Thanks Tom...a good post.

I agree that we need to offer our full support to our forces, who--no matter what one thought of the war itself--are now genuinely involved in the liberation of a long-oppressed people. They're fighting for freedom and democracy where there used to be oppression and dictatorship.

To give the Iraqi insurgents any reason to think America has a breaking point and that eventually we'll cut and run, is to throw gasoline on a fire. It is, to say the very least, completely unfair to our forces to offer the notion that any given American death could be the one that finally scares us off.

And to use the deaths of US soldiers for partisan purposes, to hammer on them as if they were nails in the President's coffin, is simply wrong.

Our forces are trying to defend freedom here at home by instilling it elsewhere. They're giving their lives trying to empower a people who'd been brutally oppressed for decades. They're engaged in a reconstruction that has as much to do with mending a damaged society as it does with fixing damaged buildings.

An enemy that had no chance against us in the short-term is now hoping to beat us in the long-term. Their fuel is the hope that the American public will be intimidated by the carnage they can inflict, and will in turn force the Bush Administration to abandon Iraq. The best thing we can do for everyone--both our forces and the Iraqi people--is to create a "fuel shortage" for the Sadaam loyalists by expressing solidarity in our commitement to a free and democatic Iraq.

Seven years to a free Japan...and much longer to a completely free Germany, thanks to a Soviet Union whose idea of liberation was to exchange one dictatorship for another. And here we've been only a few months in Iraq. The war's over, we cna't change that. But we can support the winning of a difficult and costly--but ultimately priceless--peace.