Fiasco

In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed.  I have no quarrel with that.  What dismays me is that anyone expected any different.  All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies.  War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale.  The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

If this war has been worse on these scores than others, and I have my doubts, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller.  At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months.  If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won.  Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently. 

Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context?  Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.