The Nation: The Futility... the Unspeakable Inhumanity

In a reflective moment in a hectic week, TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud filed this personal assessment of the war:

TOLSTOY noted that war is a profoundly unmanageable human enterprise. Generals, journalists and politicians continue to assume it is a science, a matter of vectors and the measurement of force. The irrational must be made rational before men can feel themselves in control of events. Perhaps that is also why war is so often portrayed as a game or sporting event, the battlefield as an extension of the playing fields of Eton. Nixon the poker player is seen raising the stakes;...

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