From the homepage of Doonesbury.com today come this remarkable quote from Dick Cheney:

"Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime."—Dick Cheney, 1996

I would like to know where he said this and under what circumstances, but on the surface it makes Bush Administration policies all the more troubling, this notion that they know military action is largely futile, if not worse.