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There have been other wars where the casualty rate was higher and young American boys endured more pain. We did not have state of the art medicine then. Did we cry in our beer and say it was not worth dying for? Hell no! Did we undermine our effort with pacifist rhetoric and threaten to cut off support for our troops?

I will use a football analogy. In the game of football, there are mistakes made. Balls do not get caught. Men fumble the ball. Balls get intercepted. Runners slip and fall down. Many times, the team fails to make a first down. And then you have to consider the defensive errors that happen during the game. With all of these mistakes, does the team give up. Do the fans get up an walk out because there were too many mistakes? Hell no! The team that wins the Super Bowl is the team that overcomes their mistakes and outperforms the other teams.

This is a guerrilla war. The enemy disguises itself in the civilian population. In fact, the enemy is not from Iraq, but from other countries like Iran and Syria. Guerrilla war is the most difficult war to fight. It is a war that we will need to learn how to win. It is a war that we may have to fight in our own cities some day. What would we do if suicide bombers were taking out shopping malls or movie theaters? What would we do if snipers were shooting at drivers on the freeway? What would we do if we had no idea how to fight such a threat? Our survival depends on how fast we learn how to fight such a threat.

Your first point about "other wars" is irrelevant. We had high casualty rates in those wars, but the cost of these wars generally bore some relationship to the end result. This meant that Americans could have the expectation that the ultimate price would bring about ultimate results. If FDR had gotten up in December of 1941 and called "totalitarian fascism a religion of peace," he would have been chained to his wheelchair and pitched into the Potomac River.

I'll go with your football analogy, too. Sure, mistakes are made -- and things happen during the course of a game that cannot be foreseen. In Iraq, however, it goes far beyond that. This administration basically went into this "game" with four players -- and insists on punting the ball on first down even though it's late in the game and we're trailing by two touchdowns.

What would we do if suicide bombers were taking out shopping malls or movie theaters? What would we do if snipers were shooting at drivers on the freeway? What would we do if we had no idea how to fight such a threat?

These types of attacks are absurdly easy for someone to carry out right now. Do you ever wonder why this kind of thing doesn't happen on a daily basis in the U.S.?