“The Vietnam war,” Reich wrote in The Greening of America, “represents a form of madness in which logic is carried to fantastic extremes.” He had a point. In addition to the fact that moral calculus isn’t reducible to actual calculus, the empiricism these best and brightest practiced was often faulty and fake. Enemy body counts are one very limited metric in war, seductive because they’re simply quantifiable, and in this case grossly exaggerated as well.
