Napoleon history
To the editor
Conservative columnist George Will said in Wednesday’s Journal-World that “U.S. policy must flow from Napoleon’s axiom ‘If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.'”
Is George Will reminding us of the rest of Napoleon’s history? Napoleon did indeed take Vienna and eventually also took Moscow. Although Napoleon was a far more enlightened and democratic ruler than those he replaced — or wished to replace — in Austria and Russia, he fatally underestimated the loyalty of even illiterate and oppressed Russian serfs to their homeland. He lost his army and his allies and ended in exile. Is that what George Will wants us to remember?
Mary Davidson,
Lawrence