A rather long post by Commander Jeff Huber "Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and Generalissimo George"

No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

-- Carl von Clausewitz.

What a profound pity it is that the mightiest nation in the world has proven the wisdom of the masters of the art of war by ignoring them.

Five years into our Global War on Terror--or whatever we're calling it today--the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) tells us that our experiment in Iraq has energized Islamic fundamentalism and made the global terrorism situation worse, and that the Bush administration needs to come up with a new strategy. Five years is a heck of a long time to figure out that your strategy isn't working.

We’re not even sure what we want to achieve, much less how to achieve it.
He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened

--Sun Tzu

[...]

When you start out your reign by calling your adversaries an "axis of evil," as young Mister Bush did, you can't be surprised when your adversaries give you back what you gave them. It shouldn't have shocked anyone when President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela called Mister Bush "the devil" at last week's UN summit.

There's little question that much of Mister Bush's rhetoric and his militaristic adventures are part of a manhood-measurment contest. That sort of thing is laughable when practiced by schoolboys, but it's to be condemned when engaged in by the head of state of the world's mightiest nation.

There's a good chance that the Bush demonizing by Chavez, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other world leaders will goad Mister Bush into launching yet another asinine war, this time with Iran. If that happens, there's an even better chance that's what Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and the rest of them had in mind--double-dog-daring the adolescent Emperor into doing something incredibly stupid (again), something that will do another Humpty Dumpty number on his empire.

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