Overheard @ the Columbia Tower food court:
Two Seattle fire fighters sat down at a table and started talking about the mayor’s office.
One of them asks the other: “What do you think of Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis.”
The second fire fighter answers: “Oh, I love that guy. He once recommended a book to me called Warrior Ethics that says you have to put away your morals to get stuff done in politics. It’s a great book. I love that guy, Tim Ceis.”

An amazon search brings up a book called Warrior Politics. Perhaps this is the book they were talking about:

Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics is an extended, willfully provocative essay arguing that the bedrock of sound foreign policy should be “comprehensive pragmatism” rather than “utopian hopes.” Kaplan calls for a reestablishment of American (primarily) realpolitik, one distanced from Judeo-Christian (or private) virtue and closer to a “pagan” (public) one. He aligns himself with America’s Founding Fathers, who, he says, believed good government emerged only from a “sly understanding of men’s passions.” His book is a mix of aphoristic pronouncements, brief contemporary political analyses, rapid-fire parallels between conflicts ancient and current, and copious quotes from historians and thinkers through the ages (Livy, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes among them). Though its historical gleanings are often too summary and suspiciously convenient, Warrior Politics promises to generate controversy among students of global politics—just as it was designed to do. —H. O’Billovitch