On the Saving Private Ryan principle, I thought of the woman I heard on the news, this morning, sobbing over having lost her only child, and how he was only 19. And reflected that I'm not sure if it matters to anyone in power, any more, if someone loses their sole heir, especially since it isn't really a "war", anyway.
There was the Hawkish guy on the radio going on about how this is so we don't get incidents like the Russian school, with a buncha Terrorists taking over. And realized he just didn't get it. The Chechen rebels are an internal problem, one that actually has roots in the former government of Russia. A closer analogy would be a Hawaiian separatist party taking hostages because they wanted Hawaii restored to the original Hawaiians, because it became a part of the US because of years of imperialist sugar-baron power politics. ("US carpet bombs Hawaii, film at 11.")
See the world, meet interesting people and kill them.