Red Scare Redux- Review of The Plot To Scapegoat Russia

Below is my review of Dan Kovalik's The Plot to Scapegoat Russia as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine (now The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine) for the September 2017 issue.

It's a bit late, but still timely in light of the hysteria at large these days.

Return of the Red Scare

The Plot To Scapegoat Russia

By Dan Kovalik

Skyhorse Publishing, 2017 

Paperback, 240 Pages

Dan Kovalik probably never thought that he would have writtenThe Plot To Scapegoat Russia the way he did. Not that he believed the Central Intelligence Agency was beyond any skullduggery in promoting foreign adventures.  Indeed, he has spent years observing the agency’s antics in Latin America.

Mr. Kovalik must be surprised by the fact that the only man we can pin our hopes on to stop the march to conflict, if not nuclear war is Donald Trump.  Trump, being a reactionary plutocrat is the type of person Kovalik would normally have nothing but disdain for.  

It can’t be anything he is too happy about.  Dan Kovalik is an old-school lefty.  He cut his teeth protesting U.S. involvement south of the border, traveling to Nicaragua in 1988 to oppose the Contras.  There may a social program he’s against, but that is hard to imagine.  The Trump agenda must gall him.

Except for one aspect.

Donald Trump was suggesting, in his campaign utterances, that it may not be a bad idea to actually try and get along with Russia.  He suggested as well that maybe we did not have the solution to the Syrian imbroglio.

In that one aspect at least, Donald stood head and shoulders above the competition.  

How did we get to a point in history where a progressive activist could see Donald Trump as preferable to the Democrat’s standard bearer?  It’s a long story and in no way travels a straight line.

He spends much of the book discussing his activities in Latin America.  Kovalik identifies with the Sandinistas and opposes United Fruit (i.e. Chiquita Brands International) Company and their pervasive and destructive influence in Guatemala going back to the 1954 coup.  His account takes the side of the poor and indigenous peoples.  At first, I thought his narrative dwelt a little bit too much on the past.  It does become obvious that he sees U.S. policy as continuing from the past into the present and all cut from the same cloth.

In his coverage of the Cold War between NATO and the Soviets he is also somewhat kind to the memory of the Eastern Bloc.  Not that there is not sufficient blame to go around.

When he does get to the subject of the book’s title, the author is on solid ground.  His detail of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the role of people from the West in looting the corpse, as well as the continuing demonization of the Putin regime is worth the price of the book for the uninformed.  That would be most Americans. 

On Page 132 he begins the story of how we started on the road to the new cold war and though he does not say it, the origins of 911.  

“Another momentous and arguably disastrous, Cold War maneuver of the US was its support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which at the time shared a 1000-mile-long border with the Soviet Union.”

Without our support for what turned out to include many fanatical Islamic extremists, including Bin Laden, the Soviet Union would probably still have had a lot on its hands, but would have had been better able to manage any changes necessary. 

Our support for the Mujahideen insured, like for us in Vietnam, that the Soviets could never defeat the enemy.  It would be a slow bleed and would fatally weaken the U.S.S.R.

Things had to change and they did. The Reagan Administration and Mikhail Gorbachev came to a modus vivendi.  On Page 111 the author quotes the LA Times,

“In early February 1990, US leaders made the Soviets an offer.  According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9th then- Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation, US could make ‘iron-clad guarantees’ that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”  Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.”

Kovalik notes the promise was quickly broken and most of the old Warsaw Pact are now NATO members.  The expansion continues with the U.S. trying to enlist former Soviet Republics.  It is hard to argue that the world is better for NATO enlargement.

Chapter 7 CLINTON MEDDLES IN RUSSIA WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES gives an account of the machinations of Bill Clinton’s presidency as regards the Yeltsin regime.  He did not do us proud.  Yeltsin was essentially our stooge until he knew he could not continue.  This led to Putin whose big sin is not being our patsy. 

Chapter 11 THE US EXPANDS AS RUSSIA CONTRACTS: BROKEN PROMISES AND HUMILIATION explores the project to extend our influence at the expense of Russia.  None of it is anything we can brag about, but the worst bit is our Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland deciding the fate of the Ukrainian government after we had helped riot out an elected, if corrupt, president.  The pair were recorded doing just that and the heavy-handed discussion is rightly attacked by Kovalik.  He does not mention that the recording went “viral.” *

Mr. Kovalik eventually reaches the reality show of the recent American election.  The desire to blame the Russians for the inept campaign of Hillary Clinton is explored at length as are the commonsense pronouncements of The Donald.  

Suggesting that we not bug the Russkies and maybe overthrowing Syria was not a genius level idea appealed to a population that was tired of wars without result.  The Putin is the devil campaign left something to be desired with many including an old socialist like the author.

Post-election, Trump has not lived up to his better nature.  Kovalik notes on Page 170 that “it is never clear what Trump is truly thinking or intending.”  This is true and whether it is a good strategy or evidence of a scattered mind is a matter for debate.  Trump was quick in throwing some token bombs at a Syrian air base after a supposed chemical attack.  

Since the book has been published, the new president has not bombed North Korea.  He worked out an agreement with Putin for a ceasefire in South West Syria that is holding and cannot make the neocons in or out of his government happy, so we live in hope.

In his short book, Dan Kovalik covers a lot of ground.  The continuing demonization of a nuclear power makes his book an important resource for anyone who wants to understand what is going on.

Some of the author’s views are a bit one sided.  His favoritism of the now Soviet Ancien Regime can seem a bit overboard.  It is at odds with your reviewer’s memory of the brutal repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and certainly the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.  Still, his account of the anti-Russian hysteria is well sourced with ample footnotes.  Unfortunately, with the media’s parroting of the hostile narrative, from NPR to The New York Times, do not expect him to get glowing reviews.

*The recording is still extant and one can hear it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k .  After listening you may be forgiven for wondering if State recruits at clown colleges.

The Ghost of Wars Present and Future—Review of Danny Sjursen's Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge

The war memoir is a genre of literature that has been around since before Julius Caesar wrote about his adventures in Rome’s Gallic conquest.  In the last century, the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam saw their share.

The 21st has not been around long enough to see that many volumes about war experiences, but there have been a few highlighting the exploits of men who have served in our forever wars.  

Major Daniel A. Sjursen’s Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge is a departure in a way from the usual offering of heroic after story, if only because it has Ghost in the title and was definitely not ghost written.

Every page is heartfelt and you feel you are riding with his team as they patrol Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.  The war still haunts him and your reviewer admits to being not a little affected by Ghost Riders.

Sjursen, a West Point grad and newly minted lieutenant was given command of a scout platoon.  He would train them and get to know his men far more than any civilian employer or boss ever gets to know workers.  As their tour progressed in Iraq, or didn’t progress, he and his men seemed a family.  Maybe calling them a family would be too much.  Tribe or clan would not be unwarranted.

There was New Bedford’s Alex Fuller.  Fuller made sergeant before he could legally drink in the Bay State.  The author called him “the heart of 2nd platoon.”  The young man was a born leader who mentored the new troops.  In the book, it became obvious that he did not suffer from a personality deficit.  For all that, Fuller was not unserious and he and Sjursen had firmly bonded.

All death in war is cruel.  Iraq saw some refinement in horror such as an EFP or an explosive formed penetrator.  These were easy to manufacture, difficult to avoid, and brutally powerful.  The vehicle Sgt. Fuller was riding in hit an EFP and the explosion left nothing of the soldier.

The author writes of how the death of Alex and another that night affected him, “Fuller and Balsey. Two young men, one my close friend-gone.  Just like that. Life, extinguished.  Unless you’ve seen it, it’s hard to explain the effect. They were there and then in a moment-they were gone. The randomness of death, the suddenness and finality still mess with my head.  Some days I worry about living life to its fullest and on others I’m struck by the essential absurdity of it all.  Nothing was ever the same.”

Some casualties did not take place on the battlefield.  James Smith was driver for Sjursen and according to the author a certifiable lunatic.  Young and crazy, a pre-deployment moving vehicle violation got him in jail and almost even bigger trouble with the army.  He was able to get out of it, but Sjursen said of him, “Fast cars and a stint in jail made him who he was.”

He survived Iraq and carried on an online romance with a young lady stateside.  They became engaged without ever meeting and planned a life together.  Things looked promising, but his sister, Candace noticed changes in the fun-loving young man home from war.  She saw him becoming jaded and cold.

A minor incident at a bar and Smith went to pieces and his new wife would find him in the closet hanging by his belt.  

Of course, it hit the author hard.  On a family vacation, he tried to explain what the young troop meant to him.  All he got were blank stares.  The divergence between the life of a combat soldier and the civilians who will never get anywhere near that situation is a sizeable chasm.

It is a theme he will develop further in the book.  Our nation through its government sends young men and women to foreign countries to pursue a foreign policy that does not really do much for the American people.  As the nation’s young have not been subject to a draft, there is little outcry or protest as happened with Vietnam.  Other than an occasional “Thank you for your service” and the rare news item, the wars need not be thought about.

Congressmen and presidents send the young to die.  Few of their children will go off to battle.  The no skin off their noses situation makes it easy to have wars that little affect the governing class.

Except sometimes when it does.  While the author was in Iraq, it had become obvious even to the sleeping public we were not winning.  Something had to be done.  Enter the “Surge” as mentioned in the title.  It may be ancient history to most of us that in 2007 we sent over 20,000 additional men under the hero du jour, David Petraeus. His command of the troops would turn the tide of battle. Or so the headlines would have it.

In the words of Ira Gershwin, “It ain’t necessarily so.”  In 2006, before the Surge, an armored brigade in western Anbar province exploited tension between Sunnis and Al Qaeda.  The locals were not as fanatic as the Jihadis and resented the heavy hand.

This would be developed and we would pay the Sunnis to change sides and it worked far more than the surge of GIs.  What red blooded American would want to admit that we had fought a war the old-fashioned way, with bribery.

Certainly not Lindsey Graham whom the author calls a “surge worshiper.”  It was Graham’s claim that the surge had won the war, but Obama had lost it by withdrawing the troops.  That the senator from South Carolina has it wrong infuriates Sjursen no end and he has a point.  If after the troops left it fell apart so quickly, it probably wasn’t much of a victory.

Graham should be happy, we have troops back in theater.  Anyway, we never won the war.  The author is happy to point out Iran did.  The government in Baghdad is much influenced by their fellow Shiites in Persia and also dependent on them.  Sjursen doesn’t say it but his thoughts on the matter seem to be, what were we thinking?

It’s hard not to conclude that we weren’t thinking at all.

The tour of duty the author spent was not at all easy.  If you are in another country as an occupier, there has to be much antipathy and worse on both sides.  Still, Sjursen came away liking the Iraqi people and understanding of their plight.

The account of his interpreter with the nom de guerre of Mark is admiring and generous.  Mark, a Shia, is devout, earnest and brave.  He was the support of his family in a job that risked death.  The young Muslim carried on against all odds with a good grace.  All of Danny Sjursen’s men were sympathetic characters, not the least the young Iraqi.

No one can predict the future.  Most books are forgotten soon after they are written.  To suggest Ghost Riders of Baghdad will be remembered would be going out on a limb and the odds are not good.  Yet, if there is one that should be read, this is it.

Oh, and we might take a lesson or two from it as well.

Sire, the intellectuals are revolting - Review of The Death of Expertise.

Below is the review of The Death of Expertise by Thomas Nichols as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the June 2018 issue.  It has some good points, but from Mr. Nichols twitter posts, it is apparent he is a neocon and there is a theme of follow us experts, even if we occasionally err and start a dumb war.

At the Long Hill Institute we are happy to defer to expertise in fields as diverse as medicine or plumbing, though such disciplines occasionally see failures.

In areas such as foreign policy, to say the record is less than stellar is to be guilty of gross understatement.  The book is a defense of the class that Mr. Nichols is part of and is less than convincing.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Thomas M. Nichols

Consumers of news programs might be surprised to learn expertise is dying.  After all, on television and radio and in print there is a surfeit of men and women who hold themselves out as possessed of special skill and are willing to discuss or indoctrinate at length on whatever arcane branch of knowledge they claim.

According to Tom Nichols there is a problem. His The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters documents the crisis.

Have graduate schools been shuttered by a regime bent on suppressing intellectual inquiry?  Not at all.  The problem is more that the non-experts do not properly defer to the specialist caste

Tom Nichols is an expert.  Many of the talking heads infesting the airwaves with the claim are not.  The author has a long list of credentials that include degrees and posts of importance.  Currently, he is a Professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI.  He also teaches at the Harvard Extension School.  Even more impressive, Nichols is an undefeated five-time Jeopardy winner.

Professor Nichols does provide example after example to prove his case.  He tells us we need experts well versed in their disciplines. 

He is especially upset with people who, after a google search, call out accomplished professionals with superficial online knowledge.  The anti-vaccine movement comes in for his ire.  A few celebrities get a hold of an idea and soon the usual inoculations we all got are questioned by people with law degrees and acting credits.  It is hysteria and he is dead on with that and other examples.

The problem is, it is not as new as Tom might have it.  There has always been something coming along to attack established knowledge.  Sometimes it actually turns out to be valid but more often, it is just a fad, and oft a dangerous one, but it is not new.

It was about 1975 and I had a passenger in my cab who wanted to tell me about a cancer treatment that what passed for big pharma at the time wanted to suppress.  The quack cure that was Laetrile was big and in its day, went as “viral” as could happen back then.  I had heard about it as it was hard to avoid and was at least thankful my fare was not a Moonie trying to convert me. 

Before the internet, the country was filled with mass fads such as new age crystals and bookstores had shelves filled with the self-help tomes that came and went.  In those primitive times the world was going to end because of “acid rain.”

Tom is a smart guy and a man as knowledgeable as he is should not be a victim of presentism.  Neither should we dismiss his concerns out of hand.  The internet, unlike the stacks in the library, will give us an answer in seconds.  Research is easy and easily wrong, but without technology, intellectual mischief is still possible.

Where he is on solid ground is his chapter on education.  The 34-page section amplifies the findings of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education reviewed in the April issue of this magazine.   

According to Tom, “““College graduate” today means a lot of things.  Unfortunately, “a person of demonstrated educational achievement” is not always one of them.”  After stating that, he then goes on to praise the university system for its strengths before getting back to what’s wrong.

Mass education means that there is an increasing “commodification” of college. Attendees are treated as “clients rather than as students”.  He is right, but it could not be otherwise in a buyer’s market.

Nichols teaches at the Naval War College in Newport and is thus more aware of the college scene in Rhode Island.  His observation as to what goes on at the most prestigious school in our sister state may be representative:

“Parents of students at Brown University, for example are shelling out some serious money so their children can take part in things like “Campus Nudity Week.” (One female Brown participant said in 2013 that “the negative feedback” about the event “has helped prepare her for life after college.”  One can only hope.)”

As to what college has become for many all over the country he quotes a graduate of a California party school about, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.”

Spending a good deal of time in the Pioneer Valley, your reviewer can attest to the truth of what the author writes about.  The college towns of Amherst, Northampton and South Hadley seem nothing so much as a theme park, an academic Disney World.  The locales are saturated with bars, restaurants and trendy shops.  There is an occasional bookstore, but hardly an overabundance.

Surely, however, the young are learning and will be able to carry on as experts to replace Tom and his class as the next generation.  Nichols’ writing does not inspire confidence.

The student today, he notes, sees him or herself as the professor’s equal.  They are insulted by a bad grade or correction. Undergrads expect professors to be available 24/7 via email and are demanding in tone on that medium.

Add to that grade inflation, almost everyone gets an A, and it does not bode well for the future of expertise.

Expertise itself is defended by the author vigorously.  He does admit that the cognoscenti are not without error.  Sometimes it as if he is saying, on the one hand we need the big thinkers, on the other hand, boy, can they blow it.  So why the book and why now?

Nichols was part of the nevertrump movement.  Trump, as he illustrates in Pages 211 through 213 was the anti-intellectual candidate.  As a member of the class of heavy thinkers, he would naturally be against the yahoo.  That does not mean Tom does not have a case.

The professor admits to his mistakes as an expert on Russia, but notes he was too young to be part of the prior cohort in the field who failed to see the fragility and coming demise of the Soviet Union.  A little research outside the book reveals that he was for the 2003 Iraq invasion.  Nichols does not really cover that other than to say that public skepticism is warranted when people who got that wrong return to give advice.  Ya think, Tom?

In fact, the vast majority of intellectuals were for the invasion and few if any careers suffered for their foolishness.  The great unwashed have every right to be skeptical, if not downright cynical about their betters.

Can we do without a stratum of intellectuals studying the great issues of the day?  You might think your reviewer is calling for “off with their heads.” 

No, as flawed as they may be, they are a necessary component of the body politic.  A road map tells us our position on land.  Political scientists, social scientists and historians and others tell us our position in time and in history.

We just have to remember their predictive track record will never be anywhere near flawless.