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In this encyclopedically learned and immensely grippimg book, one of our foremost military historians demolishes the famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. On Easter Island, for example, rival factions exterminated one another in a ceaseless competition for the egg of a sooty tern. The Aztecs seem to have fought for nothing more than the captives that they slaughtered by the thousands. And what policy could possibly have informed the Gulf War, in which the United States and its allies destroyed the army of Saddam Hussein, only to leave Saddam himself securely in power?
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