Never Ascribe to Malice...

You know the saying: "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity".  It's kind of a false choice; as if stupid people can't be evil or evil people can't be stupid.  When our Glorious Leader does something that comes across as incredibly evil, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, it just might be they're incredibly stupid.  Or evil.  Or both.   

David Goldman writing for PJ Media says "the Russians Think We're Wrecking the World on Purpose".  They think the administration can't possibly be as stupid as they appear, therefore it must be deliberate.  You should RTWT.

“In Russia, most analysts, politicians and ordinary citizens believe in the unlimited might of America, and thus reject the notion that the US has made, and continues to make, mistakes in the [Middle East]. Instead, they assume it’s all a part of a complex plan to restructure the world and to spread global domination,” writes Fyodor Lukyanov on the Al Monitor website today. Lukyanov, who chairs Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, laments what he derides as a “conspiracy theory.” Nonetheless, he reports, President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite think that the United States is spreading chaos as part of a diabolical plot for world domination.

Pardon me while I laugh my ass off.   Sorry.  All better, now.

Goldman writes from the perspective that the Russian psyche has been prone to conspiracy theories (this may be why they get along so well with "the Arab street" - where "buying a soda is studied deeply for underlying motives" - Rabbi Daniel Lapin)  He notes that the phrase "paranoid Russian" is redundant. 

 “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them,”

As Goldman puts it, Americans play Monopoly; Russians play chess.  It's no small coincidence that most of the grand masters of chess are Russian; it's an ideal game for conspiracy nuts.  Every move, no matter how small, is part of a carefully crafted master plan.  Every piece is working together.  He continues:

Syria’s Sunni majority started an insurgency against the minority Alawite government of Basher al-Assad in response to the ill-named Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa. America’s abrupt dismissal of its long-ally Hosni Mubarak and the ascendancy of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood emboldened Syria’s long-suffering Sunni majority to stake its claim to power. Like Mubarak, the Assads suppressed the Muslim Brothers, but far more viciously, leveling the Sunni town of Hama in 1982 with casualties estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000.

Western policy thus provoked Syria’s civil war. The prospect of a Sunni fundamentalist regime in Egypt under American patronage, the emergence of the ”Sunni Awakening” in Iraq during the Petraeus ”surge”, and the victory of Western-backed Sunni jihadists over Libya’s Gaddafi, gave Syria’s Sunnis little choice. America’s fecklessness with respect to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, moreover, gave Saudi Arabia and Turkey strategic reasons to fund and arm various branches of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.

As you might have gathered, I find it entertaining with highly interesting perspectives.  I have to admit that he tweaked me uncomfortably, lumping anyone who would support Rand Paul as a bunch of American paranoid conspiracy nuts.  These are the people he calls out for thinking that the administration might intend to use unmanned aerial vehicles to kill American citizens anywhere in the world, including in the US itself.   Or that they passed a law called the NDAA which allows imprisoning people without trial, or worse.  I assume he would think the same about MRAPs on the street or huge orders of ammunition for DHS. 

So he got that part wrong; it's still an interesting read. 

 Chess boards are always full of lines of attacks, blocks and combinations.