Workday vs Oracle: A comparison of two cloud HR systems

PARIS
If Workday is the belle of HR systems, Oracle is undoubtedly her ugly sister. Having implemented both, let me share some examples to prove my point. (The Oracle system here is the one that Oracle actively sells, Fusion HCM Cloud, having retired its shoddy predecessor, EBS, and putting PeopleSoft on life support.)

OVERALL SYSTEM USER FRIENDLINESS
In the 20 years I've known Oracle, one thing has not changed: its scant regard for customers and the most obvious consequence, poor user friendliness, reinforced by a technology that seems always a generation behind others. Key example: In most consumer-grade platforms you can get further details and actions from a given object you're looking at by clicking on the dots that can be found around that object, usually at the upper-right corner (just check any Google page) which in addition you can check by opening another tab.

As expected from a modern HR system like Workday, if you're looking at an org chart and wonder who a specific employee is, all you have to do is right click with the mouse on the dots and that employee record opens in a separate tab for you to peruse their data. Once your curiosity has been satisfied, just close that tab and go back to where you were, the org chart, to continue the work you were doing there.

No such luck if you're using Oracle Fusion. This supposedly latest-generation tool will display a pretty average org chart (see below) and should you want to see the details of a given employee there's no capability to open a tab with that employee's file. You'll have to go back to the landing page, search for that employee and then open their record. And then if you want to go back to where you were (that is, if you still remember what you were doing) you'll have to start all over again, go to the org chart, enter the team you're looking for and the system will display the page you were on eons ago.

As for the search bar, Oracle technology is still stuck in a time warp: it is case and accent sensitive. So if you have an employee called Pénélope (in French) or Penélope (Spanish), and you enter "Penelope" you'll get no results. Obviously, no Oracle developer has ever used Google and other similarly ubiquitous internet tools. 

Menu jumbo-mambo
 

In Workday, action menus are organized alphabetically, which is the logical way to go about things on Planet Earth. The five most frequently used actions appear first, which is a great time saver. On Planet Oracle, actions appear randomly, making you waste quite some time going up and down and across the the screen in hot pursuit of the action you need. Nobody ever told Oracle that making life easier for the customer should be top priority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SYNC ISSUE
We all know that "integrated" systems are rarely so, but what is amazing is that with Oracle even within a single module or feature thereof you still run into synchronization issues. Let's say that as a manager you perform an action in Workday (e.g., move an employee from your team to another) and this action requires an approval from another role (say, HR.) You log in as that HR person and here's the approval task awaiting you. Try and do the same in Oracle: you'll have a 3 to 5-minute time lag before the action travels from Manager to HR. In real life it doesn't really matter, but in project mode when you're constantly testing system setup and configuration it soon becomes bothersome and frustrating. 

Language enablement is another area where Oracle's sync'ing prowess is, shall I say, sinking? If you need to turn on a certain number of languages to go with your global deployments, with Workday it can be done in a couple of clicks and you see the results instantly. If you are unfortunate to have selected Oracle Fusion, you need to request language activation with Oracle Support. If you happen to do this on Monday, too bad, since this is done over the weekend. And since it takes half a day per language, your global implementation may have to wait an additional couple of weeks before you can go in and start checking translations.

SECURITY AND WORKFLOW
Whereas Workday can handle complex security requirements via domain and business process security, Oracle is very limited, often offering only global roles with no possibility to restrict per country/company or other criteria. In addition, whereas Workday proposes role names that are meaningful (Compensation Partner, HR Partner etc.) Oracle suggests roles with inordinately long names to remind users what that role can do (HRWithCompensationNoNotification). Can't get uglier than that.

Managing role conflicts is always an issue the more complex system implementation is. Whereas Workday has its own challenges, business process conditions work pretty well.  (Glossary: business conditions which allow you to decide how a specific role at a  specific step in a given workflow should behave.) Oracle, on the other hand, doesn't manage role conflict satisfactorily. A user case I struggled with during an implementation of Fusion  is the typical case of an HR user who is manager of an employee for whom he also plays the role of HR. If this manager initiates an action as manager and this action requires HR approval, you'd think since this manager is also this employee's HR they don't need to approve themselves. You'd be wrong! Oracle will make you do exactly that, which is absurd. You won't have this issue with Workday because its workflow configuration includes the possibility to exclude someone from approving a task if they are the initiator.

In summary, Oracle's  workflow capability can't hold a candle to Workday's which is extremely rich and allows for a level of granularity and sophistication Oracle customers can only dream of.

HALF-BAKED SYSTEM
Both Workday and Oracle provide various seniority dates to be used where relevant depending on whether one is interested in a hire date, or a company date, or time in a position etc. The similarities  end here: whereas Workday offers straight out of the box all these dates (as a user just go to an employee's record file and you'll see all the dates for that employee), Oracle will ask the user to launch a calculation for the dates they are interested in, otherwise they just remain empty not because some data is missing but because you haven't requested its calculation!!! Use case: You launch a promotion action on an employee and in order to help you make up your mind you need to know how long they have been in their current position.
In Workday, the data display effortlessly so you can continue with your promotion task.
In Oracle, you'll probably be met with an empty field, so you'll have to abort the task (remember you can't have two tabs or pages open at the same time in Oracle), go to the Seniority Dates screen in Quick Actions,  request a calculation, and then start the promotion task all over again. Awful user experience. Got forbid that at that moment you need to check another piece of information (say, compensation). You'll have to exit the promotion task one more time, go to Compensation, view the data and, if you still have not slit your throat in despair, launch a THIRD time the promotion task. One of the nuttier design decisions I've ever seen in my quarter-century experience of HR systems. 

Simple and available - the Workday way

DATA LOAD/MIGRATION
I could rant for days on how complicated data management is with Oracle, but suffice it to give one example: data inactivation. Let's say that you created a contract type which is becoming obsolete. To inactivate it you will need two rows: Start and End Dates of the period when the contract was valid and another row with the Start and End Dates when it is no longer valid. Now, since the End Date of Inactive is till the end of time Oracle requires you to put something like 4532. Why this date and not 9999 the way they do it at SAP? And why do we even need to put an End Date? Because Oracle is still run by the same people who created the relational database and keep on thinking along the lines of this technology that harks back to the last millennium. 

QUESTIONABLE DATA MODEL
Every vendor has their own data model which has been a perennial issue in system-to-system integration. None is worse than the manager data model as pursued by Oracle versus Workday. With Workday, a manager is appointed on an organization (or team) and any employee part of that team will share the same manager. Clear and straightforward - even if some first-time Workday users may be taken aback at the logical consequence of this choice: a manager will always sit in an organization above the one holding his/her team.  An employee is hired into an organization. With Oracle, things are illogical and a source of endless confusion to users: a department with 3 employees can have 3 different managers since employees are linked directly to a manager, and in this case each can have a different manager. A department manager can be assigned (as a system admin task) but only employees without a directly assigned manager will inherit that departmental head as manager. You can easily see how ugly this can turn with different employees having different managers, some sharing the same or having none whatsoever.

Calculated Fields vs FastFormulas
In short, both are ways to write custom rules such as a calculation of a compensation element or a condition/eligibility rule to apply to who should get that compensation component. And that's where the resemblance between the two stops. Whereas Workday has innovated with an easy-to-use feature whereby you assemble your rules from different objects Lego-like, Oracle is still stuck in last millennium's technology -hardly surprising when you know that FastFormulas are a transplant from Oracle's much-hated EBS HR system which only a database nerd can make sense of. See below screenshot from the two to get a sense of  how Workday has managed to become the default tool of HR users. 

Today's tool vs yesterday's

Custom Objects vs Flexfields

Here again, we have similar objects aiming at extending a system's capabilities beyond what was initially supplied by the vendor. But whereas Workday makes it easy to build, use and maintain such objects, Oracle's Flexfields have serious limitations. One of the most egregious being that on any screen it is linked to, a Flexfield appears systematically at the bottom. To give you an example, let's suppose that in a Hire screen in addition to the standard "Business Title" field, you want to add a related field called "Local Business Title". Since Oracle doesn't offer a second such field you'll have to create it via Flexields. So be it, except that being a Flexfield it appears all the way at the bottom of the screen, probably next to a data section on addresses or blood type which have nothing to do with it. Very confusing to the user. Worse, if the Flexfield is to be filled with a value depending on what you entered in the standard field, you'll have to scroll all the way up to remind yourself what you entered and, having duly taken note of it, scroll all the way back down to enter a value for the second, related, object. In terms of customer experience, it's simply awful, but on a par with Oracle's products.

DOCUMENTATION
The differences between the two vendors couldn't be starker: whereas Workday has a flourishing Community where you can find an easy answer to set-up documents, share best practice ideas with other customers, suggest enhancements to the tool (and track its status), Oracle is...well, Oracle. Its Help Center is anything but helpful. All you get is some marketing PowerPoint presentations, fluffy documents, links to attend Events and that's it. If men are from Mars and women from Venus, well Workday is clearly from Planet Customer and Oracle is still stuck in its Planet Larry Ellison - or Technology: the two are interchangeable.

So, why do some companies buy it?
I could go on for hours and inflict thousands of additional pixels on your retina, but I think you get my drift. Which prompts the following question: with Workday being manifestly so superior to Oracle in every way, why do some customers still buy Oracle for their HR needs? 

First, you have to realize that only current customers (those who are using Oracle database or middleware or Financials or legacy EBS system) have any interest in envisioning the possibility of purchasing Oracle's Fusion system. 

Second, a majority of Oracle customers (both PeopleSoft and EBS) moving their HR system to the cloud do it not with Oracle Fusion, but with...Workday, proof enough of what they really think of their current vendor.

Third, as for the minority who decides to stick with Oracle, you may still wonder that only masochists would spend good money on bad technology. And here you'd be more right than you may think. When I referred to these customers as buying Oracle Fusion HR, actually I wasn't being accurate because one of Oracle's (many) dirty little secrets is that these customers actually don't buy Oracle HR because ...they get it for free! Oracle just tells them that if they take Fusion Financials, they'll get HR for free. Most customers make the decision that sure it looks ugly but you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, do you? So, they decide to plod on and make the best out of a bad situation.

It's not dissimilar to those millions of consumers  who have a regular meal at McDonald's knowing it's not good for their health (or their palate) but that consideration is outweighed by price and convenience. 

So, my advice to Oracle customers as they head to Oracle CloudWorld is to remind them of that old phrase: you get what you pay for. And as you've seen it in this analysis, there's no denying it: Workday blows Oracle out of the water.

The longest reign: Musings on 11 remarkable days

PARIS
For someone who lived in the UK in his late teens, and have ever since visited the country for business and leisure over the decades, I have always looked at the British monarchy quizzically and at times uncomprehendingly. 

And yet like most Planet Earth residents I spent an inordinate amount of time last Monday and the previous weeks watching on TV, streaming or reading the press: debates, parades, processions, tributes, national anthems, religious services, that at times felt as long as her 70-year-long reign.

What impressed me and remained with me is the following.

First, not the sheer number of people who lined up  to file past the Queen's coffin in Westminster Hall, but the fact that they were willing to wait for over 12 hours or more for the honor. President Nasser's death drew throngs of people and fired up the whole Arab world,  but I doubt that anybody would have waited that long for him. I still can't wrap around my head what made hundreds of thousands of Britons (and foreigners) go through what must have been at times a painful wait just to see a coffin, illustrious as its contents must have been. This will remain as one of those mysteries of the British psyche I may never unfold. 

Second, the craze wasn't limited to the UK, or the Commonwealth, but was basically global. I would switch from one TV channel to another, or read the online press from around the world and for days and days they carried only one major topic; "The funeral of the century", as the tagline went. Has the world gone mad? Aren't there more important things to focus on? An increasingly scary war in the Ukraine? Global warning? Runaway inflation? Immigration crisis?

Third, in spite of billions of pixels and gallons of ink spent  on the Queen's passing away and the rites associated with it, one topic was simply never mentioned. What did she die of? Sure, it's not particularly shocking that a 96 year-old would die, and sure she looked increasingly frail, but on Tuesday last week we saw her bidding farewell to Boris Johnson and greeting incoming uncurtsying Prime Minister Liz Truss with both of whom she spent a couple of hours (more below on that curtsy - or lack thereof.). And the next day she didn't feel well and then ...she was gone. She can't have been missing BoJo that much, already, can she?

The blogger appearing on a postcard

with the Queen when she visited his 

Central Paris neighborhood in 2004

 

 

Fourth, the British are (in)famous for their quasi-total lack of skills when it comes to major infrastructure projects but when it comes to large spectacles, especially involving the military and extolling the monarchy, they are unbeatable. In just a matter of days they put in place a dazzling show involving complex logistics and organizational excellence that was astonishing. Cecil B. DeMille, the legendary Hollywood film-maker known for his lavish epics, wouldn't have been able to pull it off so spectacularly. And Mr. DeMille had the advantage of countless rehearsals and takes, something unavailable to the organizers: if you make mistakes it's in full view of the whole world. I was also amazed at the punctuality of the various events, despite so many unknowns and the large number of people involved. Probably explains how a tiny island lost in the mists of northern Europe managed to conquer one-third of mankind and build the largest empire the world has ever known and whose remnants the late sovereign represented. 

Fifth, no one would dare make a prediction of what the new King's reign will be like, but two things are certain. One, he won't reign half as long as his august mother. Second, the road is bound to be bumpy when you see the tantrums he threw before a global TV audience just because his pen was leaking. Seriously? There's something definitely wrong with a man who goes berserk on such a mundane issue. With his predecessor, we wouldn't even have noticed that something was amiss.

Sixth, the press was the major broker in getting the show over to us and I was hugely entertained by the crass incompetence of some of the reporters or self-proclaimed specialists pontificating on various TV shows. In France, it was cocorico! as our Sun King, Louis XIV's record as longest reigning monarch in mankind's history still holds: 72 years over Elizabeth II's 70 years (she's still the longest reigning female monarch and longest living monarch ever.) However, a not insignificant detail that French TV and press overlooked is that of Louis XIV's 72 years on the throne, 10 were spent as part of a regency since he was a minor. Meaning that he exercized his full royal prerogatives for only 62 years, whereas the British queen enjoyed all the trappings of power on Day 1. In that respect she does hold the record for longest effective reign in recorded history. 

The press also got it wrong when they often predicted that the Commonwealth would shrink as some countries inevitably ditched the monarchy. Actually there's no direct link between the two. Even if, say, Jamaica took the lead of Barbados and became a republic, they would still remain in the Commonwealth. Remember that Elizabeth II was queen of South Africa until 1961 and of Malta until 1974. Both are still part of the Commonwealth. Even New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Arden, was largely misquoted as saying she wished her country would become a republic in her lifetime. She never said that. I saw her interview on the Beeb and while she predicted such a thing, she never expressed such a wish, and clearly stated that she wouldn't instigate a move (like a referendum) in that direction. I found it very interesting to see her (and the NZ Governor-General) take a deep curtsy before the Queen's coffin, when the UK's own Prime Minister, Liz Truss, wasn't seen once curtsying to either the Queen on her last days or when she met Charles III. Maybe that Tory Liz is secretly planning a move towards a Republic with Boris Johnson as first president.

 

The blogger in his teens while he lived in Britain.
Visiting Glamis Castle in the Scottish Highlands,
ancestral home of the Queen Mother's family
and where the late Queen's sister, Margaret, was born

 

Seventh, a constant in my long acquaintance with the country has been the lousy, soggy, wet weather I had to endure as a price to pay to live in the UK or visit it. And yet, during those 11 days, without almost no exception, it was either flawlessly blue skies or at least lack of rain, as if the gods had decided to do their bit on the historical moment. If anything, we'll remember it for that.

Eighth, at times, especially at the end, the whole thing felt a bit protracted. Two lying-in-states were a bit much (thank God they didn't decide to drag the coffin around Wales and Northern Ireland or the 14 other "Realms" or countries where the queen was monarch!) and as we got to the end, the endless processions and ceremonies and religious services felt like stretching the point. On the 11th day, Monday, the funeral included several processions, and after the service at Westminster Hall, arriving at Windsor Castle for yet another one, with many of the same attendees, and then a third service, blissfully, for family only, it was clearly overkill. 

Ninth, reflecting on the meaning of it all, it was even more astonishing that it was to honor someone who in eight decades of public service never said anything memorable. Elizabeth II must be the only head of state who never gave a single press interview (Charles and William both have - let's see whether they keep their mother's and grandmother's tradition alive once they start reigning.) 

Tenth, why did Elizabeth II's popularity trump that of her predecessors, current peers and other politicians? My explanation is that rarely has a leader so much identified with her country the way she has. One revealing example that nobody seems to have noticed: She never went on vacation abroad. Not for her, skiing in Gstaad or St Moritz (as Diana was wont to) or frolicking  in the Caribbean (like her own sister, Margaret). Year in and year out, it was Norfolk and Scotland, and Scotland and Norfolk.

Well, it sure was a one-of-a-kind moment and here's one prediction I can safely make: I am unlikely to witness something similar in my lifetime.

When Workday’s “Power of One” fails: An example from Payroll-Compensation integration

LONDON

At the turn of the millennium, PeopleSoft, the then-undisputed HR tech leader, asked me to join them as Product Strategy Manager to help them with their European payrolls. Until 2001, PeopleSoft only had payroll for North America. For other countries the spin was that what really mattered was to have all your employees’ key data in one global system (Core HR) which you would then interface to various downstream systems (Payroll, Finance, Time Tracking, Expenses etc.) depending on needs. The underlying message was that Payroll was just an engine, not a strategic tool and therefore there was little value in having it in the same system. Actually you didn’t even need to have it in-house, just outsource it to ADP and the likes.

That was until PeopleSoft realized there was a lot of money in the Payroll business and that there was a lot of value in a Payroll-Core HR/Compensation integration after all. That’s when they built a global team, of which your humble servant was part of covering France and Spain. In a payroll blitzkrieg unheard of in the industry until then and since, we brought to the market close to a dozen payrolls (France, Spain, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Japan, Australia and a sprinkling of other countries).

Suddenly, in a not-so-subtle move that I found highly entertaining, Payroll/Compensation integration was all the rage. At every meeting with customers, at HR tech conferences, in press and analyst encounters, our message was that an HR system without payroll wasn’t worth the pixels it showed on your PC monitor. You needed the Payroll module as a mandatory accessory to your global Core HR/Compensation.

Fast forward two decades and to today’s indisputable HR Tech leader, Workday. Just like its forerunner, Workday started with a limited number of payrolls (and no finance tool), so it was all about having a global core HR system, the rest was dismissed with a wave of the hand as optional, ancillary and unimportant. Then came finance and the slow drip feed of payroll and, lo and behold, out of the cloud emerges the fundamental, indispensable need to be able to integrate both within the same system with the same data model and UI (which now goes by the fancy term of UX). Workday coined the phrase of the Power of One which as they say in their marketing material does not “require any process or configuration changes on your end”.

Well, as we all know, there’s marketing and there’s the truth. Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, there are three types of lies: lies, statistics and software marketing (truth be told, Workday is certainly not the most egregious perpetrator here; the Oscar probably goes to Oracle and their fanciful claims about basically every product they throw at their customers.)

But, back to Workday, since this post is about Workday. There are many examples where the Power of One is contradicted by the reality of many. The one that I want to focus on deals with one of my favorite Workday and HR topics: Compensation under its various guises: Core Compensation, Payroll and Compensation Review.

Compensation Review is the process whereby you increase employee salaries and award them bonuses and stocks, usually once a year, based on their performance (and the company’s.) To run this process Workday has a pretty strong module called Advanced Compensation, on which I got certified in 2019. I’m not going to inflict boring technical and business details on you, but suffice it to say that in order for a bonus to be calculated you need a reference compensation if your bonus is going to be a percentage rather than an amount. That reference compensation (which is called Compensation Basis in the Workday lingo) is usually the standard salary (Total Base Pay in Workday-ese ) or it can be created from scratch to include any compensation component such as allowances as long as these compensation components are…available in Workday. If they are not (such as overtime which is often part of another tool, Payroll) then you need to load those amounts back into Workday using some esoterically named Eligible Earnings Override.

 

The villain revealed

So far so good. Everybody understands that Workday cannot retrieve a data not held within Workday. And since a majority of Workday customers use third-part payrolls (especially outside North America), it is perfectly understandable that these amounts need to be extracted from your payroll system, appropriately formatted  and then loaded into Workday for Advanced Compensation’s consumption.

 

Except that, and here’s the rub, there are many customers who use Workday Payroll. In that case you’d assume from Workday Payroll to Workday Core/Advanced Compensation the data should flow as easily as the River Thames under London Bridge.

Wrong!

Rather than being able to point your bonus calculation to the relevant Payroll earnings (or sum thereof) you still have to go through the whole cumbersome task of extracting/preparing the data in payroll, then loading it into Workday, then going and referencing it for your bonus calculation.  Where is the Power of One? Looks more like the madness of many ─ as we all know how messy integrations are. When you’re using separate systems, no queda más remedio as my Spanish friends would say, you have to build that interface. But why would you have to do that when you’re running the SAME system? That’s what you were told and sold: buy one and no integration need, right?

I heard that Workday is planning on fixing this, which is long overdue. But why did you even have the issue in the first place?  Bad product design happens everywhere, even with the best. But then be a little modest when taunting your Power of One which has been found lacking.

And don’t get me started on absence management. With Workday you can track your employee absences in Core HR, in Time Tracking and via Payroll as well. In Core HR you have it more than once: the standard Absence features and the Leave of Absence functionality. Like estranged siblings, neither seems to be aware of the other’s existence. Another product strategy gone mad.

Workforce Planning? Integrated only in name. Another Power of One derailed.

Alright, I thing I’ll stop here. You get my drift. Time for Workday to spend a bit less time on Marketing and more on Product Strategy and Development.

 

(This is the latest in a series of posts on Workday. The most popular feature below. Many more can be found by searching chronologically the list of posts on the right-hand pane.

-Feb. 2021: "10 features Workday should deliver - yesterday!"

-April 2016: "SOW - A Comparison of 3 Global Cloud HR vendors: SAP, Oracle and Workday"

-Feb. 2015: "An open letter to Workday's Bhusri and Duffield: Time to fix Europe"

-May 2011: "PeopleSoft vs Workday - Old vs New" )

 

(The Global HR Technologist is enjoying a 4-day Jubilee Holiday in London, a place he has been visiting relentlessly on business and pleasure for over three decades now, going back to when he was a teenage student in Britain under the Iron Lady’s rule. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London everything that life can afford,” said Dr. Johnson a couple of centuries ago. So true now as then.)

Why Russia will gobble up the Ukraine, the West will fail to stop it and China is lapping it all up

PARIS

French President Emmanuel Macron made a fool of himself with his shuttle diplomacy. In his folie des grandeurs, he dreamed of winning a Nobel Peace Prize and boosting his re-election bid in the upcoming French presidential election. What an amateur he is. During all the time the West, a.k.a. the US and the major European powers, "negotiated" with Putin, the Russian Czar took them to the cleaners, gaining time to get his military might in place and, once ready, launching an invasion of the Ukrainian territory.

Russia has decided it wanted the Ukraine (yes, I keep on using the definite article as it has always been the case in English for decades) and I will not enter here in a debate on how justified Russia's grievances are. Suffice to say that once Putin has made that strategic decision the West (meaning America, since the EU is largely useless and ineffective) will not be able to stop it. 

Sanctions? Yeah right!
Apart from the case of apartheid-era South Africa, sanctions never work. Did sanctions and condemnations make Israel change its (mis) treatment of Palestinians? Or prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons? Or stop Iran doing just that? Did sanctions in place against Russia since it took over the Crimea in 2014 make them give it up? And of course we always have the example of the mother of all sanctions, the embargo on Cuba: the Communists are still in power more than 60 years later.

As the 1930s showed, the only way to stop an expansionist power is to meet them force by force. And here the West is not willing to declare war on Russia

Strong with the weak, weak with the strong
When it was felt that Serbia wasn't treating its Kosovo minority in an acceptable manner, the West attacked small Serbia and forced it to accept Kosovo independence. When Saddam Hussein's third-rate Iraq conquered Kuwait, again the West assembled a mighty force to dislodge the Butcher of Baghdad from the emirate. But Russia? Nope, the West won't dare engage it militarily as it is not only a nuclear power but we would be well advised to remember history and how the Russians managed to outlast both Napoleon's and Hitler's armies.

Actually, speaking of nuclear weapons, the Iraqi experience wasn't lost on the Koreans: despite Hussein's boastful threats of using nuclear weapons, it was soon revealed the emperor had no clothes and there were no mass-destruction weapons. Hence Iraq's defeat. The Koreans learned the lesson and now that they have nuclear weapons, nobody dares attack them. Iraq's neighbors, the Iranians, are keenly aware of that lesson too, which explains the games they're playing with the West and its agents like the IAEA. How unfortunate for the Ukrainians that they didn't learn that lesson and when they got their independence following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, they accepted to get rid of their nuclear weapons in exchange for a guarantee of their territorial integrity. What a spectacular miscalculation. When your neighbor is the Russian bear, only a fool would let go of the most effective military deterrent.

Putin is now laughing the West's condemnation ("bad boy, Vlad, you are misbehaving") and additional sanctions all the way to his dacha. He even afforded himself the luxury of invading the Ukraine while "negotiating" at the U.N. Security Council. I told you, my friends, the West is led by incapable fools. And hypocrites as well. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 for no justifiable reason, except that they had WMD which turned out to be untrue, the world ended up accepting it. Even France which opposed it initially ended up collaborating with the US on the Iraqi occupation. The US didn't like Saddam Hussein so they invaded Iraq to carry out regime change, which is exactly what Putin is doing in the Ukraine: he doesn't like the current Ukrainian government, result of the so-called Maidan Revolution, so he's invading it to carry out regime change. What is good for the gander, should be good for the goose, as they say.

In the meantime, in China
The Red Emperor is watching these developments very carefully to see how much Vlad the Devourer can get away with. He has his own Ukraine: Taiwan, which he never made any attempt to hide he wanted to add to his collection of additional territories (after Hong Kong and Macau.) So far, only the fear of getting involved with a military confrontation with the US has stopped China. But once it sees how ineffectual the  West is when a sovereign nation disappears, "What's to stop me from conquering what I never recognized as an independent country anyway?" will Xi Jinping rightly ask himself. And act accordingly.

World War III it ain't - yet. But looks very much like soon we'll have all its trappings and trigger.