You are correct in my opinion. It seems whoever orchestrated that thought it would be the second Crimea, forgot Ukraine had 8 years to prepare (even with a shared soviet corruption problems and cheap traitors) and completely ignored the historical case of their resistance in and post WW2. One magazine even published a postponned article summarizing the achievements of russian warriors, and there were public persons speculating about taking Kiyv in three days. Even if you ignore them normalizing of such an act at all, they were sniffing their farts while planning it and thinking it’d go alright.

Militarily it was a huge success.

I mean, I have to disagree. The military focus was on taking centers of financial and administrative power, rather than securing the physical capital that allowed the country to operate. A bunch of the post-invasion insurrection was the collapse in quality of life that resulted from all the infrastructure failures the US presided over in a country that was already hobbled by a decade of sanctions and infrastructure issues. This was entirely a consequence of US “Shock and Awe” invasion tactics, which destroyed the machinery that we would have needed in order to successfully govern.

After that, our efforts to rebuild Iraq were largely a sham, serving as a funnel for kicking money back to the Bush mega-donors. So we just got a reputation in the country as these hopelessly incompetent and shamelessly corrupt middle men. And after ousting all the original incompetent and corrupt middle men (along with a healthy number of competent and forthright engineers and administrators), this gave the insurrection the same nationalist flavor that gave birth to the original Ba’athist party.

So it wasn’t a military success. It was a smash-and-grab operation in which the US ultimately fumbled the bag. We didn’t get solid control over the southern oil fields. We didn’t cement Iraq as a South Korean / Israeli / Jordanian style permanent regional ally from which to project our influence. We couldn’t secure the borders or quell insurrections long enough to transition to civilian rule. We couldn’t even hold Fallujah for more than a year at a time. Even as Bush was rolling out those “Mission Accomplished” banners, we were already losing traction in the territory we said we’d claimed. This was in large part because the original push into Baghdad fully exhausted the US military’s ground capacity. The tanks that made it to Baghdad in May of 2003 were running on fumes, having completely outpaced their supply convoys.

The US invasion of Iraq was a mess from day one. It was only Saddam’s own weak position, and the refusal of US mass media to report any kind of negative analysis of the initial charge into Baghdad, that left the illusion of success.

News reports are not “trying to present Russia as weak”. They legitimately are weak.

They have a firmer control of the Donetsk region than the US ever had outside the Green Zone of Baghdad. If the US Invasion of Iraq could be considered a success (it was not), the Russian invasion of eastern ukraine was total victory (also untrue, but it still holds up marginally).

Do you think the US or NATO would have any trouble rolling Ukraine if it only had Russian support?

I think the US is currently involved in too many theaters of combat and is far too exhausted from decades of international conflict to dedicate anywhere near what it brought to bear against Iraq in 2003. What’s more, the political capital of losing significant numbers of American troops in a slugging match with Russia would be disastrous to the current administration’s reelection chances. If Biden sent divisions to the Ukrainian front, President Trump would be recalling them inside the next year guaranteed.

NATO is even more toothless, given the state of German and French and British armed forces. Germany has 10% of the required military readiness under NATO guidelines, because they’ve been so lackluster in military spending over the last two decades. France is being run out of its old colonial enclaves across Africa and still has far too many economic ties to Russia to want to pick a fight. The UK is flat broke and its governance is in shambles. Nobody else in the alliance has anything resembling a competitive military force, much less one armed and trained for a foreign invasion.

Ukraine was already a proxy war with Russia. Its proved a futile one. Ukraine had the 9th largest military in the world and its been virtually wiped out.

No troops would be on the ground but Kiev would be rubble within two weeks.

That was the Pyongyang gambit of the 1950s, back when the US had uncontested air superiority and more ordinance than it knew what to do with. Modern air defenses make that kind of strategy impossible. Americans would lose more in the air than anyone lost on the ground.

Certain special irony if that’s a misquote.