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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

"Perfect is the enemy of good"

Robert Watson Watt wrote in 1999: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."

Voltaire wrote in 1770: "A wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good."

Montesquieu wrote in 1726: "The better is the mortal enemy of the good."

Shakespeare wrote in 1606: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to mar the subject that before was well?" (don't fix what ain't broke)

Chinese proverb says: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."

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I always liked the way G.K. Chesterton put it: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

The more I've thought about this quote the more value it has given me.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)

Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.

At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.

They also enlist trusting their leaders to use them wisely. I very much do not believe they were used wisely for those wars.

That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.

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