Joining the Fray

President Barack Hussein Obama may discover a hard lesson that leaders have encountered over the centuries- that is that it is quite easy to enter a conflict as the United States has just done in Libya and not possible on your own terms to extricate yourself. You see the other side has quite a bit to say about that. When the Seven Years' War started, do you think the participants thought it could possibly last that long? What about the Thirty Years' War, did anyone imagine a war that fathers and sons could claim to be veterans not fighting together, but a generation apart? And what of the Hundred Years' War- did the leaders who started the fighting have any idea that the conflict would outlast them and by no small margin? No, it is awfully easy to spill the first blood, but terribly difficult to staunch the hemorrhage.