by Naresh Jotwani

Looking back at the major military conflicts since the last century, one sees that none of them produced results which were proudly and loudly touted to be achieved. Failure is the norm, while success has had to be retrofitted into the outcome through clever PR. Examples: the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Ordinary people are taken in by tyrants’ sabre-rattling, loud speeches, military parades and so on. An ordinary person says to himself: All that cannot be wrong, can it? Listening to a mesmerizing tyrant, he dare not even articulate the thought that the bravado is hollow and could backfire. But, invariably, it does. Ordinary people need to wake up and smell the coffee. It is not enough to say that the tyrants can be wrong. The fact is they are wrong, and their mistakes prove costly to all.

This post tries to link such failures to fickle understanding.