The Times lines ‘em up and I knock ‘em down
October 20th, 2008, 9:27 am · Post a Comment · posted by jhogg
The NY Times article, Russia is striving to modernize its military, actually does a passing job on the subject. The Russian military, particularly the army, is one long experiment in ruin. The culture of dedovshina (literally, rule by grandfathers) has been practically impossible to shake within the conscript system. For those not in the know, dedovshina is the hazing practice within the Russian army that rivals the treatment in any maximum security prison in the United States.
But the Times drops the ball when it listens a little TOO much to the Pentagon talking points:
Which is not to say that the United States will stop judging Russian behavior in light of what it considers a clumsy, ill-advised and unnecessary invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Wait… what? Clusmy and ill-advised? The Ball Gunner has long argued that the Russians did precisely what they intended to do in Georgia. Send a message, knock some heads and then get out of town before the locals can cobble together an insurgency. Note that there is now a de jure if not de facto South Ossetia. There are lots of points to be made about clumsy, ill-advised invasions. But me thinks Georgia is not the one they should be pointing at.
On the matter of horn tooting:
“What the Russian leadership has discovered is proof of an old maxim: that a foreign policy without a credible military is no foreign policy,” said Dale R. Herspring, a scholar on Russian military affairs at Kansas State University.
I took a class with this fellow. He’s a former Foreign Service Officer, an absolute fountain of knowledge, fluent in several languages and a right bastard. The Ball Gunner is immensely fond of him.
And finally, a mad lib for your pleasure:
An irony is emerging. One central cause of the (insert possessive country here) collapse was that its centrally planned, calcified economy simply could not support the (insert above country’s capital city) superpower military ambitions.
The New York Times picked “Soviet Union” and “Kremlin.” How many examples can YOU come up with?
