RE: From Russia With Love
A couple of things about intelligence agencies, from someone who has spent a bit of time working with them.
One, there are all sorts of contrary views represented. That is as it should be. There's a problem at the top because those folks are all very set in their views. They've invested their careers in the assumption that if Taiwan does this, China will do that, and they have no room for contrary opinions. But at the lackey level, opinions are like a-holes, everybody has one.
Two, intel isn't about certainty. You take bits and pieces and try to figure out the missing parts. You don't have subpoena power, so you have to do the best you can without a bunch of information. Yes, there are the occasional Joe Rochefort or Bletchley Park situations, but those are rare exceptions.
Jack Ryan, in the Clancy novels and films, gives a pretty good representation of both these points, except that Ryan is always right, and that's not how it works in the real world.
My best guess as to what happened is that some analyst comes across cash payments from somebody in Russia to the Taliban, and concludes that it must be bounty payments for killing US soldiers. He/she runs it up the flagpole, nobody salutes, so he/she decides to leak it instead.
Now I have a couple of problems with this. If Russia is paying the Taliban for anything, doesn't that make them our enemy on some level? But isn't that also a pretty cogent expression of the futility of our being there in the first place?
Never fight a war that you don't intend to win. Never, never, never, never fight a war that you don't want anybody to win. We're doing both of those in the Mideast.
I'd GTFO and stay TFO, with two caveats. I'd make it very clear to Russia (and anybody else who needs to know) that the Kurds and Israel are off limits. I'd also make sure that both are armed to the teeth.
With getting out of the Mideast, we can then focus on the real problem--China. We are already in Cold War II, and China is the enemy this time. Anybody assuming otherwise is going to be in for a huge negative surprise. And getting out of the Mideast carries one other advantage. The Chinese economy depends on the Middle East for about 40% of it's total oil. If we aren't guaranteeing that oil's passage through the Straits of Hormuz, then they have to. And that deflects a huge portion of their military away from threatening its neighbors around the South China Sea.
I actually think we could make a lot of hay by triangulating Russia against China. But we need to recognize that the real enemy is not somewhere in the sands of the Mideast.
(This post was last modified: 07-02-2020 09:57 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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