Casualties

Some of my commenters thought I was promoting an outlook that was too rosy. This is not something I'm often accused of, so of course I had to defend my ego-territory as a grim realist. To that end I'm pulling my response up from the depths of my comment box and posting it here --

To me the naive position is thinking that this struggle is going to be over in one grand quick victory, and that we're not going to take huge casualties in the course of it.

I think it's likely enough that we're standing at the end of human history -- that the environment may already be mortally wounded, but that we'll probably see a major nuclear exchange within the next generation, so that we won't even get to witness its demise. Is that grim enough for y'all?

If we do gain a victory over warfare and the poisoning of the environment, it's going to be at the end of a long and protracted struggle, and we're going to have lost a lot by the end of it. And that was true no matter who got elected president this year. Get real, folks. As Mr Bush is so fond of saying -- we're at war. We're going to take losses.