http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/339970,CST-EDT-GREEL13.articleApril 13, 2007
BY ANDREW GREELEY
Most of us thought that the last election settled the Iraq issue. The voters by a substantial majority rejected the Iraq war. It now appears that Iraq will be the focus of the presidential election next year. In an exercise of political legerdemain almost as ingenious as that which launched this stupid, inept and immoral war, President Bush has somehow reintroduced it as the focus for political debate this year and next year.
Despite the sentiment of the voters and the wise advice of the Iraq Commission, victory is still possible in Iraq if only we have the patience and the courage (are willing to accept more deaths of other people's children). We must protect Iraqi democracy. The consequences of failure are unthinkable. We must keep faith with our dead troops. If we don't fight the terrorists in Iraq, then we will have to fight them here at home.
There is nothing new in any of these arguments, and nothing true either. Yet they are advanced as new insights to support a "new" strategy and they are propounded by White House spokespersons, Republican members of Congress, commentators on the Fox network and conservative columnists and editorial writers as if they were wisdom that has not been heard before.
Now at last, they seem to be saying, we've finally got it right. The war is lost. It was lost before it started. It is immoral and it was immoral before it started. The Republicans running for re-election know the public is fed up with the war but they are caught in recycled old rhetoric and cannot slip out of it.