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I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source.

The dark cloud we can see and feel overhead and all around us

is our target this hour. Is it one cloud or many?

Connected how? We're aiming at the war question in the cloud.

Americans pay more for our military than any nation in history,

but we expect less.

Not victories, nor an end of war.

George W. Bush proclaimed mission accomplished in Iraq,

but we stayed in the war for another decade.

President Obama said we live in an age without surrender ceremonies.

Mary Dujak at Emory University in Atlanta gets our conversation started.

She's eminent among historians of war and death in American experience.

Her particular study nowadays is the persistence of American wars

and their disengagement from popular feeling.

Yale Legal Scholar Samuel Moyne will join us with a question

both historical and practical, have almost two centuries of rulemaking

and regulation of warfare had the perverse effect of keeping war alive.

Has the modern world been trying to purify war when we should have abolished it by now?

...