The dominant media-political narrative is that Vladimir Putin is a mentally-crazed loon who is getting a well-deserved bloody nose from plucky little Ukraine. According to Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, this is all so much much wishful thinking.
As the humiliating defeats of Iraq and then Afghanistan ought to have taught Western planners and pundits, Pollyanna hubris is the road to catastrophic defeat. It’s also part of what created this very crisis.
Sympathy for the outnumbered and outgunned defenders of Kyiv has led to the exaggeration of Russian setbacks, misunderstanding of Russian strategy, and even baseless claims from amateur psychoanalysts that Putin has lost his mind.
A more sober analysis shows that Russia may have sought a knockout blow, but always had well-laid plans for follow-on assaults if its initial moves proved insufficient.
The world has underestimated Putin before and those mistakes have led, in part, to this tragedy in Ukraine.
As I’ve written elsewhere, apparently drunk on the victory champagne of winning the Cold War, US and NATO strategy in Eastern Europe essentially amounted to telling the former Soviet Union that this was the end of history, so suck it up, chumps. Disastrously, as we see, this arrogance pushed Russia over a red line that made war as inevitable as it was avoidable.
Yet, even after the war has been unleashed, the Pentagon and the mainstream media are letting wishful thinking overrule sober judgement.
Allegedly, Putin believed that the Ukrainian government would collapse once Russian troops crossed the frontier and pushed to Kyiv, and that the operation has failed because the Ukrainian government remains in place.
Putin certainly hoped for a swift victory, but he clearly was not relying on his opening salvo as the only plan for success.
Rather, the Russian military was prepared to take the country by force if a swift decapitation strike fell short.
The US ought to recognise this strategy: it’s exactly what they used, when they invaded Iraq (as always, it’s different when we invade other countries). It certainly won them the battle to take Iraq. The grind of trying to rebuild a nation they’d destroyed and slap a veneer of “democracy” over the ruins came long after.
A look at the Russian military offensive demonstrates there was a plan for a full-scale invasion, which Russia is now executing.
Conventional, mechanized warfare is a time and resource consuming enterprise, and an operation of this scope isn’t cobbled together in days […]
What matters more than a handful of setbacks is that Russian forces have pushed 70 miles into contested terrain in less than a week and are on the outskirts of the capital.
This is not a sign of a disorganized, poorly assembled, and failed offensive.
Daily Mail
Rather, it’s a systematic assault by a calculating leader who clearly has full control of his senses — and has his opponents in the Pentagon and Washington fully sussed.
Donald Trump was merely speaking an uncomfortable truth when he acknowledged that, like it or not, Putin’s strategy was smart and effective. The mainstream media and deranged Democrats can Reee! all they like, but closing their ears to uncomfortable truths is to merely continue on the primrose path to disaster.