The first thing you have to do is understand what success looks like. And to understand what success looks like you have to understand the intent. If you understand that intent is to make sure the sea lines are secure, then suddenly bombing Kosovo makes sense, because you don't want Serbia to reemerge as a major power.
George FriedmanI cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.
George FriedmanWar is an extraordinary condition to be in - to be, for example, in the combat information center of a warship [and behaving] as though you were merely processing credit card applications. [Instead,] the information you're processing is that an incoming missile is 15 kilometers away, now 10 kilometers away, now 5 kilometers. You have to separate yourself psychologically from the fact that your mortal existence may well end. That is the ancient reality of war.
George FriedmanI'm not a journalist. So I didn't down and let Assad charm me. I didn't walk away and say "my god he's got an Apple computer and he really likes Beyonce so he must be a liberal."
George Friedman