Bill Moyers has writes about his experience as Press Secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the beginning of the Vietnam War and the inevitable cost of the War on Iraq to the innocents on both sides.
The Costs Of War

Our Secretary of Defense has a plaque on his desk that says, “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” I don’t think so.
To launch an armada against Hussein’s own hostages, a people who have not fired a shot at us in anger, seems a crude and poor alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy.
Don’t get me wrong. Vietnam didn’t make me a dove; it made me read the Constitution. That’s all. Government’s first obligation is to defend its citizens. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it’s permissible for a great nation to go hunting for Hussein by killing the people he holds hostage, his own people, who have no choice in the matter, who have done us no harm.
Unprovoked, the noble sport of war becomes the murder of the innocent.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers14.html
The Costs of War
By Bill Moyers
Iraq is not Vietnam, but war is war. Some of you will recall that I was Press Secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the escalation of war in Vietnam. Like the White House today, we didn’t talk very much about what the war would cost. Not in the beginning. We weren’t sure, and we didn’t really want to know too soon, anyway.
If we had to tell Congress and the public the true cost of the war, we were afraid of what it would do to the rest of the budget