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It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
I'm old enough to remember the end of World War II. On Aug. 14, 1946, a year after the Japanese were defeated, most newspapers and magazines had single articles commemorating the end of the war.
I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.
We are not living in the same world we were immediately after the Cold War, when there seemed to be a greater belief in the universality of human rights and there was enough prosperity to make us question why we had not committed more resources to upholding the values we claimed to hold most dear.