A lesson in history, from the NY Times:

"May 7, 2007, 6:36 pm
The Peace Presidents

By Jean Edward Smith

On Feb. 8, 2004, George W. Bush proudly proclaimed to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," "I am a war president." Like an 8-year-old playing with toy soldiers, Bush, an Air National Guard dropout, looked at war with vicarious enthusiasm. Contrast the attitude of the nation's "peace presidents" – supreme commanders who led the nation to victory in the greatest wars the country faced: men who had experienced the grim reality of battle and wanted no part of it.

Ulysses S. Grant condemned war as "the most destructive and unsavory activity of mankind." Surveying the carnage at Fort Donelson during the Civil War, he told an aide, "this work is part of the devil that is left in us."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, another former general, was equally outspoken: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility and stupidity…. War settles nothing."

Both Grant and Eisenhower were elected with expectations that they would put a victorious end to conflicts in which the country was then engaged. Both presidents did end the fighting. But not in ways that their bellicose supporters anticipated. ...

..."In 1956, when Britain, France and Israel colluded to invade Egypt, Eisenhower forced them to withdraw, toppling Anthony Eden's government in London and threatening financial reprisals against Israel. That repudiation of what Ike called "old fashioned gunboat diplomacy" not only kept the peace but enhanced American prestige throughout the world.

George Bush and the neocons have no monopoly on glorifying military adventure. Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's secretary of state, caused General Colin Powell a case of near cardiac arrest when she asked at a meeting of the National Security Council, "Why do we have an Army if we are not willing to use it?"

War is not an instrument of policy. It is an act of desperation. "Any course short of national humiliation or national destruction is better than war," Grant told Prince Kung of China in 1879. "War itself is so great a calamity that it should only be invoked when there is no way of saving a nation from a greater [one].""