What planet do you live on?
That's not a war. That's the illusion of a war. The expense is real, the war is not. Regardless of the expense, a politically correct war is not war.
Perhaps the idea was best expressed by Victor Davis Hanson, in one of the most educational books I have read in the last few years, The Soul of Battle, The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Commenting on how farmer boys, uncouth yanks, laborers and ordinary Americans became ruthless killers, vanquishing the most formidable killing machine ever created, Nazi Germany and its ally, Japan:
For much of my life I have wondered where such a murderous force of a season came from. And how a democracy made a willing killer out of my father and other farm boys, putting their lives into the hands of an unhinged zealot like LeMay, who ostensibly was neither emblematic of a democratic citizenry nor representative of the values that we purportedly cherish. Or was he? How can a democratic leader brag of such destruction, take pride in his force's ability to destroy thousands --- in short, how can he be so utterly uncouth? How in less than a year after being assembled can a motley group of young recruits fly the most lethat bombers in history to incinerate a feared imperialistic culture six thousand miles from their home?
And how can that most murderous air force in the world nearly disappear into the anonymity and amnesia of democracy six months after its victory?
[Emphasis mine.]
Those thoughts are the easy anxieties of the desk-bound class. I have come to realize that both Curtis LeMay and my father are stock types, not aberrations, of the democratic society that produced them. Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them. It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the sould of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
Whatever war we have been fighting the last 10 years, has distinctly lacked the spirit of that noble Soul of Battle.
I mentioned I have several relatives in uniform in the Middle East. I would be there, too but they don’t want old fogies slowing things down.