alt Hacker NewsThe irony here of course is that most comments on HN - including this one and the one it responds to - are arm-chair commentary on generals' actions, even less informed, even more disconnected.
Unintended consequences are inevitable. The danger isn't that they'll exist - it's that they'll be ignored entirely or ignored until they cannot be, that the desire for panacea produces a willful blindness to their existence or myopic fixation on their effects to the point where the value of the intended consequences are ignored.
Another relevant example here is vaping: an amazing win for harm reduction in existing smokers, but an attractive on-ramp to the addiction for some who would have avoided it otherwise. No panacea.
Smoking cigarettes has an incredibly massive public health cost. Addiction to nicotine makes people wring their hands, but population wide doesn't have a significant cost and might even be a net benefit. Vaping likewise has an incomparably minimal public health cost, though at the margins there's probably more injury than nicotine use alone.
Yes, usually there are unintended consequences. The most important unintended consequence here was the anti-vaping sentiment engendered by the anti-smoking campaign choosing to conflate nicotine with the harms from inhaling combustion byproducts and tacitly embracing a cateforical, puritanical morality regarding substance use.