Early warnings

In retrospect, however...

*

I won't comment much on these two quotes here, except to say that I'm using them in a book submission I'm preparing, to illustrate the two great themes which seem to me to characterize our failure in Iraq and in the war on terror:

our inability to understand that in contemporary warfare less is more, or more poetically that in setting ourselves up as Goliath we are dooming ourselves to perpetual failure, and

our inability to recognize the extraordinary power of religious (and specifically apocalyptic) belief in contemporary geopolitics