Other points of view on the war. Eddie's moral education.

20230106

A couple of days ago I encouraged Eddie to take a look at the other side of the story. He and I watch Denys Davidov just about every day. I post reports from Bob Homans just about daily. I occasionally watch analysis of the war by The Russian Dude on YouTube and read the Institute For the Study of War and Sam Freed. In other words, we get our war news from a number of different sources. Who is on the pro-Russian side? One of you mentioned reading Paul Craig Roberts and finding, as I do, that there is absolutely nothing there.

One of the best-known pro-Russian commenters is retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor. I had seen only short clips of his work. I resolved to listen to him at greater length.  Here he is, the great man, the deep thinker saying nothing at all for 45 minutes. He talks about the origins of the war. How the American neocons got us into it. How they had gotten us into wars throughout the Middle East. How Ukraine had been a client state. How Russia deserved to win this war. How Russia was defending its national interest. He had absolutely nothing to say about how the war was being conducted. Absolutely no explanation as to how they might win.

MacGregor does not embarrass himself by presenting maps, numbers, graphs or links that would later prove to be wrong.  He protects his credentials by being as vague as possible.

Gonzalo Lira, on the other hand, is full of observations. He says that at Bakhmut the Russians are grinding away, annihilating Ukrainians and NATO contractors at a horrific clip. He accuses Ukraine of the sunk cost fallacy – that we are defending Bakhmat because we have invested so much in it so far that we cannot afford to give up. He says that our weapons, the HIMARS and M777 are operated by former NATO soldiers working as contractors. These weapons are too complex for Ukrainians to master in a couple of months. He says that NATO and Ukraine are doing what Russia wants. We are feeding our troops to Russia to grind them up until they totally eviscerate NATO. At that point Russia will invade from the north and totally slice off Kyiv from the west. There will be another major offensive coming West out of Donetsk.

This is all absolute madness, not repeated by any other commenter. Putin is the one who gave the direction to conquer all of the Donetsk oblast. That’s why the Russians have not given up on Bakhmut.  It is not of that much strategic importance to Ukraine, but it is a mechanism for chewing up huge quantities of Russian men and matériel. In this way it is much like Ukraine’s defense of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk last summer. In other words, Lira makes absolutely no sense. He has no numbers, no graphs, no maps, and no links, even to Russian sites.  Unlike MacGregor, he has no reputation to protect.  He can afford to make stuff up.

From out of left field, quite literally, comes a video by a couple of dedicated Marxists. They are always looking out for the underdogs, which in this case is – get ready for it – Ukraine. They lecture their fellow leftists about how Russia has always been an imperialistic power, bullying and dominating its neighbors. There is a universal principle of self-determination which Russia is violating. They have no business in Ukraine. A couple of intelligent guys, Eric Draitser  Sukant Chandan. Chandan has a book out, The Martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi. Precisely one review on Amazon. I’ve offered to do #2 if he’ll send me a copy.

Eric Draitser wrote this even more direct article on the point of why Russia has no business in Ukraine. He claims that Russia is following in the footprints of American neocons like Dick Cheney, repeating the mistakes of the Iraq war in Ukraine. He points to the eerie parallels between George W. Bush’s excuses for starting that war and Putin’s for this war. I’m not much of a leftist, but I agree with him on this.

Returning to the topic of corruption, Eddie and I recently talked about my career. I stressed to him how lucky I had been.  Fate had me born into the luckiest year of the luckiest generation.  We of the Silent Generation were few in number, and buoyed by the great need for talent after the war.  Fate intervened again to push me into working as a civilian in Vietnam, where I was overpaid for four years. I became financially independent by the time I was 30.

I don’t know what moral compromises the managers made at IBM. Whatever they were, they were small. They had to go along with distasteful policies such as affirmative-action, discriminating against guys like me. It might have been easy to rationalize that they were simply doing what the higher-ups wanted.  It was obvious that IBM was a successful company run by a white guys like me. They could have been persuaded that it might be better done by others. I would say history has shown them wrong.

There were tragedies.  People were hired who were not up to the job.  One such incompetent, a black named Ed Mann, put the blame for his failure to make the grade on IBM and smashed his Lincoln through the front door of the headquarters building, hopping out with a gun hoping to shoot Bill Rooker, the guy in charge.  I think Mann died in prison.

Most stories were not that dramatic. IBM was rich enough that if incompetents kept quiet they were tolerated.  Those of us who didn’t want to carry them quietly left, and the company drifted into mediocrity.

I jumped from IBM to Booz, Allen in 1979, lasting a year. There it was much more explicit. They wanted to get the “golden handcuffs” on you. Give you enough money that you had to do things their way. I recently wrote about my experience wanting to recommend a $40,000 computer to the Saudi Navy when the school solution was something for $2 million. They whisked me off the project within a week, sending me to Argentina. It was a very direct indication of what they expected from employees. 

I still have many friends from IBM, none from Booz.  I did watch the careers of several of the Booz people.  None of them led anywhere I would have wanted to go.  They died of stress, heart attacks in one thing and another. The one guy that I remained closest to, Bob Fitzgerald, was too honest ever to make partner but sufficiently compromised not to leave.  In our last few phone conversations he was bitter and eager to get off the line.

Bob was really high on my ex-wife Mary Ann.  She was a perfect Booz Allen employee.  Intelligent, conscientious, and disinclined to question the morality of what she did. She worked with a partner, Steve Mucchetti, really quite a decent fellow. He moved on to a partnership with the Coopers & Lybrand accounting firm. Coopers did antidumping work, supporting lawyers engaged by American companies to accuse foreign companies of dumping goods in American markets. Mary Ann did the statistical computer work to support their arguments.

She got a huge break when Coopers decided to give up that line of business. The three men who ran the practice decided to start their own company.  They took Mary Ann along to do their computer work – she was in on the ground floor as a partner. Thirty years later the firm is thriving and she is still there.  Although getting the American government to apply legal pressure to throttle your foreign competition is a fundamentally corrupt business, she sees only numbers and is oblivious to the corruption.

I resented the fact that she would never let me near her business despite the fact that I am extremely good with statistics, computers, foreign languages and business. In other words I would’ve been a natural in every way imaginable.  Except for my conscience. Maybe she was wiser than I thought and leaving me out of it.

Pages 93 and 94 of my biography describe the typical Washington corruption that I encountered about that same time in the Episcopal Church where I served as treasurer.  My account leaves out one petty but telling incident.  The priest who had surreptitiously refinanced his house, half owned by the school, taking out $50,000 and leaving the school underwater, made it clear that if I played ball my son could have the role of a wise man in the Christmas pageant.  I didn’t.  Jack was a sheep.

Oksana attended a Ukrainian evangelical church here twelve years ago.  The pastor, Sergei Vasylovych, said that Christians survived during Soviet times because they had a reputation for being honest and hard working.  They could not ascend the ladder of success in Soviet society, but they could feed themselves by making themselves useful to others.  I’m passing the lesson on to our kids.  Society around them may be corrupt, but they should be able to keep their virtue and survive.

That’s the take from Lake WeBeGone, where the preparations are all in place for Orthodox Christmas tomorrow. Still on January 7. Grandmother attends a parish that belongs to the Moscow Patriarchy, oblivious to the incongruity of belonging to a church where the patriarch prays for Russians to kill Ukrainians.

Graham