"... just read the essay and must say your criticism is off the mark and comes across as personal - although a flawed essay, it raises interesting points, points which no doubt will be raised with increasing frequency as the West's views of the nature of war and the best uses of a military continue to fray and possibly start to conflict with the reality of an emergent China kicking it old school - which was the point about Cortes that for some inexplicable reason you utterly missed.

And you make the classic mistake viz Clausewitz and politics by seeming to assume that what old Clauzy meant by politics is in any way related to what we mean by politics -  politics for Clauzy was grand strategy - he would have had no idea what to make of the woman who saw on YouTube a video of a marine shooting a puppy and therefore voted against Bush - when the author wonders about the possible negative effects of politics on the military ethos he's speaking about the puppy.

And what's your problem with counterfactual arguments? They were good enough for Socrates so I imagine there's something to them.  There's nothing wrong with me asking the question 'what would happen if we dropped a couple of armored divisions into Afghanistan tomorrow?' - of course that can't and won't happen, but that doesn't mean that certain elements of the argument over the whys and wherefores of Afghanistan are not illuminated by asking it - which is how the author used counterfactuals in the essay.

And the carnage of WWI was not about mindless ritual as you seem to want to claim - it was about the failure by some or many to understand or act on the understanding that the effects of the industrial revolution had changed the practice of war..."

"Pakistan-Iran: Pakistani President Zardari and Interior Minister Rehman Malik will travel to Tehran on 16 July to meet Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, according to Iran's ambassador to Pakistan, an Iranian news agency reported on the 14th.

Comment: This is more fallout from the killing of bin Laden. Pakistan is reaching out even to Iran to reduce dependence on the US. What is not clear is whether the Pakistani leadership understands that in reaching out to Iran it is reaching out to yet another Chinese proxy for some purposes.

What they do seem to understand is that in reaching out to Iran they are reaching out to a viscerally anti-US leadership. The message Zardari is sending is Pakistan has options that are not congenial to US interests.

 Theoretically, Iran and Pakistan could carve up southern Afghanistan into spheres of influence, after 2014, if they could ever overcome their mutual suspicions. They could leave northern Afghanistan to the Chinese who are exploiting its mineral deposits, protected by NATO forces."

It's worth pointing out [for my ego's sake] that I was virtually the only one who seemed to notice how strategically inept it was to kill Osama - or, at least, kill him in the way they did.