Michael Gerber Quotes
At some point, you have to declare an idea dead and, if not a failure, then at least not a success.
After failing to buy off the whites, the king and has chief minister, took poison, thus ending the Ndebele kingdom. See his last speech.
In 1991 Bush’s father, and his military and security advisors, after winning an overwhelming victory and accomplishing the war aims stated of rolling back the Iraqi aggression, decided that it was not worth the loss of American and Iraqi lives to try and occupy Bagdad and change the regime. America and its large coalition withdrew in victory having restored the pre-aggression status quo. The son and some of the right wing and neo conservatives always saw that strategy as a mistake and this quotation is often cited as showing this psychological animus to that decision of his father. His use of the term “cut and run” which implies defeat and some lack of courage is surprising to some as America and the coalition did anything but run as they had killed and destroyed far more or the Iraqi military power than the son’s later war did. It was a withdrawal and there were critics at the time, but no one accused the elder Bush of “cut and run” except that is the way the son obviously saw it.
The CIA and others had known that the Vietnam War was not winnable, yet the CIA Management and the Defense Department were stating the contrary. Gates was then an analyst for the CIA and it was his first job out of college. There was a rationale for the politicians and military leaders to lie about prospects in Vietnam. If we could not win, we wanted to negotiate a settlement on as good terms as we could get. However, if Ho Chi Min and the North Vietnamese knew that we did not think that we could win, they would have no incentive to concede on any points or compromise at all. To be successful in the negotiations, we had to persuade the Vietnamese that we thought we could win and would keep up the fighting and bombing unless they would concede some things. Unfortunately, by the time that we started negotiations, it was too late to be very successful in negotiations. All the parties to the negotiations at that point realized that we could not win. The only people who thought the contrary were a large block of American patriots who had been deceived by the politicians and the military leadership.
Michael Gerber is best known as the author of the Barry Trotter series, Sunday Times best-selling parodies of the Harry Potter books. Before becoming a novelist, Gerber contributed humor to The Yale Record, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, NPR and Saturday Night Live, among many other venues. He is an alumnus of Yale and Oak Park River Forest High School.
