Great Piece by Mac Owens on Perspective in war

The New Republic and the National Review are dueling on a new joint site that pits pundit against pundit. This week Spencert Ackerman and Mac Thomas Owens are going at it about Iraq. Mac's brilliant understanding of military history is superb in his rebuttal yesterday. He quotes Prussian philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz:

See it on Opinion Duel: "But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Throughout the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. The successive acts of war are thus not premeditated designs, but on the contrary are spontaneous acts guided by military measures. Everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate the facts, to clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then to carry them out with strength and constancy."