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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aerosappy who wrote (22480)	11/23/2004 1:39:52 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Respond to of 23153

A poster sent me this link with the reporter's in depth report on the Iraqi insurgent thing. I found it very informative: kevinsites.net I thought I might reprint my p.m. to the poster, even stipulating all the facts in the reporter's account (his facts, his impressions, anyone seen Rashomon lately?) are absolutely true, I think it misses the overarching truth of war. "Thanks for that site. Very interesting. In wars, in the heat of the moment "mistakes" are made. I put "mistakes" in quotes because that's like saying when you build a house a certain amount of material will be wasted. It's theoretically possible to build a house which requires XXX board feet of structural lumber and 8,937 3-inch nails with EXACTLY that amount of supplies. At the end of building the house, all you would need is a vacuum cleaner to pull up the dust. The reality is you will have bent nails all over the site, pieces of mis-cut lumber here and there (not to mention all the stuff that will be stolen off the site). The reality is you buy XXX (+ YYY)feet of lumber and 12,000 nails. So the wasted nails and wasted lumber are not really due to "mistakes," that's just the way houses are made. If you insist that no wastage occur, then no houses will be built, ever. Another example is the highway system, where in order to transport people and goods along the nation's arteries, we routinely suffer traffic fatalities in the tens of thousands each year, and incredible property damage. In war time we even kill our own. In past wars the number of people killed by friendly fire is astonishing. In the Persian Gulf war 49% of our casualties were, by one report, friendly fire. members.aol.com It's war, people get killed. Soldiers, noncombatant military, civilians--they all die, the casualties of war. People die for a reason, and they die for no reason. Kb "