Bertolt Brecht Quotes
One cannot be arraigned for declaring a war, which every ruler has to do once in a while, but only for running a war badly.
Brecht, Bertolt. The Trial of Lucullus. Translated by H. R. Hays, New Directions, 1943.
This issue of who has the wisdom and competency to determine policy in matters of war has been a constant one in most societies. Even in the Iraq war of the early 21st century, the Congress and the President argued as to what competence the Congress had to determine policy, strategy and tactics.
After the U. S. entered World War I, the issue of military conscription was debated and opposed by many of the congressional leaders:
He lost the vote on this issue, and the Congress created the first committee to investigate and oversee military affairs.
Ikle wrote this over a decade before both the military and civilian leaders fell into this trap in the 1994 Iraq War.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the so-called V-effect.