President Bush spent much of last week addressing the decline of support, at least as measured in public opinion polls, for the war in Iraq. In his speech in Idaho last Wednesday, he focused on honoring both fallen soldiers and those who continue to fight, and the necessity that we stay the course until the job is done. While it is certainly necessary to rally support for the war by making speeches and presenting arguments against an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, more than that will be needed for the American public to make an informed decision in the 2008 presidential election.
Some of the slogans on the signs waved by the followers of Cindy Sheehan indicate that many Iraq war critics are protesting on the basis of bad intelligence. (I will save discussion of that irony for another day.) But the slogans repeated by protesters are just a sampling of the myths that have been repeated often enough that average Americans may have already accepted them as fact. The claims of war critics have gone largely unanswered for too long, so at some point before the 2008 Presidential election an effort should be made to “set the record straight” about the reasons we went to war in Iraq.
Some of the sillier claims of the anti-war, anti-Bush Left don’t deserve attention. The “war for oil” and “they enlisted to fight for Halliburton” mantras fit into this category. Others, however, such as the claim that Bush lied about WMD, and that Saddam had no connections to terrorism, need to be addressed.
Hopefully, by 2008, we will have reduced troop levels so that the war in Iraq will not be the big issue that it is now. But with North Korea, Iran and other hot spots on the horizon, many of the same issues will be raised. Unfortunately, I can easily imagine a scenario in which the arguments for and against the war in Iraq could be made all over again, only with different names being substituted for Iraq and Saddam.