If you haven’t gotten enough of my reporting about the past week’s Afghanistan hearings, check out this ten-minute segment on Ana Marie Cox’s Air America radio show. I can’t actually get this to play, myself, as it seems like Silverlight and Firefox and my laptop would prefer not to have anything to do with one another.

Something I should have clarified on the program, though. I’m uncomfortable with the word optimistic to describe my feelings about Afghanistan strategy. That’s not because McChrystal didn’t make a compelling case. In my view, he did. Nor did Ana Marie mischaracterize my substantive take. It’s just that war is not the sort of thing I think a person can be optimistic about. War is a brutal, miserable and wretched thing. One can have confidence in the soundness of a certain course of action. But optimism… that makes it sound like war can be sanitized, or isn’t, in every case, a disgusting thing, to be engaged in only reluctantly and with the heaviest of hearts. War is not just-another-policy choice. It is the engine of misery and horror, even when it’s necessary.

So I just wanted to make that clear. I didn’t feel comfortable contradicting Ana Marie on her show, because, you know, it’s her show and it was nice of her to invite me on and I didn’t want to waste time on what’s basically an internal monologue. But that’s been weighing on me since we recorded the segment.