by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
I am more convinced than ever that we are headed for nuclear Armageddon
As readers know, I admire Russian President Putin, but the reasons I admire him make him a failed war leader.
Putin is a product of an old conception of foreign affairs as a rational enterprise conducted by gentlemen who relied on agreement rather than on the imposition of power. Consequently, when faced with non-gentlemen, Putin finds he played his cards wrong and lacks power.
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By this I mean conventional power. He went to war in Donbas without an army, and he still doesn’t have one. Therefore, the defense of Russia now resides in tactical nuclear weapons. Once they are used, it goes full scale.
Putin failed to understand that the conflict in Ukraine provoked by Washington had to be quickly won. He has failed to comprehend reality since 2014 when Washington overthrew, while Putin did nothing, the Ukrainian government. He still hasn’t built the massive Russian Army that would cause second thoughts among Washington’s NATO puppets.
How a leader of Putin’s quality fails in this way is beyond my understanding. Perhaps Putin is a Western liberal created by decades of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe propaganda beamed into the Soviet Union. So many Russian intellectuals, known as Atlanticist Integrationists, are a product of Washington propaganda and thus a threat to Russia.
Putin has never enforced any of his red lines. Consequently, every one has been crossed with zero consequences to the West. The latest Western audacity was the American led invasion of Kursk. Putin said the attackers would be held accountable, but the very limited strikes on some Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure hardly count as acts of war.
If we turn to the Middle East, we see the same inability to recognize reality. Israel used the moronic George W. Bush (really Dick Cheney) Regime to eliminate the countries opposing Israel’s expansion in the Middle East–Iraq, Syria, Iran. Washington knocked off Iraq for Israel, pretending it was a “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and the dumbshit Americans fell for it. But before the Obama Regime could deliver its attack on Syria, Russia was there, thus saving the country.
Now Israel has Washington focused on Iran. Why? Because Iran finances and arms the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, which has successfully defeated two Israeli invasions. If Israel can get Washington to get rid of Iran, Israel can grab southern Lebanon and perhaps the entire country.
Once Israel’s forces were committed to Gaza, it was a perfect time for Syria to retake the Golan Heights and for Hezbollah to overrun northern Israel. Iran could have knocked out the Iron Dome and destroyed Israeli air bases and military sites.
But nothing happened.
Seeing nothing but indecision and weakness, Israel began a campaign of attacking Syria, Hezbollah, and assassinating people in Iran.
Following an assassination in the Iranian capital, the Iranian leader said he was going to teach Israel a lesson. But he didn’t. All Iran did was to reveal to Israel that it had the capability to breach the Iron Dome and bring destruction to Israel, but Iran brought no destruction. Instead, Iran stupidly revealed its capability, thus in an act of total stupidity put Israel on alert.
Syria, allegedly, has the Russian S-300 air defense system. Either it doesn’t work or the Russians won’t let Syria use it to deter Israeli and US air attacks on Syria, which continue unabated. Makes one wonder why Russia bothered to intervene..
One can’t help but wonder if Putin and the almost equally unrealistic Chinese leader are sitting on Iran and Hezbollah, thinking that they are preventing an outbreak of a larger war. To the contrary, they are contributing to the outbreak of wider war.
From all indications, neither the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments have sufficient awareness of the situation to understand that a lack of effective response to aggression leads to more and worse aggression.
There are on the Iranian scene two of Washington’s carrier task force groups, US soldiers, and US jet fighters. Why are they there? Certainly not to rescue Israel from Gazans.
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