Obama doesn’t grasp Putin’s Eurasian ambitions

Washington Post ^ | March 19, 2014 | By Editorial Board

[zeestephen]

This editorial is not serious.

The Washington Post does not fear Putin.

The Washington Post fears the 2014 election.

The neo-Con reaction is very similar - all politics, no substance.

After you read “Commentary” magazine over a period of years, you realize that most neo-Cons support the Democratic Party on every issue except military spending and Israel.

The neo-Cons have to be hawks against Putin, otherwise, they will be accused of being single issue Conservatives who only care about Israel.

[PotatoHeadMick]

You appear to have missed the thrust of my point. I was not disagreeing with the idea that politically it couldn’t have been done, I am simply stating that it should never have been made so obvious (by publicly admonishing Patton for his comments etc) that the option wasn’t on the table.

Joe Stalin got every single thing he wanted through bluster and bluff, he always pretended that he could make a separate peace with Hitler to scare the western allies. Stalin could never have done so and survived but simply the threat was enough to make the western allies panic and give him whatever he wanted.

At the same time Stalin was terrified that the western allies would make a separate peace with Hitler and leave him on his own, something that was not so fanciful. This weakness should have been exploited by the western allies. They should have delayed the odd lend-lease shipment, dropped hints that Georgie Patton wasn’t such an idiot after all. Made statements that after a suitably brief time period Germany could be rearmed and back on its feet again. Fine, it’s bluffing, we know that now but Joe Stalin didn’t.

You are mistaken that the Red Army was all powerful, like I said every single boot its soldiers wore had “Made in the USA” stamped on it, the same with the trucks, the wheat and meat that fed Soviet soldiers came from the west. Vast tracts of farmland and industrial plant were destroyed, millions of Russians were dead, millions more were sick of the war and of their government (and we know how that ended up in 1918). The USA was building the atomic bomb, it was the world’s greatest industrial nation bar none. Stalin was weak and he knew it.

The west didn’t have to actually fight Stalin, they just needed to show a bit of backbone in the face of his bluster and bluff, they caved however, time and again. The reason they caved of course was in no small way due to the fact that Joe Stalin had KGB agents inserted in the very highest ranks of the British, French and American governments.

[JimRed]

Thank you for keeping an eye on the ComPost- so we don’t have to! Even they get it right once in a while.