Well, Too Bad.

NYT is in lament mode. 

WASHINGTON — After four weeks of terror and retaliation in Israel and the Gaza Strip, and 20 months of war in Ukraine, President is confronting the limits of his leverage in the two international conflicts defining his presidency. For 10 days, the Biden administration has been urging Prime Minister to allow for “humanitarian pauses” in the bombing of Gaza, hoping that the $3.8 billion a year in American security assistance would carry with it enough influence over the Israeli leader’s tactics. It has not. Netanyahu rebuffed Biden’s push for greater efforts to avoid civilian casualties in a phone call Monday. And he has pushed ahead with what he has called “mighty vengeance” for the Oct. 7 attacks, using huge bombs to collapse Hamas’ network of tunnels, even if they also collapse whole neighborhoods in Gaza.

Well, that is an expected result for administration which merely simulates professional activity in fields were it has none. And if Gaza atrocity hasn't been enough. There is this:

So now, Biden is trying to channel fatigue and frustration with the war in Ukraine, born of the growing sense that billions of dollars in American arms, aid and intelligence collection has simply failed to overcome the assembled weight of the dug-in Russian army. “What I worry about,” Douglas Lute, a retired general who was central to putting together the Afghanistan strategy in the Bush and Obama administrations, said at an event at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point last week, “is that we are giving them enough to stay in the fight, but not enough to win.”

What can I say--General Douglas Lute wouldn't be allowed to command a company in Russian Army, of which he has about zero knowledge (expected from the guy who lost in Afghanistan), but then again, US general with a record of winning any campaign, let alone war is a unicorn of sorts nowadays. A suffocating professional envy drives many of them to profuse verbal diarrhea of platitudes and militarily meaningless statements designed for domestic consumption. Something tells me that Lute, judging by his brilliant "strategy" in Afghanistan wouldn't know how to calculate what constitutes  this "enough to win". Does he even know what winning in war is? I doubt it. What kind of an officer can you bring up when teaching them fake military history while removing the West Point from the engineering school it once was further and further away. 

Looking at Petraeus, Lute or Ben Hodges one can safely conclude that the process has started long time ago. Just take a look at the "academics" at West Point.  Majors, minors? Here is a typical academic program. English? Really? Pre-Calculus? Calculus II as a "required" course. Biology? For what? How's fucking biology can form an officer? For biological weapons, I guess. Literature? This is Bologna system at its worst. I wonder what they teach them today in History of Military Art. Ah, wait, I know... So, no wonder.