Wars, at least at the beginning, provide moments of clarity. Russia’s unprovoked and illegitimate invasion of Ukraine has provided many, including the resistance of ordinary Ukrainians and the leadership of their comedian-turned-president, who has shown Churchillian qualities in the early days.

While the military outcome is not yet known, and cannot be predicted, the moral outcome is clear: Russia and its autocrat, Vladimir Putin, are the aggressors, and merit all of the surprisingly well-coordinated international response that grows by the day.

And the illegitimacy of a former American president, who openly favored Russia over Ukraine, should also be beyond dispute, despite acquittal in the first impeachment trial. The United States, too, veered off course.

So it should also be time to clarify the way Americans talk about their wars, which has become badly muddled in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Richard Haass, an adviser in both Bush administrations and a pillar of the foreign policy establishment, now heads the Council on Foreign Relations. He took the opportunity of the Russian invasion’s first day, in a Washington Post op-ed, to draw a distinction between a “war of necessity” and a “war of choice,” labeling Putin’s invasion a one of “choice.”

It was a distinction he first made in a 2009 book interpreting George H.W. Bush’s 1991 rollback of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, backed by the United Nations, as “necessary,” while categorizing George W. Bush’s preemptive 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on distorted intelligence, as a “choice.”

The language covers up, deliberately or not, a profound moral failing, after a century in which two cataclysmic world wars finally established a rough understanding of when wars can be justified, and when they cannot.

“War of choice” sounds reasonable, as if intelligent people could disagree on whether it was justified.

In reality, there are no “wars of choice.” There are wars of aggression. What America did in 2003 was to invade another country without just cause. No matter how “evil” Saddam was, he was hardly unique among world leaders.

A better contrast than “necessity” and “choice” might be “defense,” paired with “aggression.”

America has engaged in defensive wars in the past 75 years, including Korea, when the north attacked, but not in Vietnam, when after an initial defensive phase, the U.S. launched aggressive attacks against the north, a country that represented no threat to us.

The same became true in Afghanistan, when, after an invasion to subdue the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American troops stayed for a seemingly endless war finally ended, in an ironic twist, by two U.S. presidents who otherwise have little in common.

“Why are we in Afghanistan?” was a question that wasn’t asked nearly as often as “Why are we in Vietnam?” but it should have been.

It’s always difficult for governments to admit fault or error after inviting the enormous human costs wars always bring. But that doesn’t mean that, as citizens, we shouldn’t engage in the soul-searching that’s necessary if we can ever hope to build a better world.

No one now attempts to label Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a “war of choice.” Americans joined with what remained of the free world to win those wars, but no one who endured them ever forgot the price they exacted.

Nor is anyone likely to grant much tolerance for Putin’s “choice” in 2022.

The United Nations, for those who remember its early days, was supposed to be the instrument for peaceful settlement of conflicts, short of war. Occasionally, it was.

Yet war — as an instrument of policy almost always avoidable — cannot be vanquished unless we are clear about our own responsibility, as well as that of others.

When one raises the still-unresolved question of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the subject of the second impeachment trial, the answer often seems to be “who cares?”

Well, we had better care. Attacks on democracies, like Ukraine’s fledging one or our “mature” model, can come from without or within. Each can be subversive of the rule of law and the legitimacy of governance.

In his State of the Union address, President Biden summoned Americans to solidarity with the people of Ukraine as a fellow democracy — solidarity, he suggested, needed here at home, too.

Democracies make mistakes, yes, and even launch wars that turn out to be mistaken. But they have expectations, rules and limits, and can correct course at the behest of their citizens; autocracies cannot.

Together, a free citizenry determines whether there can be a peaceful future, somewhere over the horizon.

Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, commentator and reporter since 1984, is the author of three books. His first, “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible,” is now out in paperback.  He welcomes comment at [email protected]