From one corner to another

At National Review's The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson makes a bid for Pseuds Corner --

War is like water, its recent manifestation like a pump that delivers more of it more quickly but does not change its essence, which is entirely human—and human nature is fixed. So what Lincoln felt in 1864 or Truman in 1950 is not unlike Bush must feel now (which does not necessarily imply that Bush is, for example, a Lincoln), as the pulse of the battlefield has shorn away erstwhile supporters and prompted calls for talking rather than sacrificing more for victory. That wartime fickleness in a democracy, mutatis mutandis, is a universal phenomenon and goes back to the Greeks, as Thucydides saw in his brilliant epilogue/epitaph about Pericles in book II.