When retired generals, claiming to speak for active-duty troops (who usually resent having views put in their mouth that way), talk about war-weariness, they do not help American diplomacy. They hurt it, because the surest way for a president to negotiate credibly, and thus avoid war, is to have at his side a growling mastiff on the leash — not a tired bloodhound that looks as though it has had, for the moment, enough tussles with the other canines.

Above all, a president has no business confessing to war-weariness. Sending soldiers to war is a hard business. But President Obama knew he was going to be a war president; if that duty was too trying for him, he should not have run for reelection, because, as he has discovered, he might have to fight new wars and not merely end old ones.

For a president to confess to war- weariness is to confess weakness.