Despite vocabulary (see below) that sentence is absolutely no different from your sentiments, which I disagree with but grant have been consistent, principled, and unchanging through the wild swings of pundit repositioning to the pulse of the battlefield.

If asked to explain the present muted reaction compared to the ”smelling salts” that met your kindred assessment, I suppose the liberal community feared that you always meant it, no doubt about it (in this regard, are you to be given credit for coining the phrase “more rubble, less trouble”?).

In contrast, Prof. Fukuyama apparently has come to your position reluctantly, as one whose neo-conservative idealism in calling for possible preemption against monsters like Saddam, followed by fostering consensual government in his place, died tragically somewhere between Fallujah and Ramadi.

P.S. And Derb, speaking as a philologist, and in our therapeutic culture, it’s all in the language of euphemism as you know. Had you just said “duking it out” to describe the vicious beheading, head-drilling, gassing, and blowing up of children rather than the more intellectually honest “slaughtering each other”, you would avoided some cheap charges of neanderthalism.

And in that regard, it is always more palatable to greet abject internecine slaughter as “not the worst outcome” (classical litotes), than with the honest admission of “with calm composure.”

After all when we flee, we want to be reassured in bite-your-lip regrets that what follows is a sort of de Hoya/Mayweather dust-up-not to be calmly assured that it is an above-the-ground

Dante’s Inferno.