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This line: >Tactical brilliance could not guarantee strategic clarity—and each gain came at political and moral cost. sums up what is wrong with modern confli
by WillAdams 1y ago
This line:
>Tactical brilliance could not guarantee strategic clarity—and each gain came at political and moral cost.
sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination which Jomini (who had displaced Clausewitz after his inculcation at West Point as part of the brutal lessens the U.S. learned in Vietnam) failed to consider, and which Clausewitz took to heart and studied deeply, and thought long on.
It wasn't that long ago that the collapse of the Soviet Union was viewed as "the end of history" and a global acknowledgement that liberal democracy was the means of government most widely accepted --- hopefully articles such as this will be a guidepost to getting back on that track --- every moral failure simply recruits others to fight on the opposite side.
- lazide 1y ago[flagged]
- WillAdams 1y agoAn Islamic belief which can be worked with would be the mainstream liberal views which were gaining currency in Iran and Iraq back before the Shah and the Ba'athists. Regimes which do not accord basic rights to all citizens, including women should simply be ignored until such time as they do, no matter how much oil they have.
- lazide 1y ago[flagged]
- snapcaster 1y agoSo is the vast majority of secular western society according to hardline christian religion. I think what poster you're replying to is implicitly saying is just that religious institutions have to weakened and "tamed"
- lazide 1y agoThe difference is, Islam isn’t out of the fight yet. Even 200 years ago, this would be (and was!) a very different discussion around Christianity, eh?
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoIslamic teachings/belief tell you approximately as much as catholics teachings/belief which is to say next to nothing. The Islamic world in as much as it exists as entity is not homogeneous in its belief and practices. It’s a collection of countries and groups and they don’t all agree.
- lazide 1y agoLike the Holy Ghost/Spirit to Catholics? I never said it was homogenous, I’m pointing out core beliefs that - while modified in a few places - are definitional for the religion, and are fundamentally at odds with other perspectives. This isn’t hypothetical, this is a lived experience for a billion+ people.
- conception 1y agoThat’s true for all Abrahamic religions though. People can and have just ignored the parts that don’t fit in with modern society.
- falcor84 1y agoCould you please more fully explain what you mean and how it relates to the parent comment? The parent and TFA offer examples of the conflicts of US vs. Vietnam and Russia vs. Ukraine, which don't clearly involve Islamic beliefs, but otherwise appear to be similar enough to demonstrate the same principles/issues.
- lazide 1y ago[flagged]
- falcor84 1y agoSorry if I was unclear, I was hoping for clarity about your argument and its relevance to urban warfare situations across different conflicts, not more detail about your take on Islam in general.
- lazide 1y agoWhen two ideologically incompatible parties (as in what is good/bad, high ground or not) are fighting, it gets complicated and ruthless/very destructive. In large part because it’s about incompatible identities and trying to purge ‘the other’, rather than ‘mere’ control of a specific piece of land. It takes a potentially resolvable conflict (an area where there may be a stable compromise), and can turn it into an existential fight. This becomes especially destructive in very dense environments like urban centers, because the level of hiding that can happen becomes almost fractal. The fight in Gaza is one recent example, as are the others. I’m not surprised that Gaza has escalated to the point it has (total war, essentially), because Hamas can’t actually give up without losing their entire identity and reason for being, for example. And the factions in Israel can’t back down without winning or ‘it would have all been for nothing’. Or are you referring to tactics, because there are actual religions reasons/justifications for the nature of some specific tactics being used in Gaza.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago> Islamic teachings actively call for believers to punish those that 1) challenge teachings of Mohammed, 2) stop believing in the teachings of Mohammed, 3) stray from the teachings of Mohammed. Often with literal proscribed death sentences. Utter non sense. You misunderstand both what Islam is about, the place it gives to the prophet and how sharia works. Sharia explicitly protects non believers. Did you fail to notice that Jews lived for ages in the various Islamic empires? As a non Muslim who has lived in majority Muslim countries multiple times, I’m shocked you can actually live in one and come out with such large misconceptions.
- greybeard69 1y agoIslamic beliefs as some sort of bad monolith vs Western beliefs as some sort of opposing good monolith is a painfully narrow and frankly bigoted view of human existence, warfare, and statecraft. I'll point you at Gaza and rub your nose directly in it.
- lazide 1y ago[flagged]
- kakacik 1y ago[flagged]
- croes 1y agoEvery freedom has boundaries that some see as oppression. That’s where the disagreement arises between people who have no doubt that their view of these boundaries is the right one
- snapcaster 1y agoHow is adopting the beliefs your society blasted you with since childhood an "inner" moral compass? I completely agree with you, but I recognize it's a product of my environment and "propaganda" more than some kind of intrinsic thing
- fluoridation 1y ago>Do you consider freedom (speech, movement, self-determination and so on) equal to oppression, restriction and tyranny? GP is saying that the phrase "moral high ground" presupposes an objective definition of "up" in morality. You can't cite a particular person's subjective moral "up" to disagree with them. Whether any given person values freedom or oppression more highly doesn't say anything about which one is objectively more moral, if any. Besides that, do you think it unthinkable that a person would approve of some amount of oppression and restriction being placed on them in favor of achieving some goal?
- lazide 1y agoIf you ask a random Chinese middle aged man or woman, do you think they will agree with you or not? In my experience, they think there are practical reasons why things are the way they are in China, and what you’re describing is a poisonous fantasy spread by idiots. (As one said to me quite clearly once in Singapore!) Either way, I prefer freedom of movement, self determination, etc. but it’s pretty obvious that many cultures actively think it’s a bad idea and go out of their way to squash it in very real ways, especially against certain portions of the population. And I bet if we did a spreadsheet with various examples, you’d also consider some of them too much. Like consensual vore. Personal freedom, or mental illness? Ignoring that you’ll get a fight from any given culture on these and many more topics and we can all just ‘get along’ due to fundamental human awesomeness is just not how it has ever worked - ever - near as I can tell.
- gl-prod 1y agoWestern beliefs? Do they include colonizing other people and taking their land and freedom?
- lazide 1y agoHmm, do you think Ghenghis Khan was a westerner in this scenario? Being a genocidal manic is as old as humans, near as I can tell. One group was the most recent assholes, but change is inevitable.
- dang 1y agoPlease don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
- lazide 1y agoIf you check out the thread, I think you’ll see it wasn’t me making it into a flamewar, but rather a bunch of folks with apparently no idea what Islam even is (like literally core tenets). And somehow thinking that me stating them is harshing on Islam, which seems really funny actually? Isn’t that the anti-Islamic sentiment in reality? It’s like if people accused me of being antisemitic because I was just saying that Jews believe they have a special deal with god. Or that I hate Christians because I said they believe Jesus was the son of god. When that’s literally one of the core tenets of Judaism/Christianity. I’m not hating on any religion here, just pointing out core tenets that are at the root of ideological conflicts! Personally, I think this is a great example for surfacing the actual underlying problems here. Which is that trying to apply your own core values to something/someone with wildly different core values from a position of ignorance produces bad outcomes for everyone. And any sort of ‘high ground’ definition is just internal propaganda - which everyone does need - but has little to no connection to actual reality.
- dang 1y agoYou took the thread way off topic into a generic argument about religion that is more or less guaranteed, in the general case, to end up in a flamewar. Since your account is the one that started it and contributed the most to it, you're responsible for it. Then you kept doing it repeatedly after I asked you to stop. Not cool. Edit: We've had to ask you not to do such things in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031745 (Aug 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821594 (Oct 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082862 (Jan 2024) If you keep doing it, we're going to end up banning you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit of the site from now on, that would be good.
- pydry 1y ago[flagged]
- pjc50 1y agoSerbia is not like the others. You see the genocide in Gaza, but also see the genocide in Srebrenica.
- pydry 1y agoIf there were ~9 wars that followed purely imperialist logic and 1 where it could plausibly have been done for imperialist or humanitarian reasons, it was probably done for imperialist reasons. Fragmenting Serbia and creating a puppet state within its borders did serve America's goal to project power in the balkans.
- eldgfipo 1y agoFuture historians will judge America harshly for the now documented millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Lybians that died for no reason at the hand of America. Wonder if it will be depicted as a modern Mongol Invasion equivalent, with all the cruelty associated with it
- nradov 1y agoThe Mongols were a mixed bag. Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others. Many of the conquered peoples lived better under the Mongols than under their previous overlords. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/187628/genghis-khan-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world-by-jack-weatherford/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/187628/genghis-khan...
- korse 1y ago>Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others. Sounds like western imperialism then?
- psunavy03 1y agoWest Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieutenant. In fact it's arguable the service academies are a waste of resources as currently implemented as opposed to OCS and ROTC. What matters is what is taught to the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Lieutenant Commanders, and Commanders 12-15 years later at the War Colleges. And as a graduate myself (if only by correspondence) I can assure you that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were very much still on the books in the 2010s.
- pclmulqdq 1y agoThe war colleges are more intellectual than many people think. The curricula of those schools include most of the seminal works on war and statecraft from Thucydides to Kissinger.
- psunavy03 1y agoI was disappointed they truncated the remote version of Strategy and War and we didn't get to dig into Thucydides and Corbett. I will say getting that intellectualism to stick in the officer corps doesn't necessarily always work. There are jokes about "it's only a lot of reading if you do the reading," and oftentimes being able to spend a year in residence gets passed over in favor of sending people to other assignments and expecting them to do the War College syllabus by correspondence. That said, the War Colleges are also heavily involved in things like designing and evaluating higher-level military exercises, red-teaming things, etc.
- corimaith 1y agoYou're going to loose to Russia and China in time.
- RealityVoid 1y agoThis is spoken as if history converges to a point and then it _really_ gets to the end of history. There is no end, there will be endless fights and conflicts and one country taking the upper hand is just a temporary state.
- corimaith 1y agoDosen't mean you specifically will survive till the next conflict.
- vkou 1y agoRussia is a one-trick petrostate that has been stuck in a three-year quagmire of a land war against the poorest country in Europe (that is a quarter its size).
- rolandog 1y agoCompletely agree... though I wouldn't underestimate them: Their main strength, I'd argue, comes from their very successful use of the Firehose Of Falsehood (effectively managing to make the US self-own itself by turbocharging neoliberalism, among other things). They "James-Bond-Villain'd" the US (announced how they'd "take over the world") 28 years ago [0], and... well... look how that's going. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
- vkou 1y agoNothing there seems to be dramatically different from the sort of wankery produced by think tanks like PNAC and their ilk. And it's not like the US or the UK or the USSR have ever shied away from using soft power to destabilize other countries. The game everyone's playing is not that different, and Ivan isn't making some 400 IQ move in it.
- southernplaces7 1y ago>sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination Pray tell, when in the whole of humanity's so often sordid history has warfare mostly been even within audible laughing distance of a tendency towards promoting moral high ground or taking into account people's right to self determination? If anything, the wars of the last few decades have made more pretense of both those things (pretense, not necessarily real application) than any typical war at any previous time, when naked, crude, unvarnished conquest was the main justification most leaders felt inclined to think good enough.
- mrsvanwinkle 1y agoactually smitten by your diction and writing style which stood out to me in an era of ubiquituous Strunk and White SAT essay form that everyone on the internet suddenly had a perfect grasp of.