A. Please do not center justify paragraphs, this is really annoying and makes things very hard to read. B. It is very tricky to make conclusions about life and

A. Please do not center justify paragraphs, this is really annoying and makes things very hard to read. B. It is very tricky to make conclusions about life and business from US conquering military campaigns from within the US, because these campaigns have been shrouded with so many layers of lies self delusion and bullshit, that a lot of the generally accepted facts are just not true, and thus not able to teach us anything. By the way, I do not think America is in any way unique about this. Every country's conquering wars are carefully explained with heaps of bullshit from that country. There are some very rare exception as in with Germany and Japan and WW2, but usually every country carefully shapes the official story to make it so that the conquering wars are not completely based on greed and lust for power, when they usually are. So lets talk about McNamara and Vietnam. The problems there had little to do with some kind of duality between the quantitative and qualitative. In fact if McNamara honestly followed quantitative analysis, he would reach very different conclusions about Vietnam. If, for example, he commissioned a very simple very quantitative opinion poll among Vietnamese about whether they would prefer to be ruled by a puppet regime installed by a foreign country or by the independent patriotic leader that just defeated the French colonialists, he would see that the official reason for invading Vietnam was just not valid. It is not clear whether such a poll has been commissioned but McNamara probably knew what the results would be, because the US never permitted a free election in South Vietnam. Thus, faced with a simple quantitative fact against the war, the quantitative managerial McNamara ignored it and suppressed it. So no it is not about the quantitative vs the qualitative, it is the usual problem with wars of conquest by rich countries. People in positions that would benefit from the war carefully and persistently create a web of lies and delusions that is intended to drive the country to war.