Why We’d Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo

Hundreds of thousands of historians have pored over the questions of why he attacked when, where and how he attacked. Yet 200 years after the fact, a different question must be asked: Why was the Battle of Waterloo even fought? Was it really necessary to secure the peace and security of Europe?

.. Yet he said he would be remembered not for his military victories, but for his domestic reforms, especially the Code Napoleon, that brilliant distillation of 42 competing and often contradictory legal codes into a single, easily comprehensible body of French law.

.. But the French averted war with the United States over its inevitable expansion westward, and the 80 million francs they received allowed Napoleon to rebuild France, especially its army.

.. Napoleon started none of those wars, but he won all of them.

.. in 1812 he responded to France’s being cut out of Russian markets—in violation of the Tilsit terms—by invading Russia.

Roman Empire Depended Upon Bureaucracy & Navy

The Romans, like all great Empires (save a few exceptions like the Mongol and not even them in totality) actually won because of their bureaucracy- the masses of overweight, underpaid, pasty clerks sitting in warehouses across the Empire counting pennies all day long.

.. Defending ‘land’ is a very modern style of thinking. The Ancients- despite all the poetry they wrote- never defended land. They defended cities, bridges, factories- but never land!

.. If the Mongols had invaded, Rome would’ve simply withdrawn from those lands, allowed the Mongols to bleed themselves out, & shuttled themselves into their port-city-citadels.With navies, there was no way the Mongols could’ve sieged them successfully.

The Problem With Asking Republicans, ‘Would You Have Invaded Iraq?’

As the head of British intelligence famously remarked, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The unclassified summary of the NIE was also far more categorical than the full, classified version, which, according to Florida Senator Bob Graham, was “pocked with dissent, conditions, [and] minority opinions on a variety of critical issues.” After reading the full NIE, Graham voted against authorizing war. Unfortunately, by one estimate, only a half-dozen other senators bothered to do so.

.. George W. Bush was not forced to invade Iraq because of the weight of objective evidence about WMD. He and his top advisors shamelessly hyped that evidence to justify a war they were seeking an excuse to launch. And in the hysterical aftermath of September 11, Congress was too cowed to effectively challenge them.

.. In the run-up to the Iraq War, experts in and outside the Bush administration expressed the same fears. A November 2002 National Defense University report argued that occupying Iraq “will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.” A collection of experts at the Army War College warned that the “possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious.”