‘British Specialists’
It was Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick!
The Kremlin says Moscow knows who sabotaged the Nord Stream network last month. After a thorough investigation, Russia has determined it wasn't Russia. Jeffrey Sachs knew it all along.
That's all dark humor and sarcasm, of course. The conflict in Ukraine has supplanted Syria's civil war as the world's foremost wellspring of counter-narrative -- the theater du jour for the propaganda wars.
The public will never know what really happ
And the prolific amount of digital ink spilled.
Reading between the lines, I believe you’re saying that Jeffry Sachs was the saboteur?
Live fire drill, might as well get some press out of it.
Excellent assessment…..as usual.
“Russia’s intervention in Syria was unimpeded by the West” – unimpeded? just saying that I recall at the time that we were intent on removing Assad, and his government (legitimate UN member government at the time) asked for Russia’s technical military help to help in their civil war. We were on the other side arming the Kurds and whey (ISIS, al-queda, whomever). My reading of the UN charter allows Syria to align with Russia and cooperate. On what basis, on what justification, would we “impede”? Really asking.
Yes, unimpeded. We aided the opposition, as did the Saudis (and others), and when fighting a multi-front war finally wore down Assad’s army, and he was on the brink of being overthrown, the IRGC stepped in and Hezbollah stepped up. Qassem Soleimani assessed that the situation would be much easier to turn around with Russian air power, so he flew to Moscow (despite a travel ban) and laid out the case to Putin. Putin, who already had special forces in the country, officially intervened, sending his air force to Latakia in September of 2015. Shortly thereafter, Soleimani, Hezbollah, Shiite fighters brought over from Iraq and what was left of Assad’s depleted army launched the Aleppo assault. From there, the US effectively ceded western Syria (Assad’s power corridor) to the Russia-IRGC-Hezbollah-Assad alliance. The US continued to fight alongside the Kurds in the east of the country to retake Raqqa from ISIS. We stayed over there, Russia stayed west, and the country was effectively divided into Syria proper (in the west) and a kind of no man’s land in the east, save an enclave in the north controlled by the Kurds. That worked until Erdogan got irritated with it, and Trump pulled US support for the YPG. Idlib remains a mess, but other than that, the Assad regime is basically restored, although clearly it’s never going to be the same as it was. The West’s support for opposition elements in Syria in no way, shape or form resembles the scope of the support for Ukraine. The basis for supporting the opposition in Syria was, at the outset, to get rid of Assad when he cracked down on protestors agitating for democracy. That effort (supporting the opposition) became more complex by the week, and eventually turned into one of the most absurd disasters in the history of US-supported coups, which is really saying something because that history is replete with absurd disasters. There was nothing (and is nothing) “legitimate” about the Assad government, unless you equate legitimacy with decades of oppression. If you doubt that assessment, take a trip to Syria in a few years when it’s a little safer and try to lobby for truly free and truly fair elections. Let me know how it goes. Also, “technical” military help hardly covers it. Russia threw an enormous amount of fire power, air cover and on-the-ground assistance at the war. They effectively went to war themselves. They’re still there. They also committed all manner of atrocities, the scope of which is impossible to overstate.
Theoretically, the US could’ve kept arming the opposition, sent US special forces to western Syria or just plain old called up the Kremlin and said “Hey, it’s us, we’ve decided Assad has to go, and you’re not going to help him, especially not at the behest of Qassem Soleimani. So, you stay home, in Moscow, or else.” We didn’t do any of that. Eventually, we gave up on the idea of stitching together alliances of Sunni extremists and we let Russia and Iran restore Assad’s regime. He should thank us. We didn’t have to. We probably would’ve kept embarrassing ourselves with those silly, short-lived, constantly shifting teams of extremists we were sending small arms to, but it wouldn’t be the first time we stuck around and embarrassed ourselves until the bitter end.
Russia is a rickety remnant of a failed experiment. They can’t even hold small areas of captured territory in Ukraine. Any time we want to call their bluff we can. It’s just a matter of whether a US president is willing to take that 1 in (whatever it is) chance that Putin would push the proverbial button. The overwhelming odds are that if the White House told him to leave now, or face a US military operation to liberate Ukraine, he’d fold. I’d suggest it might come to that eventually, if it weren’t for the fact that the Russian military is apparently so incompetent that Ukraine might well end up beating them and driving them back into Russia before NATO even has a chance to gear up.
Also, I want to preemptively caution everyone against even the appearance of pro-Assad comments. In the simplest possible terms: I don’t want them. And the vast majority of readers don’t want to read them, either. Everyone understands that Syria was, in part anyway, another example of botched US interventionism. But, just as the fact that the US had no business ruining Iraq’s future doesn’t thereby mean Saddam Hussein was a good guy, the fact that the US armed factions of Sunni extremists in Syria doesn’t thereby mean the Assad family are the type of folks you’d want to have backyard cookout with. There’s a good case against US interventionism. But, at the same time, there’s no case for the Assads and Saddams of the world.
Plainly, destabilizing regimes has the potential to create untold misery for the populace, and in that sense, it’s absolutely the case that Iraq and Syria would’ve been “better” off from a kind of day-to-day, “well, at least it’s not chaos and as long as we don’t challenge the big man, we’ll be ok” perspective, if Assad and Saddam were never bothered by anyone. But if that’s the line we’re going to take, then what’s the point of democracy? What is it about our system that we like? Every day, millions of people take to the internet to point out what I just did: That Syria was more stable with Assad unfettered, that Iraq was more stable with Saddam, Libya with Gaddafi, and so on. That being the case, why do we even bother with democracy? Why would virtually none of the people who make the argument I just did choose to live in Assad’s pre-war Syria or Saddam’s Iraq compared to, say, Canada or Sweden? If those places are so stable and prosperous with dictators, then why not go live there? I mean, Syria and Iraq have rich cultural heritages that date back to the dawn of time. In many ways, they’re quite literally the cradle of human civilization. Although I’m sure you can conjure any number of reasons why it’d be preferable to live in Canada versus Saddam’s “stable” Iraq, the main reason is that at any given time, and for any given reason (or no reason at all), you could be snatched up off the streets by the government in Saddam’s Iraq never to be heard from again. Finally, before we cast implicit aspersions at domestic agitators and violent protestors who resort to extreme means to destabilize the likes of Assad, let’s not forget who we are in America — namely, the descendants of agitators who resorted to violent means to throw off (as opposed to overthrow) a dictator (a king, in our case), with the help of a foreign government.
I recall Brits that were pro-Nazis hoping for stability; and these days right here at home folks wishing for the return of a recent fascist leader and the current elections of his cohort. I am really not sure what is so attractive about a Supreme Leader, except maybe as a way out of our continuing gridlock.
Did the Russians mention James Bond by name?
My favorite bit of counter-narrative about the Nord Stream sabotage–favorite because it’s so plausible it could be true:
It was a de-icing accident. Follow along children…
At undersea temperatures and high pipeline pressures, methane ice builds up inside of natural gas pipelines. It has to be periodically de-iced, just like your freer. While it has to be carefully coordinated, it’s a standard procedure. Both sides of the pipe bring down the gas pressure, and when it gets low enough, the methane ice sublimates into gas. The risk is that if things aren’t well coordinated–if the pressures on each side aren’t balanced–chunks of ice can break loose and go barreling down the pipe like a cannonball, doing catastrophic damage.
The idea that the operators on the Russian side messed this up and chose to blame sabotage rather than admitting the truth and losing their jobs actually makes complete sense. There’s only one problem with this narrative. It isn’t true.
It’s provably false. I don’t even need links or evidence, just logic, to prove that.
1) De-icing is scheduled well in advance. If the procedure went wrong, the side that didn’t mess things up would just immediately say what happened, and that would be that.
2) Seismic sensors detected blasts. Not ricocheting ice, but explosions. But actually, point 1) is enough to disprove this whole counter-narrative.
And yet, the narrative lives on. It’s so hard to kill a good story, even if logic is on your side. The newest bit of counter-narrative out there is that the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi was actually a disaffected gay lover. Elon Musk even got on board before deleting the relevant tweets. As long as you can tell a good story, you can persuade enough people to sow doubt and make any claim plausible.
Oh, and there’s a third reason why the de-icing story is false: I just made the whole thing up.
Russia is a clown academy except for one thing:They are all about war crimes and genocide. My personal view is we need a few bodies on the sidewalk in Moscow, or there will be no peace….
I personally like the Zen approach: Have no opinion for or against anything.
The Russian economy is collapsing, and the only thing left is its energy (NG and Oil). The destruction of the pipeline will prevent Russia quickly reversing policy. Doesn’t it seem possible that it was a strategic hit by someone other than Russia.
Sure it’s possible. Which is what’s so funny (to me anyway) about the bombastic way in which so much counter-narrative is presented. A lot of counter-narrative is entirely plausible. It’s the way it’s packaged (usually in order to sell it, figuratively or literally) that makes it implausible and/or nefarious. Imagine if all the Nord Stream counter-narrative were presented in the succinct, rational way you just presented it. Nobody would lampoon it. That Bloomberg TV segment I talked about earlier this month would’ve gone completely differently if Sachs had said, “You know, it’s really difficult to say what precisely happened. What we do know is that if Nord Stream 1 is down forever, that means Russia won’t be able to ramp back up to full capacity and thereby restore its revenue streams in the event the situation does resolve itself at some point, so that’s something to consider.” Instead, he said something he knew would be provocative, and then did a kind of wild-eyed, sarcastic thing with his facial expression which might’ve looked, to some viewers, like a purposeful attempt to provoke Lisa and Tom, then he proceeded to suggest that the media is trying to obscure the truth or at least keep people like him from positing alternative theories. The whole thing was overwrought and needlessly confrontational, He could’ve made the same point without making any waves whatsoever.
Admittedly, I wasn’t receptive to the presentation of a concise, somewhat rational alternative theory when this story first broke. In fact, I declined to countenance it at all and closed the comments on the article, as many of you doubtlessly remember.
I’ll (happily) defend that decision even if it turns out it was Navy SEALs using advanced technology gleaned from aliens working at Area 51.
Why? Why would I defend a decision to shut down rational debate not couched in bombastic terms? Well, I’ll tell you.
First, the reason I was hostile to an alternative account initially, was because it was the very first comment, left just minutes after the article was published. As a reminder, that comment suggested it was a US operation aimed at ensuring America could secure access to a lucrative LNG market. Forgetting for a moment the fact that the US doesn’t need to destroy the Nord Stream to convince Europe to buy American natural gas, we, as citizens of prosperous Western democracies absolutely have to stop defaulting immediately to conspiracy theories at every possible opportunity. As most readers will agree, that tendency is destroying the social fabric and leading ~40% of the electorate down the road to insanity. In addition to the psychological toll on those folks, their paranoia is also creating untold misery for other people who are the subject of conspiracy theories (e.g., the families who sued Alex Jones). It’s not that we should just blindly accept the Western narrative, it’s that if our first instinct in every instance is to posit a conspiracy, then we’ll all lose our minds.
Second, when a piece of infrastructure blows up, and someone (in this case me) who’s compelled to write about it in real time has to make a snap “odds are” judgment about the likely culprit, the person doing to writing will be forgiven for suggesting that the dictator who controls the infrastructure and who’s spent the last six months doing nothing but blowing things up, might’ve had something to do with it.
Two words: Methane. Ice.
At low underseas temperatures and high internal-pipeline pressures, methane icing occurs (natural gas is mostly just methane). Just like your freezer, it periodically has to be de-iced. This is a straightforward procedure which nonetheless has to be carefully coordinated. Both sides of the pipe have to lower the pressure in a coordinated fashion, after which the ice naturally sublimates back into gas. The problem is if the pressure is dropped unevenly, in which case chunks of ice can break free. These go ricocheting down the pipe ballistically, causing catastrophic damage. That’s exactly what happened, but neither sides’ specialists want to admit it, because then they would lose their jobs.