Russian tanks like these defeating the Ukrainian forces at Debaltsevo are what need to be damaged or destroyed. Photo by Max Avdeev.

Casey Michel has an article called The U.S. Should Arm Ukraine—But Not Because This War Is Winnable.

Among other things you can notice that the New New Republic now spells "God" with a small "g".

More importantly, Michel is proposing a policy prescription that involves having the US deliberately lose a war it gets involved in, instead of not intentionally, as it did with Iraq and Afghanistan, and deliberately try to create lots of dead Russians.

Why am I the only one to notice how odd that whole concept this is, and answer this article?

What I see is a lot of Twittering masses just RTing it because they think it's an article about arming Ukraine, which they support, and they don't even read it or maybe skim it.

I personally think it makes sense to arm Ukraine — let's see if this article helps us arrive there with the arguments Michel actually made.

Some pro-Ukrainian activists fell into the trap of appearing as if they're for killing lots of Russians:

Great piece by @cjcmichel: The #US Should Arm #Ukraine, But Not Because This War Is Winnable http://t.co/HDmwfyChF1 pic.twitter.com/YOHazHI0zx

— Ariana Gic Perry (@ArianaGicPerry) February 8, 2015

 

In fact, what the short form of Michel's policy is was actually expertly caught by Cathy Young:

@ArianaGicPerry @cjcmichel Excellent point but I'm sure it will get twisted as "neocons admit their only goal is to get more people killed"

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) February 8, 2015

 

Bingo. Indeed it will, and that may have been the point all along, because Michel never makes an actual forthright call for any action himself, he just sets up a proposition and then sees if people will bite — and bite they do. He can then walk away from it and say he was merely being "descriptive."

Very cunning, and I would say even sinister. Mission accomplished — neo-cons want bodies to pile up.

A key trope of Kremlin propaganda — and the leftist "progressive" propaganda that often mimics it or draws from it — is that evil, blood-thirsty neo-cons — especially that particularly evil couple Victoria Nuland in the State Department and her spouse Robert Kagan and their nefarious relatives Frederick and Kimberly Kagan !!! — are going to lead us all into a crazy, reckless stupid wars and kill lots of people in order to get oil fields for Joe Biden's son to make billions…or something… Again, this sort of Infowars and Al Jazeera and RT.com propaganda is based on that exaggerated and crazy premise — as if these people, and not, oh, Samuel Charap, Andrew Weiss and even Steven Cohen actually have a lot more influence not only on the media but Obama himself.

So, let's take a closer look at all.

Casey Michel is someone I've called out before due to his curious reluctance to directly criticize Putin, his defense of the government of Kazakhstan from legitimate OSCE criticism about flawed elections, his endless harrying of a professor close to Baku but critical of Moscow; his strange affinity for the Russian ambassador to Paris' notion that Ukraine and Russia are "like" Normandy and France — and more. That's why I'm blocked on Twitter.

Since he began the PhD program at Harriman, he's adjusted his rhetoric to be more critical of Russia with the usual menu — Pussy Riot, Durov, gay rights. But rarely about Navalny — and then if mentioned, critical, and seldom about the Caucasus or — again — any real substantive criticism about Putin himself. Just the low-hanging fruit. And little mention of Nuland, if not critical.

So, this piece that is partly about baiting neo-cons and partly about purveying various misleading concepts about Russia may work as some strange disinformation injection, but as a policy prescription, it's a jumble.

 1. Casey Michel may advocate arming Ukraine, and that's great, but he doesn't say how or with what. Defensive weapons only? Offensive weapons? Precision weapons? Not a single specific weapon systems or concept is mentioned.

 2. Just what would it mean to have the West or even just the US engage in a controversial project like "arming Ukraine," but then *losing the war*? Huh? If we arm Ukraine, it should be for the purpose of stopping the war by deterring the Russians. That's not losing. It might even be possible to fight it fiercely enough and force Russia to forget about threatening its neighbours ever again. That would likely be more complicated militarily and politically, but at the very least, some drones, some anti-tank weapons could DETER Russia.

So why is this about LOSING the war? Makes no sense. And no military leader would accept a proposition that says "go ahead an arm those Ukrainians just a little –  but they'll lose anyway." That's not how military planning works, surely.

3. The premise that Russians will begin to protest if too many zinc coffins come back is completely fallacious and shows poor familiarity with the war in Afghanistan and the wars in Chechnya, not to mention the war in Ukraine. Here's why:

a. Russia is huge — with multiple constituent republics — and the capacity for spreading around the hurt is enormous. That happened with Afghanistan and Chechnya and with Ukraine, too. And that's exactly what happens as the deaths confirmed so far are very far flung and scattered. There aren't enough in any one area except Rostov where so many ostensibly die "in training" near the Ukrainian border that entire communities will rise up.

b. The number of confirmed deaths is 265+, so the number of actual deaths is several thousands, not tens of thousands, despite some very false reports flung around to confuse and distract (like those of Elena Vasilieva who claims without any basis whatsoever that there are 8,000, or even the Ukrainian government which at times has said "4,000" without being able to back it up). That means that there are not enough to get ordinary people really protesting en masse.

c. We should know by now the capacity for government suppression of war news is vast and effective. It wasn't some 15,000 soldiers dying in the war in Afghanistan that eventually forced the Soviets to end that war, it was the one million civilian Afghans they killed and their inability to control the country. BTW, Soviet and then Russian propagandists have managed to keep the true nature of their devastation to Afghan civilians suppressed for years, even converting the "root causes" for the Taliban which THEY created into American sins — because very late in this war, America came in and gave some weapons to some mujahideen that helped defeat some of their helicopters.

Soviet authorities heavily suppressed any news of soldiers "fulfilling their international duty" and it was only towards the end that some controlled publications by journalists close to intelligence were allowed to prepare public opinion for the pull-out.

d. Social media has certainly spread the news of deployments and killed in action far wider, but the Internet penetration and familiarity is still not so great (about 2/3 of Russians have Internet access) that this has influenced people in the hinterlands where the soldiers come from. Even so, a lot of people have phones with at least SMS capacity and people do get on VKontakte and do know about the deployment. And so far, in those social media contexts, there is far less concern about deaths than something else: massive support for the war, admiration and support for those volunteering, sympathy with the "people's republics" and mass contribution of money and donated goods for the Donbass war effort. If anything, the news of those killed in the war makes people claim them as heroes and become more ardent about the cause.

Churches, social clubs, sports clubs, veterans' societies have been involved in large numbers, sometimes orchestrated by authorities but more often not. Like Ukraine, Russian provinces have found a new galvanizing factor for civil society in the "Novorossiya" cause and that's not going to be undermined so easily by liberals in Moscow.

4. The theory of "let's inflict lots of casualties and then Russia will stop" is one that comes out of Western thinking and mirror-imaging in democratic societies with real parliaments and free media where war's effects and casualties can resonate. That's not Russia. Russia has Poddubny and Kots and Steshin on the TV screen every night in their war helmets and flak jackets in front of pictures of weeping old women and mothers with children standing in front of their shattered homes ostensibly destroyed by Ukrainian shelling. What they do not have is any kind of Vietnam war or Iraq war reporting where the reality of war for its fighters as well as civilians is visible. And that means people will be moved to help the defenseless people of the Donbass and volunteer to fight or pay for a soldier to be outfitted, not go to an anti-war march.

5. The capacity for Russian authorities to deter, punish, infiltrate and confuse anti-war movements is huge and constantly in motion. The few brave souls who have picketed the war without authorization have had heavy sentences (45 days is the longest, which is a long time to ask any ordinary person to serve as it means they lose their job and place in school). Heavy sentences for persistent demonstrators up to 4-5 years in previous years has also been a powerful deterrent.

Worst of all — in terms of the factor that Michel thinks can be so easily triggered by "piling up bodies" — parents and spouses and other relatives are very easily intimidated by military personnel telling them to shut up — or they will lose their relatives' death benefits and even their pensions. People are HUGELY dependent on the state in Russia for jobs and food and housing. They cannot afford to lose their social welfare. This source of blackmail is endlessly used by military and FSB and police and we have many reports of this. Most people contacted by journalists refuse to talk for precisely this reason. 

The secret police has been particularly active in ensuring severe beatings, harassment, public vilification, fake criminal charges, etc. on those brave enough to be persistent with inquiries about deaths, like Lev Shlosberg of Pskov. Funny that Casey didn't mention him because he's an absolutely clear-cut case. Instead, he mentioned a case that is a lot more shaky, because we can't be sure if in fact the authorities do have some claims they can build on this elderly woman charged with taking money to solve some desperate relative's case.

There doesn't seem to be evidence for this, but everyone knows EXACTLY how the system works in Russia: pay a bribe, get your son out of the draft. Pay another bribe, get him released from the contract he was forced to sign under the pretext his service would be shortened. Pay another bribe — find information about him when he's missing. The military is rife with this bribe-taking; unfortunately so are some unscrupulous NGOs.

6. The government has also unleashed an "Anti-Maidan"  movement of bikers, Afghan war vets, Novorossiya fans, Cossacks and other ultranationalists to harry and harass those few who do come out to either unauthorized or authorized marches. They threaten violence and deliver on it. They create counter marches and shout down and harass people who try to speak out against the war. The police stand aside. This is hard for most people to withstand, and while encouragingly, some do, their capacity to deliver large crowds is stymied by this.

Thus, the formula being presented here — let's inflict large casualties on the Russians, that will make parents weep and ordinary people demonstrate — is fallacious for Russia. In fact, it's cruel. Russia does not work that way and never has. We are lucky when once or twice a year, we get 20,000 or 30,000 people to a march now, and that includes a lot of people who would just as well be happy to keep Crimea.

Any plan to arm Ukraine has to be about DETERRING Russia as a state machine, as a modern, motorized, mechanized, computerized armed force. What that means is not just inflicting deaths on people, but damaging heavy tanks, so that the cost of constantly bringing in convoys gets greater. It has to be about more exposure and international shaming of the lie that is the Russian "non-involvement" in Ukraine. It has to be enough to make Putin pause before continuing to fund and permit it because international sanctions will grow and less business will be done with Russia. By the way, the notion of sanctions crippling Russia has its flaws, too, due to the statified nature of the economy and the close cooperation of Putin's cronies — the oligarchs — in the state's  projects. Even so, deterrence can work there, too.

The purpose of anti-tank weapons is to stop tanks. Russia has a lot of tanks. It should be deterred from using them by their heavy loss.

 The purpose of drones is to be able to enable Ukraine to see the landscape and see what they are shooting at, so they don't have to have as many civilian casualties. We all know that the way Putin is deterring Ukraine is using Michel's formula in reverse — allowing not only Ukrainian soldiers' deaths to visibly pile up in a free-media situation, but even great, civilian deaths now reaching nearly 6,000. Many of these, but certainly not all, do come from Ukrainian shelling in response to separatist shelling. And that means that Putin can count on Human Rights Watch, Reid Standish, Alec Luhn and scores of other groups and journalists to constantly amplify the war in Ukraine as a story about evil Poroshenko killing old ladies and children — and in its most lurid Infowars form — because he's a greedy chocolate capitalist who wants to join NATO.

So those two things — anti-tank weapons and drones — are needed to inflict damage on vehicles and lesson civilian casualties. Michel didn't think to mention them or set up the philosophy for providing them, and I wonder why.