Maybe they were too successful for their own good, inflicting upon themselves an unavoidable mad May slugfest which ultimately proved counter-productive.
While the latter is inherently bad to inflict, the former is inherently good to inflict (if inflicted by a proper punitive desert agent).
It will do neither Israel nor its captured soldier much good to inflict collective punishment on the inhabitants of Gaza or to go rounding up Hamas officials, including MPs and government ministers, in various West Bank towns.
"One is absolutely sickened," he wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, "not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted".
Lying on my gurney, I decided that I'd moved on from Christian docudrama to the plague portion of the Passover Seder, when we dip our pinkies into wine to represent the hideous disasters the good Lord inflicted on the Egyptians: locusts, frogs, pestilence, infertility, preëclampsia, brain damage.
Moreover, some critics think the view that it is intrinsically good to inflict suffering is "barbaric" (Tadros 2011: 63).
"It's not that we would inflict horrible things on them, but that we failed to inflict good things on them".
That action fulfilled Montgomery's calculation and enabled his armour, now established in good position, to inflict heavy losses on those spasmodic counterattacks.
It has become clear that this bill, for all its good intentions, would inflict severe costs on the economy of our state.
It made good the losses inflicted on the merchant marines by the U-boat war in 1917, when the UK armed the Americans and enabled Sir Douglas Haig to hold off General Ludendorff in the following spring.
