Will it be now, in Iraq and against terror, as then?

Still, the news budget of stories about Abu Ghraib buries stories about the discoveries of mass Saddamite graves containing the bodies of hundreds of thousands. Likewise, that same budget somehow obscures stories about discoveries of precisely some of the gases and ingredients Saddam's apologists say he never had: sarin, mustard gas, chemical and biological toxins.

And what have you read of the poison gas attack foiled early this month in Jordan - one Jordanian authorities estimate could have killed 80,000? Jordan also believes the ingredients for the gas originated in Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld, during a surprise visit, told American forces in Baghdad that Abu Ghraib "doesn't represent America. It doesn't represent American values. And it doesn't represent the values of each of you here in this room." He was right - no matter what America's enemies and apologists for Islamofascism may say to the contrary. Western morality, embodied in its highest contemporary form in America, is far nobler and more honorable.

But as with Israel, so with the United States: Our morality may make it difficult to win against an enemy that finds no compunction in blowing up buses or bombing pizzerias - or hijacking airliners and flying them into buildings, or beheading innocents on site to help.

Perhaps worst of all, some among us - too many - see moral equivalence in moral distinction and turn our own morality against ourselves to end an anti-terror enterprise initiated for our own survival.

The Vietnam War was not lost on the battlefields of Southeast Asia but in American streets and living rooms, on American television, in American hearts and minds. We lost our stomach, our nerve. We drifted. We accepted a steady diet of anti-American baloney that cut away our will to win, even to fight, slice by slice. A traduced morality, a twisted equivalence, created the atmosphere in which we could cut and run.

Will it be now, in Iraq and against terror more broadly, as then? Or this time will the nation at last pull itself together and, as U.S. commanding General John Abizaid urged Congress last month, galvanize to "fight this war and defeat this enemy"?

Time flies.