Unconditional

Two-Front Insurgency

William Safire discusses recent events in Iraq in his column today. He argues that the U.S. must resolve itself to take the fight to those responsible for recent attacks on our troops and hold fast to the deadline of June 30 for turning the country over to a new Iraqi government.

He asks questions at the end of his column that make me wonder if he understands the very freedoms we're supposed to be bringing to Iraq. Read his column, then ask yourself, "Does the fact that we've been lead into a war under false pretenses mean we should abandon our tradition of free speech and accept whatever a president says and does in an election year?" Safire is right that "these are the times that try men's souls." But he ignores the fact that we're in such times because, "at a time and a place of our choosing," as Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying, we chose to fight back against the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons. Ted Kennedy is right to call this Bush's Vietnam--it's a war being fought without the wholehearted support of the American people, and that lack of support leads to problems. The solution in this case isn't for the American people to blindly support the president. It's for him to give us a reason to support him.