But the war will not be over at midnight. We do not know when it will be over and what we will then have accumulated in war dead and treasury depleted, and we do not know for sure what the scene in Iraq will be like when we are through.

A good subject for a seminar at the National War College would be: Was it a good idea to go to war in March 2003?

The affirmative will seek to carry the case by one simple, and hardly unpersuasive, proposition: If your intelligence informs you that an aggressive tyrant has in hand or prospectively in hand weapons of ultimate destructiveness, the United States has no alternative but to proceed by military intervention.

The negative would say: Unless there is reason to suspect an enemy timetable threatening action in days or weeks, one should deliberate alternatives to military intervention, including the possibility that the intelligence is defective.

That debate-seminar will be waged for decades, but not on the presidential election scene. President Bush can't acknowledge, while we are fighting day by day in Iraq, that the very reason for the military engagement is questionable. And Senator Kerry, having at last found a political roost, is not going to stray from it. So we are left with:

We shouldn't have.

We should have. Continued...