...you must kill him.
Wizbang shares his thoughts on the wisdom in this sentence, and how so many people have gotten in trouble because they ignored it.
George H.W. Bush didn't take down Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, and that caused 12 years of grief.
Osama didn't succeed in taking down the US, and paid for it.
Dan Rather failed to take down George W. Bush, and is no longer an anchor at CBS. (Though in this case, the effect might well have been a case of Mutually Assurred Destruction, had the truth not surfaced way too soon.)
Indeed, you can find cases like this throughout history. At the start of the Vietnam war, only two of the three North Vietnam airfields were bombed. Had the third been bombed, the south and its allies would have had air supremacy, and the war would have taken a very different course. Instead, we saw most of a decade of slowly bidding up the cost of the war, auction style, until one side or the other finally dropped out.
And in Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, the Kzinti lost their first war with humankind, and never had a chance thereafter. They had this bad habit of always attacking before they were quite ready.
No comments:
Post a Comment