What needs to be said clearly is that Kaplan is a thoughtless war-hugger in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, who famously said: "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war".
Piloted by remote control from thousands of miles away, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been the one unqualified military triumph of the war in Afghanistan.
In February, for example, in The Guardian of London, the historian Eric Hobsbawm celebrated the ultimate triumph of the war's losers and suggested that the virtues of their cause transcended Stalin's machinations.
His tone is clear and so is his gaze, even when he is swept up by what, for him, was surely the greatest triumph of the war, the liberation of Paris: **{:.break one} ** For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy.
The recent midterm election triumph of Republican war hawks and the prospective lineup of candidates for president in 2016 does not bode well when it comes to reining in the national security state in any foreseeable future.
The very triumph of "Star Wars" turned the movie business into a merchandising business, and as a result, "a movie as fresh and unknowing as 'Star Wars' couldn't get made 20 years later".
He understands that the end of the Soviet empire was not primarily the work of a romantic popular uprising (although, unlike some scholars, he gives the Russian public its due), nor was it especially a triumph of cold-war containment; it was the result of the inevitable collapse of an exhausted economy propped up by a cynical ideology.
The victory has repeatedly been held out by President Obama and other U.S. officials as one of the greatest triumphs of the war so far, a David and Goliath encounter in which outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish fighters held at bay then eventually defeated wave after wave of militant invaders.
As Mr. Bush noted, this war will not resemble the quick and easy triumph of the gulf war or the virtually casualty-free American combat operations in the Balkans.
Today's peaceful separation is, in part, a triumph of diplomacy over war.
