacent nations to stir trouble. The Federation then surreptitiously intervenes to protect its folk.

The United States has, thus far, been unable to roll back these expansions of Russian influence.

Indeed, we have invited some of the Federation's alleged transgressions by having directly fostered neo-Nazi influence in those same regions. Payback's sometimes a bitch, isn't it?

Let's take Putin's previous tactic a step further. He could flirt with threatening the Baltic States. Or any other convenient target on the Russia's reachable periphery, including the Middle East.

What would the US do in response?

We would probably mass troops and military materiel at anticipated threat points.

Putin could dance away (along relatively interior lines) to create diversionary play at some other place — while quietly infiltrating a weak point that we failed to anticipate.

This is not a game that the United States is likely to win at such extreme logistical distances.

Like Muhammad Ali's "rope a dope" strategy

Here the "dope" is the United States, which never saw a problem that did not require a large, unwieldy hammer to solve.

Knowing how one's strengths can be turned into weaknesses by a clever opponent is a necessary element of smart strategic thinking.

Enter the nukes

The crux of rope-a-doping in this scenario is the existence of Russia's giant nuclear arsenal.

The United States is unlikely, if it values its continued existence, to put the Federation into existential woe. This means that Putin knows that there are limits beyond which a warned US will not go.

In this strategic respect, President Putin is not the former (more humanistically inclined) President Gorbachev. Putin would rather, I am reasonably certain, risk losing Russia's existence than submit to what he sees as continued American imperialism.

Putin's understandably resistive attitude makes the Russian Federation a dangerous adversary to provoke unnecessarily.

Unfortunately, I have seen nothing in American leadership that encourages me to think that we are good at accurately characterizing our opponents' intent, skills and closely held values.

Two world wars have resulted from similar perceptual shortcomings in other nations.

The people who ultimately will pay — are those who live along the Federation's borders

Attempting to attack the Federation on in its own homeland would probably result in nuclear war.

Consequently, confronting Russia militarily would be done on its periphery.

For self-righteously inclined Americans — which appear to be most of us

Russia's resurgent combativeness was the direct result of the United States arrogantly foolish expansion of NATO toward the former Soviet Union's periphery.

George F. Kennan — Cold War "containment" strategist, now deceased — anticipated today's prickly result. He was interviewed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 1998:

[W]hen I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion . . .:

''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home.

''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.

["]No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.

"[NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''

''What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,'' added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs . . . defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years.

"Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia . . . ."

Had one of our adversaries done the same provocatively expansionist thing in the Western Hemisphere, war would certainly have resulted. Witness the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Americans obtusely fail to see this. Flawed insight motivates armed conflicts that we consistently lose.

We are today teetering on the cusp of starting a war with Russia. We will not be able to finish it to our advantage. The People's Republic of China would be the chief beneficiary.

The moral? — Be careful whom you provoke over comparative trivialities

If you ask me whom to bet on — victors at Stalingrad or losers in Vietnam — you know whom I will pick. Putin's thinking will go the same way.

Russian determination is something that Napoleon and Hitler vastly underestimated. If the United States forces the Russian Federation into armed conflict, the entirety of the Federation will be aroused in a way that Americans have not and cannot anticipate.

I detest American group think. Its thoughtlessness proposes solutions to complicated problems that often fail in deadly ways.

Yesterday's Senate "good ole boy" dog-and-pony show was especially nauseating. There is little as dangerous as a group of spoiled middle-aged and elderly men, whose shriveling scrotums serve as the only brain they have left.

If you doubt that revolting metaphor, just watch this clip of the Senate committee session.

These are the kinds of posturing fools, who repeatedly start wars that other people exclusively pay the price for.

I don't want our troops and foreign nations' innocents carrying that load.

PeteFree.com

Group thinking our mindless way to yet another war — this time with Russia