It's heartwarming to read Mr. Dunn's newfound confidence in the forecasts of the descendants of Maxwell Taylor, Creighton Abrams and Robert McNamara. Or am I unloading too much history for comfort? Knowledge and context are dangerous to abstract formulas. Had Robert McNamara in 1964 ditched his data pile for a ten minute conversation with General Giap, the victor of Dien Bien Phu, he would have understood the losing quagmire he was getting into and two million Vietnamese and 58000 Americans wouldn't have died. Similarly, had General Milley, Macron, Scholz and other western leaders ditched their context-free numbers and neo-imperial prejudice-driven formulas about Russian military modernization and strength and Ukrainian weakness, corruption and state failure, they would have supplied Ukraine with the best western weapons and air defense much sooner. Many Ukrainians now freezing in the dark wouldn't be and many now dead would be alive. After Kharkiv and Kherson and the coming loss of Melitopol, the last land bridge to Crimea, Putin's only hope is western fatigue and weakness. Misguided Russian useful idiots like Mr. Dunn form the foundation of Putin's last hope.
This MSNBC Mehdi Hassan report about how Ukraine's disruptive decentralized bottom-up networked startup war surprised everybody puts the armchair warrior label where it belongs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO24ywwALbU&feature=youtu.be
Since Mehdi Hassan is no shill for the American national security state. So it's impossible to brand him as an armchair warrior.
McNamara, Taylor, Abrams and Bundy had reams and reams of useless data about Vietnam, but the wrong premise about how to interpret it. It was GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. Milley and all those who thought Ukraine would fall in 3-4 days or a few weeks started from the wrong premises:
1. The neo-imperial prejudice that Ukraine was a weak, corrupt and failed state and totally missed what my former Riga Business School colleague, retired British army colonel and adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Glen Grant, and his Ukrainian colleagues had accomplished after 2014: created a bottom up disruptive startup model of networked warfare that the top down hypercentralized Russian military could not cope with. The liberation of Kherson was just one result: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0CSEuwLBlg)
2. They fell for the illusory premise that Russia's Potemkin military had really modernized and was capable of combined arms operations when it hadn't and wasn't.
Mr. Dunn's touching newfound admiration for Pentagon analysis doubtless doesn't extend to Milley's colleague, retired former NATO commander, General Ben Hodges. Hodges disagrees with Milley because he starts from different premises that account for pesky historical context (sorry to unload again). Different premises lead him to forecast the liberation of Crimea by next summer. Based on Ukrainians pressure on the only land bridge from Donetsk to Crimea, Melitopol, Hodges' forecast is credible. Hodges sees Ukraine as having achieved "irreversible momentum", which would make negotiating under the terms Putin wants to end the war utterly foolish.
The Premise of Negotiation
If there's no feasible western guarantee for peace, then Ukraine has all the more reason to fight until total victory. This war is existential for Ukraine, as it was for Israel in 1948-49 and Britain in 1940-41. Mr. Dunn still remains deaf to Russia's openly genocidal war aims--expressed in the exterminationist rhetoric of Medvedev, Ria Novosti's Timofey Sergeytsev, DPR leader Pavel Gubarev, chat show host Solovyev, RT editor Margarita Simonyan and many other Putin mouthpieces. Here's just a small sample:
"A Russian activist and former neo-Nazi has released a video threatening to kill Ukrainians who don’t join his nation’s cause. Pavel Gubarev, described as Russia’s “DPR figure” in Donetsk, tells those in the annexed regions that Vladimir Putin’s forces “aren’t coming to kill you, but to convince you”. “But if you don’t want to be convinced, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: one million, five million, or exterminate all of you,” he goes on to say."
(https://news.yahoo.com/dpr-separatist-pavel-gubarev-vows-083350063.html)
It's beyond my capacity to imagine what more is required to get Mr. Dunn to take this river of exterminationist hatred at face value (https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/).
How do we know what Putin's terms and "red lines" are? He told Elon Musk, who told the Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer:
"Elon Musk has denied a report that he spoke to Vladimir Putin, including about the potential for using nuclear weapons, before floating a peace plan that suggested that Ukraine cede territory to Russia.
The head of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy, who made the original claim, had insisted that his source was Musk himself. “Elon Musk told me he had spoken with Putin and the Kremlin directly about Ukraine,” Ian Bremmer said in a tweet after Musk’s tweeted denial. “He also told me what the kremlin’s red lines were.
“I have been writing my weekly newsletter on geopolitics for 24 yrs. I write honestly without fear or favor and this week’s update was no different.”
In a newsletter for Eurasia Group subscribers, Bremmer wrote that the Tesla CEO told him Putin was “prepared to negotiate”, but only if Crimea remained Russian, if Ukraine accepted a form of permanent neutrality, and Ukraine recognised Russia’s annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Such conditions would represent near-total Ukrainian capitulation at a time when their forces are on the offensive.
In the newsletter, first reported by Vice News, Bremmer said Musk claimed to have been told by Putin that those war aims would be achieved “no matter what”, including the potential use of a nuclear weapon if Ukraine retook territory in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Bremmer said Musk told him that “everything needed to be done to avoid that outcome”. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/11/elon-musk-denies-report-he-spoke-to-putin-about-use-of-nuclear-weapons?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
In any case, the western guarantees for peace that Ukraine would insist on to sign an agreement would not include boots on the ground from NATO nor any prospect of a hot war between the US and Russia. I don't know where Dunn got that idea from. With Sweden and Finland in NATO and a short drive from St Petersburg, Putin knows what a war with NATO means: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/april-25-russia-ukraine-endgame-2b564512f8c5 . Russian-speaking Finnish troops pay off the border guards and troops and the Moscow-hating St Petersburgers vote to secede overwhelmingly in a referendum and join the EU as an independent city state when they're offered Schengen work visas, tripled pensions and 5000 euros each to vote for secession. And Kaliningrad is jealous and says why not us too. And Putin thinks he's the only one who can play the annexation referendum game. But I digress.
The Ukrainians don't want ANY foreign troops in Ukraine and have repeatedly said they can fight and defeat Russia on their own if given the tools. Putin's dream of keeping the western coalition from delivering those tools to Ukraine runs through useful idiots like Mr. Dunn.
This generation is the reverse of the Vietnam War, which I marched against. Now it's the appeasing faux peaceniks peddling "light at the end of the tunnel" with the mirage of a negotiation and ceasefire that would just freeze the conflict to give Russia the chance to regroup and prepare round two. No Ukrainians want their children fighting that one. And they certainly won't listen to anyone telling them to sign a deal with a half defeated revanchist Russian empire that, like The Terminator, will say, "I'LL BE BACK".
