Category Archives: Iraq

Sunday’s Iraq war column

Iraq_mosque_1

Iraq: Why we’re there,
why we must stay

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS BRIEFLY taken aback when a colleague reminded me that we were coming up on the third anniversary of “the war.”
I thought we passed the fourth one last September. Within days after 9/11, I turned a file drawer over to “War,” and started filling it with articles, maps, photos and other items relating to “Afghanistan,” “Arabs,” “Britain,” “Bush,” “Civil Liberties,” “Iraq,” “Islam,” “Mideast,” etc. In my e-mail files, there are 27 folders under “War.” “Iraq” is but one.
Then I realized the other editor meant the Iraq campaign, dating from the 2003 invasion. I felt pretty thick. That was a huge milestone, worth addressing prominently. This war’s heaviest fighting, Antiwar2jpgpart and America’s greatest losses (since the one-day losses of 9/11), have been on that front. So last Sunday’s editorial took stock of where Iraq stands, three years on.
Today, after seeing, hearing and reading an avalanche of commemorative rhetoric from all sides, I address it again.

Lever of change
The war that began on 9/11/01 — that is, the long, asymmetrical war on the West that we Americans first fully recognized that day — was one we did not choose.
Maybe that’s why we had neglected for so long to connect the dots between the USS Cole and Al-Qaida, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, bin Laden and our retreat from Somalia, Somalia and poverty, poverty and tyranny, oil and U.S. support for oppressive regimes, those regimes and radical Islam, Islamists and terror.
The invasion of Iraq, as a critical element of this war, was a fight that we chose, as critics keep Iraq_saddam saying — but only in a sense. Iraq was where we decided to insert the lever with which we would attempt to turn back half a century of Near East politics and policies.
The fact that Iraq was the likeliest place to insert it was not our choice. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He invaded Kuwait, which caused us to lead a coalition to throw him out in 1991. He then violated, for 12 years, the terms established as the price of remaining in power. He shot at American aircraft. He defied the United Nations again in 2002, when he was told that his one chance to stay in power was full cooperation. (He also — although this is incidental to my point — was the one who paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)
The United States — and Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Denmark (most of Europe, other than France and Germany) and about two dozen other countries — decided to take action.

About the WMD
And yes, pretty much all of those nations, and the countries that refused to participate (publicly), Iraq_brit_1 believed Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. So did his own generals, who were counting on it. He did a wonderful impersonation of a man with something to hide, when all he was still hiding was the fact that they were gone.
I never thought his WMD programs were the best reason to invade. I thought he had them, but I doubted they were an immediate threat. His behavior on the subject gave the coalition additional justification to take action, but it never really moved me. I preferred the other big one the Bush administration talked about in 2002 — regime change. That, too, was fully justified, by Saddam’s behavior over the previous 12 years.
The idea, which has been iterated over and over by everyone from the president to Thomas Friedman, was to start a sort of reverse domino effect — to drop a big rock into the pond, and generate ripples of liberal democracy that would lap against, and erode, the status quo in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and, if we got lucky, maybe even Iran. That process has at least begun in every one of those places except Iran — and don’t give up on Iran.
In some ways Iraq wasn’t the place one would choose to drop the rock. It was profoundly, violently Balkanized and, like the country that spawned that adjective, had been held together by force. But it was the one place where the reigning despot had provided justification to step in.

Why take action?
Why drop a rock at all? Why disturb the status quo? Hadn’t we done all we could to prop it up for decades? Wasn’t that why the president’s Dad stood by and let Iraqi rebels he had stirred up be slaughtered (possibly the most shameful thing my country has done in my lifetime) — because creating a “power vacuum” in Baghdad wouldn’t be “prudent”?
Absolutely. We had propped up an intolerable status quo in the Mideast for decades. Why? To keep the oil flowing. I am dumbfounded when a war protester says Iraq is about oil. The first Gulf War was about oil; this is about the opposite.
This one is about knocking the oil barrel over to see if we can’t get something better than Iraq_girls_1 oppression, frustration, hatred and terrorism to flow out of it. It was never, ever going to be easy. It remains hard enough that fewer and fewer Americans see how we can succeed. The challenges do remain daunting, but enormous progress has been made — often in spite of the Bush administration’s decisions. We’ve had highly successful elections — the last one with broad Sunni support — and internal security is increasingly in Iraqi hands (which is why U.S. casualties have recently slowed).
Does forming a new government not present a huge hurdle? It does, but no more so than challenges already met. We have made it this far in spite of never having enough troops to provide the proper level of security.
However hard it is, we have no choice. We’ve knocked over the barrel, and we have to deal with it.

Many faults, one virtue
President Bush drives me nuts. His refusal to transform our energy strategies to make us stronger i Iraq_abu_ghraib n fighting this war is unconscionable. And don’t get me started on his undermining our international financial position, or his failure to fire Donald “We’ve got enough troops” Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib.
But this deeply flawed man has one saving grace: When those planes flew into those towers, he got it. He knew that this was no longer his father’s world. He still sees it all rather hazily, but he sees it. And he’s stubborn as a stone. He will not give in to ripples of panic spreading through the electorate, not even (I fervently hope) to save his own political party.
When he pointed out last week that pulling back in Iraq would be up to future presidents, and future Iraqi governments, I could have hugged him if he’d been closer. It was about time that he said what I wrote the very week American boots hit Iraqi sand — that he had crossed his Rubicon and taken the rest of us, including his successors, with him.
It still stuns me that people can even consider pulling out, or ask when we will pull out — this year, next year? What utter madness.

The long haul
If we did that any time within the foreseeable future, our nation would lose all credibility. No country, including our worst critics, would believe in American resolve within our lifetimes. Nor would we. It would be much worse than our global fecklessness after Vietnam. When the day came (and it would come) that the world needed America to lead it in standing up to some obvious, World War-sized threat — say, a belligerent China or a nuclear-missile-launching Iran — no one would trust us not to leave them in the lurch. Nor should they.
Just as bad, we would have no credibility with terrorists. When the United States ran from Somalia after losing 18 men right on the verge of accomplishing the mission, Osama bin Laden drew certain conclusions about our resolve in the face of violence. The result was 9/11. What might he, and his millions of imitators, conclude if we ran from this exponentially greater mission? What horrors would they be emboldened to unleash if we were foolish enough to think we had the power to decide when it’s over?
We can’t leave, folks.
Even if the insurgencies ended today, we couldn’t leave. Even if the Sunni and Shiite gunmen turned on the foreign jihadists and drove them out tomorrow, then made friends with each other the next day, we couldn’t leave. Even if the hardheaded politicians in Baghdad formed a Madisonian democracy next week, we’d have to stay. It would be a long, long time before an infant republic could keep from being devoured by Iran from the east, Turkey from the north and Syria from the west. Our republic had oceans to keep it safe until it was big and strong; Iraq doesn’t.
As daunting as the situation is, there is only one way to be certain to lose: Give up. We’ve already Bush9 made this a lot harder than it has to be by showing doubt. Every American who says we shouldn’t be there makes the terrorists a bit bolder, and the would-be Iraqi democrats a bit more afraid to risk their lives on our assurances.
From his tax cuts to his Medicare drug plan to his threat to veto anti-torture legislation, there’s not much that President Bush has to sell that I would want to buy. But I pray to God and to my fellow Americans that he succeeds in selling the product he was taking door-to-door last week. The alternatives are too horrible.

Grownups column

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Reprinting lousy drawings
just doesn’t make good sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS SORT of disappointed at Kathleen Parker’s take on the whole Danish cartoon/Islamic riots thing (see facing page) — not because I felt strongly about it one way or the other, but because it seemed so unlike her.
When I received the column from her syndicate, it was only the second expression of that particular sentiment I had seen since this craziness started (I’ve seen others since). The first came Cartoons4 from sometime radio host Michael Graham. That did not surprise me; it was just like him.
But I’ve had the opportunity in the past to speak with Kathleen about the philosophy that underlies her writing. On each occasion, I have appreciated (and identified with) the fact that although she is commonly labeled “conservative,” in fact that she does not think of herself as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. She describes her outlook as simply a matter of “being a grownup.” It’s my belief that her writing is generally consistent with that, which is why I like to read her.
That’s why I was disappointed to see her saying, essentially, that we editors should republish these cartoons because we can, because we are free and (by implication) because “they” don’t want us to. Or, to put it another way, to prove we are not “sensitive.”
That hardly seems like the grown-up response. It’s more like the eternal cry of the adolescent.
I choose not to republish those lousy cartoons. And they are lousy, by the way — typically European, most are by U.S. standards not even fully developed cartoons. They are lame illustrations, the kind a page designer might drop into a page just to break up the gray text.
Robert0212_1 When I run cartoons on this issue, they’re going to be good ones with a point, such as the seven we’ve run in the past week from our own Robert Ariail and others.
While I defend the right of those Danes to publish what they wanted, their decision to undertake the project was childish. Seriously, what grownup goes out of his way to mock anyone’s religion? And what did it accomplish? It put the rest of the West in the position of having to defend an immature editorial decision in the face of the even more infantile reaction of the kinds of lunatics who are all too common in Islamic circles. Personally, I’d rather defend something nobler than that.
I mean, if they wanted to decry the fact that Europeans were wusses about Islamist madness and show they weren’t going to be a part of that, why not criticize Islamist actions, rather than mocking the religion? There’s plenty to say within that arena — things worth saying.
And there would be nothing “fine” about cartoons mocking the Holocaust. As for “Piss Christ” and the like, my own personal reaction is that such “art” provides a good argument for reviving the Inquisition. (Maybe we can manage that now that we papists have taken over the Supreme Court.)
Anyway, I choose not to publish the lousy drawings. I take the grown-up perspective: I am free to publish them, but I’m even freer than that, which means I am free not to publish them. I do not feel Cartoons3_2 constrained by any need to prove I’m man enough to cock a snook at a bunch of pathetic idiots running around screaming in foreign cities. Nor do I feel the need to be “sensitive.” I do feel a need to be pragmatic and strategic, as someone who deeply wants my country to prevail in this war on terror.
That’s why I have written in the past that while people in the United States who loudly protest the war in Iraq have every right to do so, they need to be grown-up enough to recognize the consequences: They encourage terrorists and Baathists in Iraq to keep killing Americans (and Iraqis), because our enemies assume (with reason) that if they inflict just a few more casualties, we will cave. Protesters have the right to express themselves, but in the real world of cause and effect, they are encouraging the enemy.
It’s also why we said the president should have ditched Donald rumsfeld
after Abu Ghraib, even if one can’t draw a direct line of responsibility to him. Only a gesture such as that would have shown the world — and the people of Iraq, our proteges in the project of democracy — how seriously we take these things that happened on his watch. Showing that we stand firmly behind the ideals we espouse is far more important strategically than Rummy keeping his job. In fact, if he were replaced by someone who believed in sending over enough troops to get the job done to start with, we’d probably be better off.
(All of this follows the same reasoning we use when adults tell their teenage daughters not to go out dressed like that. Girls may see doing so as their right, but grownups know that, the world being unfair, exercising that “right” would make them more likely to draw the attention of evil men who would do them harm.)
The unifying principle in all these cases (except the parenthetical)? I want us to win the war.
Am I saying newspapers in the U.S. shouldn’t publish the cartoons because we don’t want to offend a bunch of idiots in the Arab street? No. I’m saying I see no sensible reason to do so.
Not to cast aspersions, but those people over there are nuts. They’ve been nuts for as long as I Cartoons5_1 can remember. One could provide all sorts of excuses for them if one were inclined to be “sensitive” — they are traumatized by alienation, by poverty, by propaganda, by an inferiority complex at their once-proud culture becoming subordinate to the West in so many ways — but hey, nuts is nuts. There’s absolutely no excuse for reacting violently to a few stupid drawings. But republishing them just to show we can is no way to lead them to sanity.
If you actually haven’t seen them, and want to, you can easily find them on the Web. If you do, I predict you’ll be sorry that you wasted the time.

Judicial independence column

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America must uphold judicial
independence at home, too
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DO Viktor Yushchenko, Saddam Hussein, Clement Haynsworth and Samuel Alito all have in common?
Judicial independence.
That is to say, all have been at the center of events that illustrate the importance of that critical Ukraine2 element, which anchors our republic in the rule of law.
This is what was on South Carolina Chief Justice Jean Toal’s mind when she spoke to the Columbia Rotary on Monday.
She started off with last year’s Ukrainian election, which ultimately led to Mr. Yushchenko’s election as president — but not until the bully boys behind Viktor Yanukovych had tried everything from election fraud to assassination by poison to keep the people’s choice from power.
What saved the day? Well, the “Orange Revolution” in the streets had a lot to do with it, as did international pressure from the United States and others. But ultimately, there would not have been a happy ending for democracy if the Ukrainian supreme court Ukraine1 had not stepped in — after the central election committee had refused to hear fraud complaints — and ordered a second runoff election, declaring the results of the crooked first one invalid.
“How did the Ukraine Supreme Court have the courage and the tools to conduct this important judicial review?” Chief Justice Toal asked. “Many credit the… strong decision for the rule of law to their training by a team of American judges and lawyers sent on an outreach mission to newly emerging democracies to school their judges in the art of creating and operating an independent court system.”
It is commonly understood that “America is exporting Democracy in the form of free elections” all over the world, to Afghanistan and Iraq certainly, but also less visibly to Bosnia, Saudia Arabia, and so on, she said. But just as importantly, we are “also exporting the idea of the importance of a stable court system.”
Saddam Hussein knows that, and so do his most violent supporters. That’s why Baathists assassinated a judge involved in charging the former (and would-be future) dictator. It’s also why Saddam has done so much to challenge the viability of the court trying him, from theatrics in the courtroom to refusal to show up.
The old order in Iraq knows that an independent judiciary that enjoys broad public confidence is Saddam_trial yet another nail in their coffin.
The chief justice’s remarks remind me of something Sen. Lindsey Graham told me recently. While others measure progress toward success in terms of Iraqi army battalions and police forces trained and effective, he has thought in terms of a functioning cadre of judges who value law over the will of men. That’s one reason he thinks of American disengagement in terms of years rather than the months that political expedience would dictate.
As Ms. Toal put it, America must be “a beacon to the world,” shining a light on “what living by the rule of law can contribute to the liberty of all.”
But for the judiciary to be effective, it must enjoy public acceptance — which is not at all the same as “agreement.”
That’s why she worries about the intersection of politics and judicial selection in Washington.
She tries to stay hopeful, and has seen recent signs that things can go well, even inside the Beltway. She said it will “be interesting to see whether (the nomination of) Alito follows the same positive process” as that of Chief Justice John Roberts.
“One can only pray for the republic that that is the way it proceeds.” Mr. Roberts was eminently qualified, and was treated accordingly. Ms. Toal said she doesn’t know all there is to know about Mr. Alito, but “what I do know suggests that he is in the cream of the cream,” she said in a Thursday interview.
But she worries that Senate Democrats, frustrated that they found no chinks in Mr. Roberts’ armor, are determined to make up for it now. And when politicians make up their minds to do that, the stuff is going to fly.
She’s seen it before — when South Carolinian Clement Haynsworth was nominated by Richard Nixon in 1969 to replace Abe Fortas on the nation’s high court.
She was working in the Haynsworth firm at the time, and her husband was Judge Haynsworth’s clerk. She watched as her fellow Democrats “drummed up” all sorts of bogus accusations at Judge Haynsworth, who was “revered and highly respected” by both sides of the political fence.
But after Republicans had succeeded in blocking Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Justice Fortas to be chief justice, “Democrats vowed that they would go after the first nominee of Nixon as payback.” So they did, with Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh leading the charge.
This was long before the verb “to Bork” entered the language. But things have only gotten worse as the years have passed.
“Too often, what we are doing is judging the judges on the basis of the hot-button issues,” said Ms. Toal, when “The real examination ought to be, is he fair and will he call them as he sees them?”
Many will remember that as a politician, Ms. Toal was a Democrat. But she was “an anomaly — a pro-life Democrat.” So she was never one to embrace the litmus tests of Washington.
Being a judge, and one who is particularly devoted to her calling, strengthens her aversion to what she fears the fight over Mr. Alito could become.
But you don’t have to be chief
justice to agree with her. All you have to be is someone who respects the rule of law to understand that you’re not supposed to try to “put someone on there who will sing your song.”

A U.S. commitment can work

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A back-and-forth discussion on the subject of Bosnia among readers responding (initially, anyway) to a recent post reminded me of this piece from The New York Times, which I meant to draw attention to it at the time, but got busy with other things. Unfortunately, you can’t read it online now without paying for it.

The thrust of it was that no, the situation in Bosnia isn’t perfect — far from it — but we accomplished our goal there. Our goal was modest by the standard of what we’re trying to do in Iraq: We just wanted to stop the killing (at least, that was the goal once we finally decided to do something). We accomplished that.

The author, Roger Cohen, called the Dayton accords signed in 1995 “a messy, and unedifying, end to a conflict” but went on to say that “the Dayton agreement had one conspicuous merit: it stopped the killing that had taken about 200,000 lives. The quieted guns were a tribute to what American power and diplomacy can achieve.”

Note the word, “diplomacy.” The piece stresses the importance of working in concert with powerful allies, and draws some obvious contrasts with what has happened in Iraq. That’s the first of “two lessons” he says the Bosnia experience holds for Iraq.

“The second,” he wrote, “is that a 10-year American military commitment can bear fruit.”

Now note “10-year.” Also note “commitment.” The result is that eventually, one can draw down the troop deployment — we only have 200 in Bosnia now. But note again, all you impatient sorts: “10-year.”

Anyway, the part I liked best about the piece was the headline: “Lessons From Bosnia, 10 Years On: A U.S. Commitment Can Work.” I saw that as a fitting rebuke to the isolationists and do-nothings on both the left and the right.

Finally

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Finally, voices of reason
talk back on Iraq
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FINALLY.
Finally, after weeks of serious talk about taking the suicidal step of pulling American troops out of Iraq — driven by the steady drip of relentless news coverage of a casualty one day, two the next, and virtually nothing else; by poll numbers that fed on that coverage; and by political opportunism on one side of the partisan aisle, and political cowardice on the other — some people who knew better started talking back.
It started about 10 days ago.
That’s when The Economist sent out its last week’s edition, with these words on the cover: “Why America Must Stay.”
After going on at length, with brutal frankness, about the mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq (and I urge you to go to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and follow the links to read this and the other items I will mention), the piece gave both the positive reasons and negative reasons why we have no choice but to maintain our force there until the job is done. The “positive” reasons had to do with political and military progress achieved. Some “negative” reasons: “The cost to America of staying in Iraq may be high, but the cost of retreat would be higher. By fleeing, America would not buy itself peace. Mr. Zarqawi and his fellow fanatics have promised to hound America around the globe. Driving America out of Iraq would grant militant Islam a huge victory. Arabs who want to modernize their region would know that they could not count on America to stand by its friends.”
Then, on Saturday, political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote in The Wall Street Journal of the kind of speech he’d like to hear President Bush deliver. He complained, quite rightly, that the president was wasting time “arguing against critics of the Iraq war who are trying to rewrite history,” when “What most Americans care about is not who is lying but whether we are winning.”
And we are winning — a fact of which most Americans are tragically unaware. Mr. Wilson went on to tell how the president should explain that. A sample: “We grieve deeply over every lost American and coalition soldier, but we also recognize what those deaths have accomplished. A nation the size of California, with 25 million inhabitants, has been freed from tyranny, equipped with a new democratic constitution, and provided with a growing new infrastructure that will help every Iraqi and not just the privileged members of a brutal regime. For every American soldier who died, 12,000 Iraqi voters were made into effective citizens.”
Then on Tuesday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman wrote — once again, in the Journal — a piece headlined “Our Troops Must Stay.” Informed by a recent visit to Iraq, his picture of a nation moving toward Liebermaniraq becoming a vital democracy (as long as we don’t abandon it) was even more compelling than the others. But my own anti-partisan heart was probably warmed most by this passage:
“I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.” Amen.
Why such a flurry of similar statements of good sense all at once? It may be that the voices of grim reason finally piped up in alarmed reaction to the fact that the American people were actually starting to think of doing the unthinkable. They also wrote (very specifically, in Mr. Wilson’s case) in reaction to the appalling leadership vacuum left by the failure of the president of the United States to explain, and keep explaining, to his people the stakes in this war.
Then finally, finally, finally, the president reported for duty on Wednesday. As he should, he counseled “time and patience.” But he did more important things than that. He not only explained why we must think not of timetables for withdrawal, but measures for success. He also spelled out how we will achieve those goals. He showed a way to outcomes that too many Americans have Bushvictory_1 stopped being able to imagine.
And he addressed the mad talk about timetables for withdrawal, promising that “decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders — not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.” In other words, by the brave men and women fighting this fight, rather than by Democratic opportunists and Republican cowards.
“Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw,” he said, “would send a signal to our enemies — that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends.” Not only that, but it would tell them exactly how long they have to wait — and that would be insane.
The president’s speech was accompanied by the release of a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” In greater detail than the address, it set out the definition of victory, and the plans for achieving it. It also stated what should be obvious: “(T)he terrorists, Saddamists, and rejectionists do not have the manpower or firepower to achieve a military victory over the Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces. They can win only if we surrender.”
There remains much left to be said, and even more to be done. But it is gratifying and reassuring that the president and others are now discussing, in de
pth, the actual situation and what should be done about it. Finally.

‘Band of Brothers’ to go to Iraq

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I had thought that this was good news out of Iraq this week, and that this was even better.

Currahee But I probably took more heart from this news than from anything I’ve seen in a while. I realize the other things are probably more substantially significant, but there’s something reassuring on a gut level about the 506th PIR being resurrected, even if it isn’t technically a Parachute Infantry Regiment any more.

That unit distinguished itself to such a degree in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne and Germany in 1944-45 that the young men who have Currahee2_1 adopted "Currahee" as their battle cry (after the foothill near Toccoa, Ga., that the original soldiers of the 506th had to run up and down — three miles each way — as a routine, daily part of their initial training in 1942) have a tremendous tradition of honor to live up to. From what I’ve seen from our soldiers and Marines in the field in this war, I’m sure they’ll meet the challenge, and old heroes such as Dick Winters and "Wild Bill" Guarnere will be proud to call them brothers.

Exchange with Ted Rall

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Since some readers regularly e-mail me samples of his work, I thought there might be interest in this piece that Ted Rall sent me yesterday, and in the brief exchange we had on the subject. I think he was hoping I would buy the piece. He doesn’t know I’m not in a buying mode. In fact, he has my sympathy because fewer and fewer papers are likely to be in a buying mode.

Anyway, my initial reaction to the piece was as follows:

Actually, Ted, the only way we’re going to win is if it DOES become "boring"
enough that al-Zarqawi can’t get coverage any more. He can’t win, except by
demoralizing the American public to the point that it just wants to quit. And he
can’t do that without coverage.

But rest assured, Katrina will eventually fade into the background enough to
return to the daily suicide bombing being repeated over and over on the 24/7
boob tube news. And al Zarqawi will be a happy man, and won’t have to try so
hard to depress us.

Mr. Rall responded thusly:

It depends on whether we view al Zarqawi as the leader of a movement or just one more personality heading up one particular pyramid of insurgent cells (guess which one I think it is). I think the Iraqi insurgency is intrinsically undefeatable, first and foremost because the US isn’t willing to commit the half million troops that would have been needed to enforce total domination and law and order.

To which I responded,

I cite him as the guy taking credit for the biggest recent attempt to get our
attention. He and al Qaeda are indeed but one of the factions hoping we’ll just
get demoralized and go away…

Mr. Rall is right that we (if he means our leaders) have never been willing to commit enough troops. And he’s right that the terrorist attacks over there haven’t garnered the same kind of overplay in the U.S. media to which the terrorists are accustomed (due to Katrina). But he’s wrong about the rest. The various insurgents — al Qaeda, other assorted foreign jihadists, Sadr’s people, never-say-die Baathists, and so forth — can’t defeat us. Not unless we become so demoralized that we decide to let them.

Has America supported its wars?

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This really should be required reading for anyone out there laboring under the illusion that there is something uniquely awful and unAmerican about our involvement in Iraq — or in Vietnam, for that matter.

You think the American public is turning against the Iraq War in a big way? Well, get back to me when we’ve had a reaction as awful as the New York draft riots that Abe Lincoln had to deal with.

John Prine was not expressing such an unusual sentiment when he sang: "We lost Davy in the Korean war/And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore."

Basically, it’s tough to maintain public opinion in favor of military operations in a democracy, even when they are necessary. The reasons why a war may be just and necessary are usually far too complex to keep before the electorate for an extended period of time. That’s why you see oversimplifications. All anyone who is now against the war seems to remember is "WMD," when it was and is much more complicated than that.

Anti-war activists almost always have the advantage, because their message is simple: Stop the killing. That’s why in the long term, opinion starts to sway their way. And that’s a serious problem when you engaged in something as extremely long-term as the War on Terror.

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