World War Z author Max Brooks went off on a nonsensical hypothetical tangent on HBO’s Friday episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In the context of a larger conversation about the need to keep Chinese fingerprints off of critical infrastructure, Brooks mused that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping could blackmail President Donald Trump over Taiwan in order to avoid more plane crashes like the nation witnessed earlier this week at Reagan National Airport.
Brooks, who is also a fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, began by making the more reasonable argument that the U.S. learned the wrong lesson from Operation Desert Storm, “This goes back to a point in history called Desert Storm. In 1991 we fought a war and annihilated the world’s fifth largest army in 100 hours… we wiped them out on CNN, and that was on purpose that we let the press embed because…
