Samizdata

“To exist without enemies is to be a miserable jellyfish that stands for nothing.”
– Carter Laren, Capitalism Magazine

Respecting the sovereignty of Iraq was nothing more than respecting the sovereignty of Saddam Hussein, at the expense of the people who would have been tortured and killed for not voting for him!
– Alice Bachini

… Realists are quite right to point to the centrality of the contest for power in international relations, and also to the dangers of imprudence and immoderation that can arise from the pursuit of intangible goals like honor. But dangers of a no lesser seriousness attend the competition for power itself, however rationally calculated. Moreover, power is never pursued for itself, but always for the sake of some value or values.

In modern democratic states, those values tend to be moral in nature, and to involve a peculiarly democratic conception of honor. To attempt to exclude them from consideration is the height of phantasy, and the opposite of realism.

– the concluding sentences of Donald Kagan on national honor (from a list of Iraq related readings supplied by
Oxblog and linked to by Instapundit)

The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West’s servicemen as a subject for disapproval.
– John Keegan, Telegraph

So while the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It’s a bloggers’ world. We only link to it.
– Steven Levy in his article Bloggers’ Delight, MSNBC

[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage – he had no responsibility – he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
– Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Our present day military commanders probably think in private that Old Nosey had it about hundred times easier on the PR front than they do.