This is not a wholly uncommon view, although it is less common among people familiar with the German Army's logistical estimates of what would be required for Barbarossa, or for war with the United States (or for that matter, the British Commonwealth), or with people who know anything about the sea-keeping properties of German pocket battleships, or the design history of many German weapons, or the effect of the German officer corps on production decisions, or on the general issue of strategic sanity, etc. Any case for the unique destructiveness of American forces also disappears when we recall not only the German standard for the delicacy with which armies must treat civilian lives and property, but also when we remember the British over Hamburg or Dresden, and for that matter the Russians, anywhere, or the Japanese in any of their conquests, or the Italians in Abyssinia. So by what standard did Maass condemn the American Army, apparently across all of its recorded history? If it is strikingly clumsy and brutal, to whom is it being compared?

To ask this question is to answer it. One has the sense that Maass does not know too much about comparative military history, and that this is a pretty common situation, because his sense that the Americans are madly cruel and ham-fisted is also very common. At a guess, the ignorance that fuels these assumptions is more common now than it was fifty years ago, when most people in the West knew someone who had fought in a war. But war is almost always an immensely difficult enterprise: Clausewitz famously observed, of armies much less massive, much less intricately armed and supplied than ours are, that in war everything is simple, but that the simplest things are immensely hard. Maass reminds us that very few if any journalists who write about war communicate this urgent fact.

Occasionally, however, Maass acknowledged that it may not always be possible to conduct modern war at a higher standard then the Americans conduct it in Iraq: