Time and time again I have to turn back round and tell my friend Lawrence Kaplan: what in the world is your editor’s forward to the new World Affairs supposed to mean? This one in particular is an amalgam of war-related platitudes desperately in search of a point — don’t overlearn the lessons of Iraq; soldiers know how dearly war costs; commanders can be calculating; tactics can’t substitute for strategy; war actually is awful — and you keep waiting for him to simply pick one and use it as a springboard for a more throrough analysis, but, alas, you’ll be waiting forever.