1) I think you’re afraid to come out and say that one criterion should be the possible demoralization of the American public. You mention it a couple times but in a way that only obliquely supports your argument.

2) The sentence beginning “Generally…” I would probably avoid the word. The sentence has some grammar issues, however. Also, “containment” to characterize WWII seems like a massive understatement. It may be better to unite the Gulf War and WWII under the umbrella of “defending allies” (rescue is more accurate, but perhaps overblown for the occasion).

3) The argument about unfamiliar terrain seems very weak to me. The question asks about waging war on another country, meaning, no matter what, except for a few circumstances, the terrain would be foreign and unknown. The implied criterion in that paragraph seems to be more, make sure we have native allies on the ground that we are fighting with who can give us the tactical advantage.

4) I was confused in the third paragraph. It sounds like you’re saying that the war in Iraq has been a success, but I think you meant the Gulf War, in which case, establish set terms to differentiate between the two.

5) Your last sentence (unintentionally) obliterates completely your past argument because of the word “prevent”. The current Iraq War was a “preventative” war against a perceived aggressor. The word “prevent” is the issue. The Gulf War and our involvement in WWII occurred far too late to prevent the aggressor. There was already a record of aggression. Perhaps it would be better to talk about potential aggression vs. actual aggression or pre-emptive vs. reactive wars, which you kind of do, but not very clearly.

Did you make a quickie outline before you wrote this?

But isn’t journalism about answering broad questions in short passages using massive generalizaitions?

I agree that my thesis is a little muddy. Providing a tight answer to such a broad question in 45-minutes seems daunting, but I think I would have done a better job if I had just said that the criteria for going to war is met when a state is an aggressor. Getting into moral, ethical, and tactical “quandries” probably requires a lot more exposition than I have the time or knowledge for.

This is Jon A. I assume? I say that because of the prevalence of law school words (“putative,” “terra incognito,” “construable” which may or may not best fit your ideas )

Your essay is generally well written, but 1) the US wasn’t at all involved in Stalingrad – the destruction of the German army there was all the Soviet Army’s doing (if memory serves me right, the one time in the twentieth century where the United States had any real military presence in Russia was in 1917-19, during the Revolutionary period)…had you said that the Americans met the Japanese on mutually unknown ground in the Pacific islands or that we (along with the British) fought Germany on the terra incognito of North Africa, that might work.

Also, 2) your answer unfortunately skirts around the main point of the question, which is to consider under what criteria the United States should contemplate going to war…your essay starts to provide solid analysis of the concerns of aggressive war vis a vis wars of putative “containment” purposes, but you muddy that up by trying to vaguely link this dichotomy with public approval of war efforts and the morality of military response to political and other situations.

Also, on a more specific clarity note, when you write “…while the United States was worried that Communist China would take control of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, China did not invade the country in the manner that Germany did in World War II or Iraq did in the Gulf War,” it makes it construable to mean that Germany and Iraq both invaded Vietnam.

It’s well written, but I think that more time should be spent organizing and less on determining which GRE words best fit your ideas.