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But the real issue is not about tactics or even the larger strategy but whether to fight at all. The alternative is to soothe ourselves with half measures — tightening borders, tracking funds, sharing intelligence, courting unfriendly governments — hoping against hope that a disaster even bigger than 9/11 will not be visited upon us.

The thing is a nutshell. If it had not been for Churchill, the Tory party in Britain would have negotiated a peace with Hitler. It was Churchill and the people who kept the country fighting. One man can make a difference. In our case, it is Bush. Another point: John Eisenhower in talking about Tom Selleck in the role of IKE, said that it is hard to portray an "ordinary men," talking about his father. Well, Ike was an ordinary man in the sense that he never put on a show and that he could talk with ordinary men without intimidating them or trying to. Yet he had the character to stand up to "great men" and get them to do things his way. He even won the respect of a strange bird like DeGaulle, because Ike alone understood DeGaulle and what he was trying to achieve, which was to provide a French face for the invaders. We would have done well to do much the same thing in Iraq.