Little Hawk, I don't in the least suppose that hypothetical children in general are terribly naive and clueless. But perfectly good and true insights about children in general with which I happen to agree don't always apply to particular children at particular times. I still think it's not a bad idea to let actual parents with particular children have a little lee-way to handle discussions. Sadly, people who don't have kids are always better at these things than people who do--in a perfect world only childless people would have kids. Kind of like how people who don't go to war are always wiser and go around liberating people all over the place than the poor dupes who get sent under that rubric. Very obvious euphemisms, like most of these, seem to me the least objectionable kind, it's the slyer stealthier ones that make good sport.

Yes, journalistic euphemisms are meant to sanitize and construe terrible things in a positive way, but adults are not as clueless and naive as some people think. Okay, okay--but not all of them.

    "Surgical strike" is only part euphemism, part accurate
description, relative to current actual means of war. They are actually more accurate than they used to be, and I think that does matter to anyone who has to drop them, I don't begrudge them that phrase, and wouldn't scoff at it either if it were my home that was missed.

And it is not entirely unreasonable to hope that something better, something more "liberated" even, might emerge after the current war. I do not care to be cynical about that possibility, and even if I am, somewhat, I might keep some of it to myself. I'm against the war, and have the impression that our current president here is a self-righteous idiot, but I'm not going to let that persuade me that I can predict the future.

   Certain basic rights that I hold to be self-evident were partly paid for in wars, and horror, and injustice, conquest, aquisition of resources, and genocide. But there they are. I hoped that the threat of war would do some good, and hope for some good for somebody somewhere, somehow, now, since I can't alter the fact. I prefer that to self-congratulatory cynicism--and there's some of that here and there on this thread, unless I mistake the tone. Some of the ironies depend on equating things that are not equal. Cynicism and realism aren't quite the same thing, for example. What's the point in not hoping for the best in a bad situation? Being able to say I told you so?

I think that other sustained policies--other than war--could effect changes I'd like to see--but I don't see those sustained policies, and like a dog drinking from a toilet, will take anything I can get. War is always the wrong answer--stop the presses--but sometimes it's all that is actually going to happen. I may be projecting my western values of individual human rights on other "cultures" but I can live with that. The war may not liberate anyone, but it still stands a better chance by far than that purblind idealism will ever rid anyone of a despot.