Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Patience: I guess it doesn't help that I'm reading Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation, while the war on terrorism unfolds. His book talks about how people sacrificed everything for their country, whether by risking their lives or going without gasoline, so we could fight Germany and Japan. Nobody complained that it was only Japan who attacked us, not Germany. They knew we had to fight a long, ill-defined war.

Now in an age when most problems seem to be solved within 30 minutes on a TV sitcom, the war in Iraq is making people impatient. The same people who wanted to give U.N. inspectors another 12 years to look for WMD are wondering why we're still in Iraq six months after we declared victory. Do you know how long we stayed in Germany after World War II? I'll give you a hint -- we're still there. Despite our military presence, Germany is still free to mock us and vote against us in the United Nations. Some day Iraq will be able to do the same.

We can't just topple a couple statues and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We've unseated Saddam Hussein from power. For that, we declared victory. Now Saddam is organizing a terrorist resistance movement while hiding underground. He's trying to prevent a new Iraqi government from taking power. People say this means we failed or didn't plan ahead. I think this just means that we completed part one of our mission, now we're solving part two. While I'm hoping we can do this without many troops being killed, I'm not going to be unrealistic and expect no casualties in this war.

Liberals point to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld internal memo as a sign of disorganization within the administration and the military. All the memo shows is that inquisitive minds are reassessing our strategy at every turn. That's what it's going to take to win the war against terrorism.