Borders and Iraq and War

I spent some time at the Santana Row Borders after work today. I was browsing through George Orwell's essays and Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Both books had interesting quotes that could apply to the war in Iraq:

Better to have an end full of horror than a horror without end.

Do they prefer the risks of a long peace? Or the certainty of a long war?

T.R. also has an interesting quote, "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." See http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.509/pub_detail.asp

To show you T.R.'s great complexity, I will leave you with some beautiful paragraphs from a letter T.R. wrote to a friend, the French poet Frederic Mistral:

"You teach a lesson which none more than the American people, ardent nation, anxious and desirous of acquiring riches, needs to learn. This lesson reminds us that after the acquisition of a relatively considerable material success, the things which really count in life are things of the spirit.

Industries and railroads have their value, of course, but courage and endurance, the love of our children, the love of our country and our hearths, the love and imitation of heroes and the heroic virtues, are really the highest things in life. Without them accumulated riches, imposing and widely heralded industrialism, feverish activities, are neither profitable to the individual or to the nation.

I do not underestimate the value of those things which are the body of the nation. I only desire that they shall not make us forget that beside the body there is a soul."