Wars have always been upsetting to me. I don’t think anything disturbs me more than the excitement that some people feel about them — the righteous rhetoric that surrounds them, the endless procession of grey men in suits offering battlefield and diplomatic opinions.

At this point, the new conflict with Iran is too upsetting for me to write about in detail. I’m guessing that it won’t be around long, anyway. President Trump isn’t someone with the attention span to devote to battlefield benchmarks and long-term objectives. He will take the killing of Khamenei as a victory and will be happy to declare one — and leave the door open to doing the same thing again months down the road if he can attack quickly and get out as soon as possible.

He didn’t talk about the buildup to the war for a couple reasons. First, because he doesn’t feel obliged to explain his actions or convince anyone of anything. He expects people to simply support anything he does, and if they do not, it’s just more evidence of their hatred of him and political radicalism.

And second, more curiously, I don’t think he actually likes war either. If Trump has a sliver of humanity in him, I think he genuinely dislikes hearing about people dying in war. This can be seen in his aversion to attending funerals for soldiers and doing everything he can to ignore battlefield suffering. But it also seeps out in his statements about the futility of war. It might be the only thing that I agree with him about.

It creates that rare instance of psychological dissonance in Trump. He approves of actions that put him center stage and yield to him more power. But he really cannot stomach the blood. So he prefers quick, painless victories that he can celebrate and move on from as quickly as possible.

Trump believes that if he rattles enough sabres and spends enough defense dollars, our enemies will eventually capitulate and wars will become unnecessary. But this mad man theory has never proven true.

A few days ago, I watched the 1974 Oscar winning documentary “Hearts and Minds” about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. One part that stuck out for me was watching President Nixon speaking to recently-returned POWs in 1973, recounting his bombing campaign in December 1972. He received raucous applause when recalling this campaign.

We know now that this campaign, known as Operation Linebacker II or the Christmas bombings, achieved almost nothing. For 12 days and nights, the U.S. dropped more than 20,000 tons of ordnance on the North Vietnamese, the largest bombing campaign since the end of World War 2.

At least 1,600 civilians died in this campaign, although the figures were likely much higher. The only intention of the bombing was to get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table and attain more favorable terms in peace negotiations. The Paris peace accords were signed in late January 1973.

Nixon apologists still try to spin the campaign as a success. They argue that if the Watergate scandal hadn’t weakened his presidency, they would have been able to keep South Vietnam afloat with sufficient arms sales.

But the results speak for themselves … Saigon fell in April 1975. None of the bombing or posturing did a damn thing for Vietnam or American soldiers who fought in vain in a war that, as early as 1968, we knew we couldn’t win.

Trump, who dodged the Vietnam War, probably gets this. Even though Trump learned everything about politics from the Nixonian Roy Cohn, Trump’s adaptation is based on a series of small stunts and victories, not long campaigns with massive Nixon-Kissinger-like body counts.

That, I hope, is the best we can say about our current President. Sometimes, however, history has surprises in store. And I hope this doesn’t happen now in Iran, for too many reasons to elaborate. But eventually, Trump’s style of big talk and quick victories is going to risk getting him stuck in a war somewhere that he did not anticipate, with no easy way out. And if and when that happens, the blood won’t wash off his hands so easily.