Why the war isn't over

Lawrence Kaplan takes issue with the White House claim that the "tide is receding" with regard to war:

Declaring something does not always make it true. Peace cannot be declared in the same way as war. In articulating his vision of peace, the president has likened ours to the post-World War II and post-cold war eras. But these wars had in fact ended before the epochs that followed them. The wars of the past decade have, by contrast, gotten a linguistic cleansing. From this, a supposition about peace—“the tide of war is receding”—has become the foundation of an enormous shift in national priorities.

In its presumptuousness on this score, the administration runs the risk of being prematurely correct. The Obama team’s rhetoric contains an echo of the Clinton years, which reduced everything to a clean narrative of material progress and moral improvement. Or of the 1970s, when another global conflict was presumed to have been concluded before it actually was. Neither era ended well. 

(Image: "U.S. Army Private First Class Issam Zejli carries his gear to a staging area as they wait for the orders to convoy to Kuwait from Camp Adder as the base is prepared to be handed back to the Iraqi government later this month on December 6, 2011 at Camp Adder, near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Camp Adder is one of the few bases remaining that the United States controls as America's military continues its pullout of the country by the end of this year, after eight years of war and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein." Via Newsday.)