The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost.

But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.

Donald Rumsfeld, the now disgraced former Secretary of Defense of the United States, was as credulous a believer in the miraculous powers of technology as any devotee of the healing cult of a saint’s relics. He combined this credulity with a lack of understanding of the inherent limitations of power, however great. The weakest person, thank goodness, can subvert the intentions and purposes of the most powerful. Power affects: it does not determine.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP