Maximum Belligerence

My simple hippie dippie view of things is that violence is bad, not killing people is good, and for any conflict to end, short of genocide, there must be some sort of peace settlement. That settlement might be relatively just, or not, but that must be balanced not against an ideal outcome, but against the cost (the lives of other people, for example) of not coming to that settlement. 

And my view of the people who tend run our foreign policy, broadly defined, is they see anything less than maximum belligerence as cowardice.  They think what is most important is that the world sees that America has a big swinging dick, and achieving that takes priority over everything.

The Bushies said it a bit more out loud, but they weren't really offering anything new.  To the extent that they were, they won the "argument" despite everything.