Lawrence Freedman—or “Sir Lawrence” as they call him at Kings College in London, where he is Emeritus Professor of War Studies—has an interesting blog, “Comment Is Freed”, and an interesting post at that blog, Assessing the Assessors What did analysts get wrong about the Russian invasion?, which considers a recent paper, The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure, written by Eliot Cohen, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Phillips O’Brien at St. Andrews University, available in full online and in a shortened, “popular” version at the Atlantic, aka “Neocons R’ Us”.
Let me say at the outset that I have frequently expressed the opinion that Dr. Cohen is not my favorite senior fellow anywhere, particularly in this recent post, Eliot Cohen, last seen going from irritating to atrocious, taking the good doctor to task for, among other things, lying about the necessity of taking out Saddam Hussein back in 2001, as well as Iran, despite the fact neither country had anything to do with 9/11 and despite the fact that the two countries, you know, hated each other, but particularly for his decision to abandon his previous, passionate objecting to Donald Trump and discover instead the joys of Donnie, none of which strike me as appealing.
Curiously enough (or not), Professor Freedman was also involved in promoting the Iraq war, providing then UK Prime Minister Anthony Blair with five “tests” for whether “intervention” (aka “invasion”) of another country can be justified, which five tests were laughingly ignored by Blair when “justifying” both the Iraqi invasion and the UK’s participation in it—test 4, “Are we prepared for then long-term?” being a particular howler in my (sour) opinion, although all five were, again in my sour opinion, remarkably inane—Number 1 being “Are we sure of our case?”, for example. “Oh, Hell, yeah! We’re sure!”
So there is something, well, incongruous, in my increasingly souring opinion, in two dudes, who are in fact friends, as Freedman tells us, eagerly (particularly in Cohen’s case) analyzing the “mistakes” of others without confessing their own “mistakes”— “mistakes” that, again in my now openly rank opinion, were nothing less than lies, designed to both promote and disguise far-reaching and indeed impossible goals—the explicit military takeover of the Middle East by the U.S. and its allies, for the purposes of controlling the world’s oil supply and guaranteeing the position of Israel.
Freedman, as he tells us, was actively involved in the recent discussions of Russian intentions, and was one of those who felt that Putin wouldn’t invade, and, to his credit, gives a reasonably convincing explanation of what he feels he got wrong and why—for example, he didn’t realize that Putin “honestly” believed that Ukraine was a “fake” country, largely a creation of American support (Freedman doesn’t say this)1 and that Russian intelligence, their “Federal Security Service”, had plans to take out top Ukrainian officials that apparently failed completely. Cohen and O’Brien, in contrast, are far more interested in blasting those who said that, if Russia did invade, it would be walkover—an “analysis” conducted, I would say, in the manner of an intramural bitch-slapping (something of a specialty with Cohen)—claiming that if the “analysts” hadn’t been a bunch of weak-willed Nervous Nellies, then the Biden administration would have been more optimistic about Ukrainian chances and NATO could have supplied Ukraine with both more plentiful and more advanced weapons, which would, in the most optimistic analysis, have stopped the Russian invasion in its tracks.
Well, if wishes were horses, then beggars could ride. What do Freedman’s and Cohen’s records say about the ability of analysts to predict the future? Damned little, I would say. In fact, if I were them, I wouldn’t say anything at all!
Afterwords
Cohen provides scornful “summaries” of the “thinking” of the sissies who thought that Ukraine would fold in a matter of days, summaries that a cursory review on my part suggests are unsupported by the documents to which he links, almost as if Cohen were making his opponents say what he wished they had said instead of what they did say. But what really staggers me—and I’ve been staggering a lot in this piece—is that Cohen emerges in his analysis as the most passionately pro-Ukraine “expert” I’ve ever encountered, at the same time that he’s throwing his arms around Donald Trump, who is clearly set, once in office, to throw poor Ukraine, and poor Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in particular, to the Russian wolves. Go figure!
1. Perhaps, to speculate wildly, Putin was “inspired” by Afghanistan, not as evidence of American “weakness”, but as evidence that governments created thanks to U.S. pressure had no real popular support, that Ukrainian soldiers, like their Afghan counterparts, would throw down their rifles and run away rather than fight. Just a thought.
