Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Retired general on what it would take to convince Putin war is unsustainable" video.

  1. If you want to go back to the First Gulf War to justify invading Iraq, remember that did not arise in a vacuum. Before then, Saddam was seen to be on the side of the West, as a bulwark against Iran. He attacked Iran in a proxy war on behalf of the West, which Iran survived, but which destroyed the economy of Iraq. So then he figured he would take over Kuwait to use its resources to shore himself up. Before that First Gulf War, Saddam massacred thousands of his own Kurdish population with poison gas in Halabja, yet nobody in positions of power in the US or anywhere else in the West described him as a “brutal dictator” for that. It was, you know, a minor peccadillo of an important ally, or something like that.
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  2. Trouble is, his façade of invincibility, even competence, is already crumbling. Prigozhin and Kadyrov are openly mocking the Russian military. And this is not helped by Putin’s repeated reshuffling of the military leadership. This projects an impression of indecisiveness, of weakness.
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  3. I can understand why the Germans continue to be sensitive about it, and why Scholz was so slow to agree. There is still a feeling that 🇩🇪 has a special relationship with 🇷🇺, because the Soviets were instrumental in defeating Nazism.
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