The Myth of the Mistake-Free War

Posted October 28, 2004, 1:08 p.m.

There’s a great commentary piece by Michael S. Malone over on ABCNews.com (linked above) about how impossible it is to wage a war without making mistakes. Malone doesn’t talk about whether the war in Iraq was justified (and says he won’t talk about it), but talks instead about the nature of war in general.

Basically, there is no such thing as a mistake-free war. In any armed conflict, civilians will be killed unintentionally. In any war, troops on both sides will die. It’s the nature of the beast, not the mismanagement by the commander-in-chief, that causes this.

It’s a good read and provides some good context, and it’s especially worth considering because John Kerry is campaigning on how he would’ve gone into Iraq without making “Bush’s mistakes” when, in fact, the war would have been just as mistake-prone with anybody else at the helm (again, the discussion over whether the war was justified in the first place is another thing entirely).

The Myth of the Mistake-Free War (ABCNews.com).

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.

Limited government is a key tenet of classic liberalism—the liberalism of people like Madison and Tocqueville—although today it is regarded as a conservative ideal.

The power of the will does not extend to making opposites exist at the same time.

[Groos] well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely. . . .

Every man of power by the very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors; but we cannot afford to discourage the development of such men merely because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends.

Nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

If one man conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of conquerors.

We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

It will not be necessary for any one to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.

Accept whatever is brought upon you, and in changes that humble you be patient. For gold is tested in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.

It has always been the favorite maxim of princes, to divide the people, in order to govern them. It is now time that the people should avail themselves of the same maxim, and divide powers among their rulers, in order to prevent their abusing it.

He is no fool that gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

The fact that I want to fly to Albuquerque does not constitute probable cause for an invasive search.

Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There’s far less competition.

The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government—one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.

There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does.