Enduring a war

The war in Iraq is obviously a big factor in how people will vote. President Bush maintains that he has the determination and leadership it takes to defeat the terrorists. John Kerry has second-guessed the President on everything that he has done in the war with Iraq. All I can say is that it is easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. We are fighting a new kind of war for which there is no blueprint. Would Kerry have done better?

It is interesting to compare how the public reacts to wars now compared to earlier times. The other day I listened to a radio interview with a woman about how hard the Great Depression days were compared to now. The woman wondered how today's generation would cope with adversity. She has her doubts, as do I.

I do not want to trivialize the loss of American lives in the war with Iraq. Every life lost is a tragedy. What I would like to point out is the reaction we have to the tragedy of war. In WW II thousands of soldiers were killed at a time. The Iraqi War results in 10-50 deaths per week. Each individual loss of life is noted in the newspapers. That was not possible during WW II because of the number of deaths. In addition, the news media was too far removed from the battlefront and from the military that reported the deaths. The mounting death toll in World War II was accepted by people as a further extension of the hardships of life after having endured the Depression.

We must realize that we have been at war long before Iraq. The bombing of our troops in Beruit in 1982 should have given us a clue that someone out there doesn't like our policies. The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was our generation's Pearl Harbor. Mistakes have been made in the war in Iraq but this is a new kind of war where the enemy is hidden. Everyone is frustrated because nobody knows what we have to do to resolve the war in Iraq.

Most experts agree that one way to diffuse the situation in Iraq is to let the Iraqi people know that the United States does not plan to occupy Iraq forever. We must formulate an exit strategy. It may be a 5 year plan but we need to have a plan. Osama bin Laden made conciliatory comments in his latest video in which he stated that the terrorists would let up on their activities if the United States respects the security of the Islamic people. I don't quite know what that means but it certainly would behoove us to make some attempt to make similar conciliatory guestures. One way is to be more even-handed in our dealings with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.