You might as well speak Martian to me as military-talk, but even I can figure out that this doesn’t look good for Ukraine. Read the whole thing. Read Zimerman, period. His analysis is above my head, but I follow the big picture.
John Mearsheimer is having a moment, and a deserved one. With our centers of power in the hands of Russophobic madmen, and with the media being entirely pro-NATO/pro-war, it’s good to have a tenured professor in a major university as a partial counterweight.
Nevertheless, I have a major reservation about the guy, and a few minor ones.
Before I get to my reservations, let me salute him for showing up Edward Luttwak.
The only good thing about getting old is you remember the spasms of crazy people go through, although I must admit that this one took a bit of reminding. You young’uns may not remember (because it happened before you were born) that before Desert Storm many sage and credentialed men predicted that the US would lose, badly!
Yes!
One of these was none other than Mr. Grand Strategy himself. Luttwak was flying high on the good reviews of his book about Rome, published in 1979. I’ll have something to say about this in due course, but for now, in 1991, Luttwak predicted that the US was going to lose in Desert Storm. Yes, he did! Look it up!
Forget the rights and the wrongs of the conflict, the smart money was that the US was going to lose thousands of men in that pitiless desert, up against Saddam’s crack Republican Guards.
Thousands of American troops were supposed to be dead or wounded at this point. Hospitals stateside were going to be overwhelmed. The ground war was going to grind on for weeks. The battlefield would ``go chemical'' instantly. Public support for the war would evaporate. Israel would retaliate against Iraq and the allied coalition would fall apart. Terrorism would paralyze the West.
People were actually for real saying this. And don’t forget the bullshit propaganda that convinced us to go ahead with it:1:
I am ashamed to admit that I fell for this. A close friend warned me that it was war propaganda, but I went for it. Why? I wanted to. I was a gullible fool, set up by years of anti-Arab, pro-American propaganda, and I fell for it. Amnesty wouldn’t lie, would it? It did.
And doesn’t the name “Republican Guards” scare you? Doesn’t the mere invocation of the phrase make you quake in your boots?
Chief among the doom saying prophets was Edward Luttwak:
“If tens of thousands of Marines on the ground were inexcusably sent into a frontal attack against the Iraqi minefields, entrenched infantry, dug-in tanks and ample artillery now in Kuwait, many would die,'' said Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a Jan. 13 article in The New York Times. In Senate testimony in November, Luttwak estimated that thousands of Americans would die in a ground invasion.
I lost track of him. I don’t spend my spare time paying attention to failed pundits. He seems or seemed to have disappeared. Well, he resurfaced, and I found out that indeed Luttwalk did slink off but only to bide his time for a comeback, for Washington, like its evil twin Hollywood, is built on comebacks.2
Starting with Ukraine I became aware of him again and he was singing the same tune. Russian debacle, Putin kaput, we’ve got a winner here!
John Mearsheimer wasn’t fooled.
John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, predicted in the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 15 that the U.S. military would ``clobber'' the Iraqis and arrive in Kuwait City a day or two after the ground war began.
“I called this one,” he boasts.
He called it, and he’s been calling a lot right since, especially on Ukraine, and he deserves credit for that.
I have reservations about Mearsheimer but I need to gather my thoughts, so I’ll leave them to a future poast.
For now, savor the amusement of remembering how pundits screw up BADLY.
PS:
For a gasp-inducing example from the shit heap of punditry, this will do:
President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Ukrainian warriors have unleashed a “Red Dawn”-like response against Russian troop advances in nearly every part of the country. Russian tanks — the much-heralded T-72, T-80 and T-90 — are no match for the Javelin, Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW), Baykar Bayraktar TB2 and Switchblade drones. Their turrets litter the Ukraine landscape. Neither composite armor, explosive reactive armor, nor countermeasure suites have been effective against the modern weapon systems designed to destroy them.
As Wolfgang Pauli said, “Not even wrong.” Never trust a pundit who begins an article with a reference to a Hollywood movie—a bad Hollywood movie. Every realistic analyst of the Ukraine-NATO war has pointed out that the expensive American trinkets haven’t done brilliantly on the battlefield. From the country that specializes in trillion-dollar clusterfucks.
That’s why I’m so suspicious of the Ukraine/State Department propaganda. Anything that’s written, “according to a Ukrainian official” should be disregarded.
As the show-biz sage Bruce Willis said, “You arrive, you bomb, you come back.”