"Only that the war with them is the type of war I can fight, even if it was not precisely the type of war the Empire preferred. And it may function as a better starting place for defining what is acceptable and what is not than . . . later battles."

Or so it seems to him, all these years later. Perhaps his memory is not as sharp as it once was. Perhaps it is nostalgia that colors his thoughts of a time when things were a little bit simpler.

(Probably not.)