Politics & Power Quote by Jim Walsh

War is doing a lot of quiet work here: it becomes the nation’s steady climate, not an emergency. By opening with “for as long as,” Walsh frames conflict as ancestral and almost natural, a baseline condition that excuses the costs that follow. It’s a politician’s move with a historian’s cadence: stretch the timeline back far enough and the present looks inevitable.

The key verb is “embraced.” It’s warm, physical, familial - and strategically vague. You can embrace a soldier, a veteran, a decorated commander, even an idea of “service” that requires no policy commitment. Embrace is cheaper than care. It asks for admiration rather than accountability, ceremony rather than budgets, applause rather than scrutiny of why the war happened, who profited, and who was drafted into the consequences.

“Heros it has produced” turns people into outputs, as if war were an industry with a morally uplifting byproduct. That phrasing launders war’s uglier arithmetic: trauma, civilian death, broken institutions. It also narrows the moral lens to individual valor, steering attention away from collective responsibility. If we have heroes, then we must have had reasons; if we honor them, we don’t have to interrogate the machine that made them necessary.

Contextually, this line fits the post-Vietnam, post-9/11 American script where reverence for troops is used to stabilize public feeling when the strategic story is messy. It signals unity while quietly policing dissent: to question the war is to risk sounding like you’re withholding the embrace.