Part of the reason I am so suspicious of the Creative Destruction theorists, the Grand Political Strategists and the secular messianic End to Evil visionaries is that they write things like:Israel lost some of its precious capital of deterrence in the last war, but ultimately the real loser was a bankrupt Iran who lost far more materially than did a far wealthier Israel.
Daniel Larison points out the little blind spot that comes of this tendency to analyze things in terms of "people as means to ends".
[T]he "real loser" of the war in Lebanon last year was, um, Lebanon, which had its infrastructure severely damaged, 1,000 of its people killed, hundreds of thousands made into refugees and its political life thrown into ever greater convulsions.
Oh. Yeah. Them. The Lebanese. But they don't figure into the Grand Strategy of the Great Thinkers. They're just people who happened to be in the way of the Big Picture.
Source: Catholic & Enjoying It July 3, 2007.