What I read on Amazon today

Sometimes reading the mini-reviews on Amazon is depressing, sometimes infuriating and sometimes funny. Take this paragraph from "Clear Thinker" (sic) savaging George Packer's The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq. Mr Thinker is clearly in support of the war and wrote his review almost exactly a year ago.

First, it is yesterday's book. Written before three overwhelmingly successful elections in Iraq, a constitution, an elected government, the death of Zarqawi and vast overall progress on a number of fronts, it attempts to draw final conclusions too early. Even Zarqawi described Al-Qaeda's current situation in Iraq as "bleak". The author seems to be not aware of the substantial losses in the early days of wars from WWII to the Revolutionary War. War is messy, mistakes are made, battles and men are lost. The poorly-educated (militarily) Packer has probably never heard of Von Moltke or of his well-known dictum that "No plan survives contact with the enemy. Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."* Things take time, and the author has shown panic at too early a stage and lost his perspective of that fact. He is a short-term weak thinker, and war is a long-term business for strong determined men.

Somehow his critique has not withstood the test of time.


*apparently von Moltke did not mean you shouldn't at least have a plan.


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