Keith Gessen in The Ideas Letter:
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the New Yorker about military analysts and their arguments over the war in Ukraine. Why did so many people think that Russia would take Kyiv in a matter of days? Was it an area studies issue, an overreliance on quantitative methods, a credulity about Russian propaganda? What conclusions, if any, could we draw for the rest of the war from this initial error? And so on.
One of the military analysts I spoke with spent a lot of time on Twitter. He used it to find photos and videos from the battlefield, gauge public opinion in Ukraine, and get answers to questions about his own work. As a result, he was deeply concerned about all the mistakes, misinterpretations, and bad actors on the platform. He was willing to talk about the war in Ukraine. But what he really wanted to talk about was Twitter.
I thought about this analyst when I saw the news, in September, that Dimitri Simes, longtime president of the Center for the National Interest think tank in Washington, D.C., had been indicted by the Biden Justice Department for sanctions violations and money laundering, chiefly for his work as a talk show host on Russia’s most popular TV station, Channel One. There was war, I thought, and then, as my military analyst well knew, there was info-war. Simes was the latest casualty.
Who was Dimitri Simes?
More here.
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