Politics & Power Quote by Evan Thomas

A three-day war is less a strategy than a sales pitch, and Evan Thomas is calling out the fantasy with a writer's scalpel. The line borrows the logic of consumer culture: if the product is messy, slow, and costly, it will get returned. So wars, in this framing, must arrive like a limited-time offer: swift, decisive, emotionally unanimous, and preferably over before anyone has to read the fine print.

The intent is cynical and diagnostic. Thomas isn't advising policymakers to keep conflicts short; he's describing the political conditions Americans have come to demand. "Three days or less" is a deliberately absurd compression that exposes how public patience has been trained by media cycles, casualty aversion, and the hangover of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We want the moral clarity of World War II with the inconvenience of a long weekend. It's a critique of a nation that prefers cinematic victory to democratic endurance.

The subtext is sharper in the second clause: "the American people must be all for it from the outset". That "must" isn't about patriotism; it's about pre-authorization. Modern war-making requires a front-loaded consensus because once the images start, the polls wobble, and the costs compound, dissent becomes inevitable. Thomas is pointing to an implicit bargain between leaders and the led: sell the war as quick and righteous, and we'll look away from what war actually is. The quote works because it captures how democratic consent gets managed like a countdown timer.