No matter how it was dressed up with words, the Southern Alliance's war against the Land of Water could only be classified as a war of aggression. At least before the concept of a unified shinobi world had taken shape, Konoha could never find sufficiently solid grounds of righteousness to justify its act of waging war!
This was also why Director Yamada had always positioned himself as an "ambitious man"...
From the moment he resolved to reshape the shinobi world through physical annexation and overthrow the rule of Ninshu established by Kaguya and the Sage of Six Paths, he had known perfectly well that he could not act like some harmless old gentleman, being kind to everyone and fighting over nothing.
Thus, no matter how things were handled on the surface, Soji had always understood that achieving his ideals would inevitably require the flesh and blood of tens of thousands of innocents as "sacrifices"!
Yet Director Yamada also knew very well that, in this regard, most of Konoha's key figures—including Jiraiya—were not mentally prepared for it at all.
And this was clearly related to Konoha's longstanding position...
Tracing things back to the very beginning of the shinobi village system, Konoha had in fact always been surrounded and attacked.
The difference was that during the reign of the God of Shinobi, the Land of Fire, which possessed absolute military deterrence, could maintain its presence from a higher level even while enduring the hostility of the other four nations. By the time of the First Shinobi World War, however, it could only obediently pay the price in blood to defend its homeland.
But no matter what, Konoha's geostrategic position had determined that, for nearly the past thirty years, it had almost never proactively launched an external war for the purpose of expanding