A bit from McCain's foreign policy speech:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation's finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.

It is difficult, to say the least, to gainsay a man who has suffered as much from war as Senator McCain, but I dispute the notion - from whatever source - that war has been shorn forever of its glory. Churchill once opined that "war, which had been cruel and glorious, is now cruel and sordid". And so it had become - but mostly because barbarians had entered the fray and the civilized had followed them right down into the barbaric gutter. The civilized have now recovered from that, and now we stand clearly differentiated from our barbaric enemies, and no matter what their outrages, we remember that we are civilized - and thus, glory has returned to war.

Of sadness and death war has no lack - but the young man who volunteered to battle for what is right and who loses his life in defense of all that is decent has not fallen into something sordid, but has risen to a height most of us will never experience in this world. Far from the sacrifices of such men (and women) being incapable of bringing glory to war, it is their very sacrifice which sanctifies the war, and raises it to the highest and noblest of events. Perhaps it is the Christian in me - mindful of how Christ wasn't complete without His glorious Cross - but I just don't wish to live in a world where sacrifice is considered a sad thing. I don't want these young men and women to die; I feel terrible guilt that so many of them have died while I'm safe and dry here at home; but the key to a rational life is to keep joy as the lynchpin of one's worldview, including rejoicing at our calamaties, as they give us the opportunity to rise above narrow self-interest. Many long years ago, a woman penned what is our Battle Hymn of the Republic - I bring up the opening lyrics:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Written by a woman, there is a masculinity - and a joy - in these stanzas very much lacking in our discourse on war these days. Forthrightly, let us go into battle - the serpent still must be crushed, and we must abide the terrible, swift sword. Are we to forever go into battle haltingly? As if we fear it? If so, then I tell you, my fellow Americans, that our wars will be more frequent - and more bloody - than if we had stood to it with courage, and made the proper place for those men and women who do cover themselves in glory, even if they die in the attempt.

War is a terrible thing - but far more terrible is to cease being human; to become a sad, frightened charicature of men and women...people who seem like men and women, but who bear no relation to those genuine men and women of the past who swallowed their fears and went into battle transformed by knowledge of glory and steeled by the joyful knowledge that if they fell, it was for a noble cause, which would not be forsaken, or forgotten.

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