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I am of the mind that we can never again deploy our military into combat without the Constitutionally required "Declaration of War". Without it the "politicians" have to much wiggle room to squander the mission of war;

I agree! However, after reading so many of the biographies and histories of WWII and The War of Northern Aggression ;)...

I am oddly comforted by the opinion that every war has had its pacifist/appeasers, and it's only because and when the military returns a victory in spite of the politicians that "peace at any price" is avoided.

I, too, thought the WWII generation was different, but look up the macabre ultra-antiwar Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, 1939. Pearl Harbor did not change Trumbo/etal's peacenik stance. Indeed, during the first disaster at Kasserine Pass against Hitler, those voices got louder again ("Not our War" etc.)

And think of the Copperheads nearly bringing Honest Abe's war to a losing end.

Ike and Truman held Patton back to not go after Stalin....Lord know what disaster that might've brought....as it turned out....kill a bunch of our boys in Russia upfront, or let the Russians torment their own people for 60 years....no good choices in history. So do we run off and precipitate a full-on war of some dubious gain in the Middle East now, or let them simmer in their own juices until they fall of their own internal stress like the USSR**? No good choices.

One thing we must have learned....There is no such thing as a War to End All Wars.

** Yes, I realize the resurgent USSR on oil revenues and oil-rich middle east present some critical problems to what may be a lull rather than a collapse.