Michael Weiss

I just read a very long deep dive bit of reporting in The Guardian by Sean Walker about the lead up to the full scale invasion of Ukraine, how the US and the UK knew that the war was coming and got that absolutely right, but then completely cocked up how the war was going to go.

And why did they cock it up?

Because they took the Russian military's estimation of itself at face value.

We are a, a, a bright, shiny army that has been completely rehabilitated and reformed.

And there is not a chance in health that this little country called Ukraine can put up a fight.

Kiev in three, and then we're at the border with Poland in two weeks.

And that just proved to be utterly catastrophically wrong, right?

So I'm very, very leery of taking what a regime, a dictatorship, totalitarian dictatorship says, um,

at face value, right?

Like they might believe their own propaganda, but we shouldn't.

So is it the case that a confrontation with them would be kind of, you know, the death knell of American military?

No, it probably isn't.

We would probably wipe the floor with them.

But again, it's not about how much fire and fury can be rained down on Iran.

It's about what happens next.

How do you stop the regime from doing the sorts of things that brought you to this point in the first place?

And I do not have an answer for that because I have been given no answer for that.

I have not seen anything credible.

And maybe it's out there.

That's not to say that there aren't these elaborate plans being cooked up, but I don't know what they are.