Some folks still call WWII “the good war” — but you don’t hear many veterans of the conflict calling it that, do you? No, that term seems to be the exclusive domain of those who either sat it out or were too young to have fought in it. I might grant you that other euphemisms people use to describe it, such as “the last war where we were clearly on the side of right,” might be a little bit closer to the truth given that the Axis powers, Germany in particular, were clearly in need of stopping, but shit — it’s not like Stalinist Russia was the most noble of allies, and it’s not like we in the US had purely altruistic motives underpinning our involvement in either Europe or the Pacific ourselves. A “good war”? Sorry, but there’s no such thing.

Today, of course, we’ve at least made some…