drumdude wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:41 pm
I'm just pointing out that your "what about Iraq" argument is a very simplistic trope being spread by people who are incredibly ignorant about Russia and their war in Ukraine.
The flippancy with which you wave this away as a "simplistic trope" is astonishing. Yet it is not relevant whether it has become or trope or not, because it has just happens to be a fact that many of the people on the board of ISW and many of the people most vociferous in support for an aggressive NATO response over Ukraine were instrumental in advocating for the greatest world-historical blunder since Vietnam, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths over an invasion, occupation and basically two civil wars in the country; the complete fragmentation of the regional order with serious consequences that the world still lives with (e.g. an emboldened Iran); a weakening of American power on the world stage and thus an uncertain and dangerously fragmenting global order; and the downstream effects on the US economy, culture, and politics. That's just the short list.
The news cycle may have moved onto other shiny objects in the intervening decades, but we are still living with the mistakes of these people. All we got out of it was "oh sorry about that; some low-level intelligence officers made mistakes" (they have never said which ones were responsible for the mistake, and presumably they have not been held to account). Or as Rep. Omar might put it with her Palinesque eloquence, "some people did something." Not only has none of them been asked to answer for any for it, but they are to be heeded as sage guides in the crafting of policy—only those duped by Russian propaganda would disagree! If that's fine with you, keep flying that Ukrainian flag in our frontyard to signal yourself as one of the good guys who is too smart for "Russian propaganda." Excuse me for a being a little bit skeptical now that the band is getting back together to help direct US policy again (not that they really ever left)—only this time with the world's largest nuclear power and not a relatively insignificant country.
You should know if you are familiar with the region that the majority of <40 year old Eastern European people speak fluent English these days. Among those <20 years old it is rapidly approaching 100%. This is nothing like Iraq, where you need translators.
This reads like it came from Will Shryver's Twitter feed.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:43 pm
Well, it’s sober and rational as compared to most outlets. Look, I thought it was a good source of information on the conflict - informational, not rhetoric-filled, and had what I thought at the time were reputable board members. If you have recommendations for sites covering the war that meet the description I just typed out I’m all ears. In fact, I’d be grateful because I want good information.
It definitely appears more sober and rational, but I am skeptical because the people in it have a clear policy agenda that they argue for in other venues all the time. I used to look at ISW a lot as well last February and March for the same reasons; I just take it all with a pound of salt. I don't know that it is possible to get any good information, or even what the point of finding "good information" is supposed to be. Was it possible to get good information in the during the First World War? Probably not. Lots of propaganda on all sides. The Second World War had a moral clarity to it that meant that propaganda didn't matter anyway. I think the US government and media organizations are treating this as if there were the same moral clarity, but there isn't. Those who have spent more time studying Russian history than consuming American news know that there is just no way a Russian leader, no matter who, was going to tolerate a NATO-influenced or EU-leaning government on its border. Consider
A. J. P. Taylor on
the last significant Crimean War:
A. J. P. Taylor wrote:In some sense the Crimean war was predestined and had deep-seated causes. Neither Nicholas I nor Napoleon III nor the British government could retreat in the conflict for prestige once it was launched. Nicholas needed a subservient Turkey for the sake of Russian security; Napoleon needed success for the sake of his domestic position; the British government needed an independent Turkey for the security of the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet none of the three had conscious plans for aggression, not even Napoleon, despite his welcome of disturbance for its own sake. The British fears that Russia planned the dismemberment of Turkey were as ill founded as Russia’s fears that the western Powers threatened her security in the Black Sea. Mutual fear, not mutual aggression, caused the Crimean war.
Security concerns have always dominated Russian foreign policy in the modern era. Many of the top people at ISW know this of course—they just think America is a powerful enough to brush this aside, and more to the point that is necessary to do so. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I think it is important to understand that they are coming from a certain position and that they are not objective observers. The goal of the ISW,
according to their mission statement, is to support US policy:
We are committed to improving the nation’s ability to execute military operations and respond to emerging threats in order to achieve U.S. strategic objectives.
Given the people involved, it's not unreasonable to ask just what strategic objectives they think we need to achieve here. It is very telling of our times that if you ask that question, then you are an idiot duped by Russian propaganda and the evil Putler.
I think it is much more valuable to read history than news anyway, because most news is propaganda anyway (as is a lot of history, admittedly), or at least highly partisan. Read Robert Service's
Russia: Experiment with a People, written long before this conflict (20 years ago) and you can see a lot prescience about potential conflicts stemming from the way that nationalism was instrumentalized at the end of the Cold War.
Service is no friend to the Putin regime. One of the great American historians of Russia, Stephen Kotkin, has a short bibliographic note at the end of his book
Armageddon, about the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin, that is most instructive. He surveys the relevant works on Russian and eastern European history of the period and ends with this:
Stephen Kotkin wrote:For those interested in studying the art of contemporary history, there is no better place to turn than Thucydides.
I think that's good advice. A taste:
Thucydides wrote:It follows that it was not a very wonderful action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honor, and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides, we believed ourselves to be worthy of our position, and so you thought us till now, when calculations of interest have made you take up the cry of justice—a consideration which no one ever yet brought forward to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might.
No doubt, if you are satisfied with understanding things at the level of good guys vs. bad guys, then a simplistic appeal to Hitler and World War Two should be enough to see this as free countries vs. unfree countries. Surely that is an element, but in what way? One might also consider what elements of fear, honor, and interest are at play, because it is obvious that free vs. unfree does not apply in any easy way here or in relations with other countries. Those are not the angles from which any media organization will approach this, and certainly no government, so again, I do not know where the "good sources of information" are. Those who don't like my appeal to Thucydides should take it up with
Stephen Kotkin. Before they do, they should read this bit from Thucydides 1.176 alongside the A. J. P. Taylor above.
Beyond calling for skepticism of the ISW, I have no answers or insight, and am mostly echoing one of the great theorists of international relations:
Chap wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 5:21 pm
So I looked again, and found:
Mason received a B.A. with Honors in International Studies with a focus on US Foreign Policy and Russian from American University’s School of International Service.
Kat holds an MA in International Relations from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she studied civil-military relations and Russian.
Peter obtained an M.A. in International Political Economy from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies while studying Arabic.
Grace holds a B.A. in International Relations and Global Studies and English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also minored in Russian and earned a certificate in Security Studies.
He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BA in History and Chinese.
That makes five with some formal linguistic qualifications. Yup, there is also a native of Kyiv, and what appears to be a native Chinese speaker. Now in all fairness, does that constitute
a bunch of analysts in their mid twenties who don't even speak the languages of the the regions they study
?
Yes, in all fairness it does constitute that. I see euphemisms in three cases, not credentials. "focus on" "studied" and "while studying" and some of this in one- or two-year programs focused primarily on something else. You read that as language competency, really? And then of the two non-euphemisms, one is a minor? You can get a language minor by reaching intermediate conversation levels while taking a literature class in translation or a course or two in history, which could be on "women in Russia in cinema" to "the mongol invasions of the 14th century." These people wouldn't qualify to teach survey courses or introductory level language courses as part-time adjuncts at a community college, but I guess we will just let them be our analysts for a world-historical crisis involving nuclear powers? At least this time we'll not be surprised when our political leaders lay all the blame for disastrous decisions on some low level people.
Show me the person with a PhD in Russian or Chinese or Arabic who has written a monograph that required archival work. Then show me that their archival work was on a relevant topic—that should be the
minimum requirement, the absolute minimum for something like this. None of what you posted comes close to meeting that.
On language competencies, my skepticism is rooted in experience of people with these kinds of resumes. I had to learn Arabic because I married into a family that knew only Arabic (other than my spouse), and needed to learn it while living with them in their country, not as an NGO worker or government bureaucrat or grad student. But I did meet many such people with these sort of resumes who were there as part of an ideological program (NGOs) or government or completing their semester-long language requirement so that could then get a job in government or an NGO. Hardly any of them could actually have a sustained high-level conversation in the language. Some spoke newspaper Arabic and had a hard time in doing mundane things with the language. Arabic language education in the US is particularly bad, and I highly doubt Chinese language instruction is any better—but then most language education in this country pretty terrible. Russian language education used to be really good because the US government bathed universities and colleges in funding for it, but most of that dried up after the early 1990s. Even today, go have a look at the open jobs for language analysts in US intelligence. The requirements are remarkably low. I know of someone with a PhD in Hebrew Bible who used his coursework in Northwest Semitics (so, reading inscriptions or doing comparative linguistics) to barely pass the Arabic reading exam for a sigint job with the NSA—and he got the job! It wasn't because of his competence was great, just that it was the best of the candidates. After all, he "had studied" or "focused on" Arabic (one class in Qur'anic Arabic) as part of his dissertation research on Northwest Semitics, so that made him the most qualified for the job. Being called "Dr." was also impressive. By his own admission, he had a tough time with the language test.
Of those you found, they are not the kinds of qualifications I would rely on if I wanted to get a sober and rational perspective of an ongoing military conflict with seriously dangerous global implications. At the top there are people who are world-historical failures and careerists who should not be taken seriously; they apparently rely on the analysis of not very experienced and not very credentialed people in their 20s. I wonder why I am supposed to be impressed by this.
