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“In the course of all the reading I did for my book of the pre-Iraq War ‘debates’ this country had both on television and in print, what is most striking in retrospect is the casual and breezy tone which America collectively now discusses and thinks about war as a foreign policy option, standing inconspicuously next to all of the other options. There is really no strong resistance to it, no sense that it is a supremely horrible and tragic thing in all cases to undertake — and particularly to start. Gone almost completely from our mainstream political discourse is horror over war. The most one hears is some cursory and transparently insincere — almost bored — lip service to its being a ‘last resort.’”
(The commenters are pretty good here; one recommends Andrew J. Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, which I haven’t seen.)
