Mark Moyar

you know, any war.

I mean, if you talk with veterans of World War II or Korea or, you know, Afghanistan, I mean, there's a lot of veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who have committed suicide as well, tragically.

But, yeah, I think it's worth keeping in mind that

And in many senses, it's really not any worse of a war than most of the wars we've fought.

Because all the wars we've fought have been pretty awful.

But again, when you compare the Hollywood version of World War II movies, don't look quite like Platoon or Apocalypse Now.

I do.

And I think, you know, the left and the right took different lessons.

I mean, the left lesson was basically we want to stay out of wars

And the left pretty much stuck with that for decades.

And every time a war came, they said, no, this is another Vietnam.

And what's been interesting with Ukraine, suddenly they've now become the party of war, which they were actually for.

They got us into several wars in the 20th century.

The political right came out with the message that if you're going to fight, you fight to win.

And so we saw in the first Gulf War, the Bush administration was very intent on saying,

and we're going to use maximum force and work there.

Now, then you get to Afghanistan, Iraq.

In both of those cases, I think the US didn't really know what was coming.

We weren't even expecting a war.

We thought a protracted war.