How hubris can lead to costly mistakes

I asked a friend, a diplomat in Moscow, about the scale of Russian losses in Ukraine. He replied that discussing this matter is forbidden and that the figure is considered a state secret. Russia is different from America, he explained. The mother of a soldier killed in the war, for example, does not have the right to shed her tears on television, demand an end to the war or call for the prosecution of whoever decided to send the army there. The priority is victory, regardless of the costs, and questioning the war’s justification or utility is considered treason.
He added that President Vladimir Putin’s popularity remains high, at about 60 percent, though it is down from the 80 percent he enjoyed in previous years. The law prohibits discussion of the number of dead and wounded, as well as the number of mercenaries Russia has recruited from countries near and far to die on behalf of the Russian army, including Arabs, even if it should be noted that thousands of mercenaries are also fighting alongside the Ukrainian army.
The war and Western sanctions have not brought down the Russian economy because of the country’s immense resource wealth, as well as the recent rise in oil prices. Goods have not disappeared from the stores but they are of lower quality. Russians are tired of the war but they have not taken to the streets to say so openly.
I asked who had made the decision to launch the war that began in the last week of February 2022. The answer was that the decision had been taken by a very small group around the president and that prominent officials learned of it only after it had been made. He noted that the prevailing impression among Kremlin officials had been that Putin’s so-called special military operation would be a swift and decisive campaign and that Ukraine’s collapse would be rapid.

It did not occur to many in Moscow that the war could go on for so long or that convoys of coffins would return

Ghassan Charbel

It did not occur to many that the war could go on for so long or that convoys of coffins would return from Volodymyr Zelensky’s country at such a high pace. In the first days of the war, I too misjudged the situation, perhaps because of Putin’s life story. Putin’s biography suggested that he is a man of information and reports — an agent of the KGB, which had penetrated capitals near and far. Then there was his success in suppressing the winds of disintegration that had begun to blow across the Russian Federation itself. Finally, Western decision-makers had celebrated this man for years, receiving him and visiting him.
I was struck by the diplomat’s remark that, when the powerful make mistakes, they are usually immense. The decision to invade Ukraine may later fall under the category of costly decisions; those behind it had never imagined they would be bogged down in the swamps of war for so long. He said those around the president never imagined that Ukraine would turn into "Ukrainistan" or that it would cause such massive bleeding.
The term "costly decisions" stopped me in my tracks and raised questions. Was Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov part of the narrow circle that helped make the decision? Did it escape the mind of this seasoned and shrewd diplomat that the West would not easily accept such a blow and that it would find a way to make the decision-maker pay the price for what he had done? Did the generals’ opinion prevail over that of the foreign minister, just as the loyalty of the members of Iraq’s "Regional Command" prevailed over Tariq Aziz’s timid reservations? Could Lavrov have learned of the decision only after it had been taken?
In this bitter region, journalists are haunted by the curse of comparisons. One day, "Mr. Leader" Saddam Hussein decided that the Iranian revolution was an imminent threat and that, because it was in disarray and vulnerable, invading Iran could fragment the country. He ordered his army to cross the border and thus became mired in war; the convoys of coffins continued to arrive for eight years.
The decision to go to war is far easier to take than the decision to leave. This applies to the Iran-Iraq war and the Russian-Ukrainian war. I do not mean to say that Putin resembles Saddam or that the Iraqi Baathist resembles a KGB recruit. The point here is that hubris leads to mistakes and those mistakes are often costly. The obsession with the image one wants to leave in history helps ignite vast fires, consuming soldiers and billions of dollars alike.
The illusions of the powerful are a tragedy. Saddam imagined that the world would tolerate the blow of the Kuwait invasion. On its first day, he presented the invasion as a "special military operation." He told King Hussein of Jordan, who called him that day, that it was an "operation to break noses," a disciplinary campaign against the Kuwaiti authorities.
I was thinking of costly decisions when I asked a Palestinian leader about his total silence amid the horrors witnessed by the Gaza Strip and the grave dangers surrounding the West Bank. He said he was silent out of respect for the sea of blood that had flowed because of the brutality of the Israeli army and out of respect for the victims’ families.
He said he fears that "the current Nakba may be more severe than the first." He added that, since the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, he has been asking himself why Yahya Sinwar did not kidnap a soldier or a handful of soldiers instead of deciding to launch a full-fledged war that exceeded the capacity of Gaza and the so-called Axis of Resistance, presenting the operation as "the largest suicide operation in history."
He stressed that Palestinians have the right to confront the Israeli occupation with arms, but added that no leader has the right to make decisions without understanding the extent of their cost. He noted that "the world is now preoccupied with Hormuz and the Iranian issue, not the Palestinian cause."

• Ghassan Charbel is editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. X: @GhasanCharbel

This article first appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat.