Politics & Power Quote by Paul Begala

Begala’s move here is a political jujitsu: he takes a familiar antiwar line and flips it into a pro-troop claim that’s hard to heckle. “First casualty” usually means truth, innocence, or moral clarity; he reroutes the phrase to the bodies and lives of American troops. That substitution isn’t accidental. It’s a preemptive strike against the old Vietnam-era smear that antiwar criticism equals contempt for soldiers. By putting “unwise and unjust” up front, he makes the judgment on policymakers, not on the people sent to execute the policy.

The subtext is aimed at a country that likes its wars clean and its gratitude uncomplicated. Vietnam is invoked as a cultural scar: the war that taught Americans how quickly noble language can curdle into stalemate, and how easily returning service members can become props in domestic arguments. Begala’s sentence is engineered to separate two things that are constantly fused in American rhetoric: supporting the mission and supporting the troops. He’s insisting they’re not the same moral act.

“Called on to fight it” is quietly damning. Troops aren’t volunteers in some abstract sense; they’re summoned by institutions, incentives, and orders. Honor, in this framing, becomes less about celebrating war and more about acknowledging the asymmetry of choice and burden. It’s a liberal patriotism with guardrails: mourn the human cost first, question the war’s legitimacy, then honor the people who paid for it.