John le Carré on Brexit: ‘It’s breaking my heart’ theguardian.com/books/2020/feb… // John Le Carre has always been one of my favorite writers. His intelligence world is shrouded in many shades of grey, though there is clearly black and white. Here he ruminates on Olof Palme and our
2/ current situation, while looking backwards. On Brexit, "the rats have taken over the ship." Carre guts the idiot Corbyn. 
3/ But, here we come to one of the great strategic blunders, perhaps the greatest strategic blunder of the 20th century. In 1989, I led a three-man assessment team looking at the USSR in 2010. For simplicity's sake, we posited three decision-making trees--an innovation for the
4/ Intelligence Community. We assumed that decisions that the Soviet leadership made in the short-term, would give us indications as to where the Soviet Union would end up. Scenario 1 was a civil war. If the Soviet leadership tried to prevent the breakup of the USSR, nationalism
5/ in the republics would lead to civil war, especially as the Russian leadership would want to protect ethnic Russians. This problem emerged as their "Near Abroad." We did not think Gorbachev & Shevardnadze wanted a civil war and could control the General Staff and KGB. The
6/ second scenario was the emergence of a revanchist Red-Brown Soviet Union. This was always a possibility, but we thought that G & S were adamantly opposed to this scenario. We were convinced that Gorbachev was sincere in seeing the Soviet Union in a "common European home." We
7/ saw scenario 1 as the most likely, given the strongly held policy views of the General Secretary and his foreign minister. This scenario was a democratic Soviet Union, most likely a confederation, headed towards Europe and NATO. From the intelligence perspective, we did not
8/ consider what the West would do. What we were conveying to our colleagues in the Intelligence Community is that, given what we know in 1989-1990, the possibility of a democratic Soviet Union that is not an enemy is not impossible. They could get there. What my Army colleagues
9/ could not imagine is the short-sighted, rapacious, exploitative policies they would pursue towards Russia. Here, le Carre laments about those policies. The neo-liberal ransacking and pillaging of Russia--its factories and natural resources--has given us Putin and scenario 2,
10/ the Red-Brown alliance, more or less. Wall Street, Harvard economists, and the US political elite of both parties could only see short-term profits with no vision for the future. We won the Cold War and lost the Cold Peace. Our second strategic blunder comes in the 21st
11/ century when Bush invades Iraq in 2003. Saddam won that war. Bin Laden also won. After 19 years fighting, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives, and trillions of dollars--we have little to show for it. And you survey the self-inflicted damage
12/ from Brexit and Trump--thanks to the Mercers, Bannon, Trump, Farage, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Wikileaks, plus Putin--and here we are. Old intelligence hands look back at missed opportunities and wreckage everywhere.
