Casualty Count Quotes
This may have been the origin of the famous Stalin later quotation of very similar sentiment {616657}. No one is certain if Stalin had ever seen this work. Or he might have come upon it independently. The original source does not mention Massigli by name. However the description of the “Diplomat vom Quai d’Orsay” fits Massigli and his expertise so we attribute it to him. However, he was not the first to express this idea. The Anglican Bishop of London, Beilby Porteus, appears to have been the earliest—See {627489}.
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
Four days later following the urging of their government, the Italians attacked at Adowa and were badly beaten. Baratieri was sacked and court-marshaled but was acquitted. The telegram became historically famous for the political interference problems in military tactics and strategy. Most military observers believe that Baratieri was fighting a winning campaign as the Ethiopians had completely overextended their supply lines and had to forage off the land which was becoming bare. In a few days the Ethiopian army would have started drifting away. But the politicians in Italy wanted honor and a symbolic resounding defeat of the Ethiopians on the battlefield.
This statement was made in the first phase of the Iraq war where Cheney and President Bush thought the war was won. After that there were thousands of Americans killed in the war. Critics of the administration war policy threw this quotation up to him.
