The war choice

Does the palatability of (a) war define alone whether or not it is justified? Surely if that is the bar we set, no war ever is or ever was justified. Can you run a war by saying "this many casualties and no more?" Presidents sometimes have to place national priorities above the lives of good men, husbands, sons and fathers. It is unimaginable to think about the weight this must place on one's soul.

In his superb work When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome, Richard E. Rubenstein notes Constantine's deathbed baptism: "Like many other powerful figures, Constantine had not wanted to become fully a Christian while faced with the necessity (as he saw it) to sin." Constantine understood what so many in the current administration surely know:

Leaders send young men to die, knowing many will passionately, even violently disagree with their actions; there is no "good" war or, more often than not, even agreement on what is a "just" war. Two people can look at the same circumstances and draw opposite conclusions and this is why as a nation we delegate power to the elected and hopefully responsive few to make the hard choices that brings bile to the throat and bad dreams at night.

Robert S. McNamara's anguish regarding Vietnam, decades after he resigned, shows a man haunted by decisions made in the Johnson administration by he and others and in regard to his choice not to speak out or speak more aggressively when he sensed things were spinning out of control. To this day he is called names like "primary civilian death deliverer" by the likes of Mother Sheehan in this factually crippled article.

Can we doubt that any wartime president in our history, unable to vet their own doubts in public, suffered in private?

Are the many bright men and women, some young, some not so young anymore, who reenlists in the military noble fools for signing on to the current mission (after all - when you sign up during wartime is that not exactly what you are doing)? Were the men and women who served in Vietnam, 70% volunteers, patriotic fools?

Too many want to TiVo history and abandon Iraq to chaos because of the ugly way solders, Terrorist and, yes, civilians die.

In the wake of the CNN sniper video, obtained from and in collaboration with the very people killing our solders, we learned that it was judged required viewing by the American left because of the preposterous idea that we hicks in fly-over country did not know that 7.62mm round will blow a person's brains out; further, when we realized this it would be a moment of clarity for those of us who previously did not think abandoning Iraqis to wholesale civil war and slaughter was a good idea.

In reality it is the left who needed the reality check; they are the ones who wanted a clean, simple, quick war and transition from decades of absolute, cruel and murderous dictatorship to democracy and now cry foul that it did not happen. For those who claimed this is what they were promised by some in the current administration, they are correct, many did imply the very scenario the left craves now; many predictions made by the FDR administration and its generals and admirals failed to come to pass, yet the loyal opposition in America did not use this as a basis to call for pulling out of the war in Europe or the Pacific.

Sometimes doing the right thing is agonizing and painful beyond words and doing the wrong thing is even worse.