Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children…This is not a way of life, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Here’s something fun. See if you can guess who made that statement.

If you guessed a Kennedy or Obama or Streisand or some other tax and-spend, bleeding heart, cut-and-run liberal, you’d be wrong. If you guessed Mother Teresa or Gandhi or Woody Harrelson or some other naïve left-wing social dreamer with no clue about what goes on in the real world, you’d be wrong.

The speaker was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. The same Eisenhower who, prior to becoming president, was Gen. Eisenhower. In his soldiering days, he had a chance to learn firsthand a thing or two about guns and rockets and warships and how the real world works. Having served this country as both president and Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Eisenhower had unrivaled credibility in matters of war.

After his soldiering days, Eisenhower also served as president of Columbia University and commander of NATO forces. As president, Eisenhower worked tirelessly for world peace. He negotiated the truce that ended the Korean War and sought to reduce Cold War tensions with the USSR. He was a fiscal conservative who emphasized the importance of a balanced budget. He ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, saying, “There must be no second-class citizens in this country.” Before retiring from public life, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of disproportionate power wielded by what he called “the military-industrial complex.”

If you got that one wrong, here’s a second chance. Can you guess who said this: “The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets. We know more about war than we know of peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

Joe Biden? Hilary Clinton? The Dali Lama? Sorry, not even close. Here’s a hint. The speaker was a classmate of Eisenhower at West Point. He commanded a division, a corp, an army and a group of armies. At one point in World War II, he commanded the 900,000 men of the 12th Army Group in Europe, the largest assemblage of American soldiers ever to serve under one field commander.

He went on the head up the Veterans Administration, which made sense for an officer and a gentleman whose sincere concern for the well-being of the men under his command caused him to be nicknamed “The G.I.’s General.” Give up? It was that noted peacenik, Gen. Omar Bradley, also known as Gen. George Patton’s boss.

One last chance. Who said this: “What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”

Jesus? Buddha? Mohammed? Al Gore? No, no, no and no. I won’t keep you in suspense. It was Gen. Robert E. Lee of Virginia, another reluctant warrior with an impressive military record and a profound distaste for war.

I think about what men like Eisenhower and Bradley and Lee said about war when our country is embroiled in a war that many of us thought should never have been fought in the first place. Somehow I think they might feel called on to do more than call a news conference to announce their courage in passing a non-binding resolution in opposition to the escalation of that war. Being a soldier takes courage. But it also takes courage to be a leader. And as Wendell Berry put it, “The most alarming sign of the state of our society right now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”

No wonder we liked Ike.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classic’s File” as it was written years ago.