Absolutely Nothing.

It's rare you find someone writing about the things war is good for. Today though, I was pointed to an article from 1999 that suggested the merits of war, or at least letting small wars burn themselves out.

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.

This is all in conversation over the war in Iraq, and the fools dancing around each other claiming their strategies are different from their rivals, or the incumbent. The big hooplah is that Obama won't attribute the decreased violence in Iraq to the surge. His stance being that throwing more troops and money at the problem didn't solve it. Of course this is turned around on his lack of patriotism (ugh, see below). McCain made a big deal of this, taking his chance to tout the merits of our military, though making himself out to be even less of a student of history. 

The point of the discussion is that because of some Sunni uprising which predated, but coincided with our attempt to smother the problems in Iraq with American lives, there's been enough ethnic cleansing in the region that the violence is subsiding, and we want to take credit for it. This coming the same week the EU is celebrating the capture (over 10 years late) of the wonderful fellow who organized the crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing of muslims in Serbia back in 1995.