From Fred Reed's latest column:
The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A generation will rise for whom it will be just history. The dismembered veterans will find first that almost nobody appreciates what they did, then that few even remember it. If -- when, many would say -- the United States is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that the whole affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at the time. At any rate, we are told that they are important.In that same prefatory book, just a few paragraphs later, Thucydides famously states:
--Wars And Their Aftermaths, Fred Reed, Dec 4th 2004
I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time. (ibid., ch. 22)Truly, his work is less a recording of contemporary events than it is a study of human society in extremis. The more I study it, the more parallels I find to our own day, certainly unimaginable to Thucydides and his generation, but quite full of manifestations of the same human frailties and vices.