To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names...
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