ER's nice deconstruction of your rhetoric relieves me of that tedious chore. Bowser did me the same service by pointing out that recent and relevant history is all about military doctrine based on neoconservative ideology and Rummie's "transformational" gibberish. At the end of the day, the results speak for themselves.

What I find morbidly fascinating is the consistent thread in Conservative ideology that peace is somehow bad, and that those who value it and work toward it are weaklings and cowards. So strange, since the vast majority of normal people clearly value peace and security and demonstrate those values by organizing their lives in pursuit of those goals. What sane person would prefer the alternatives? Conservatives and Liberals alike pay attention during their working lives to securing a peaceful retirement, and some people seem to focus on not much else beyond pursuit of retirement. It's understood that the acquisition of wealth buys security. Our civil values are heavily biased towards keeping the peace--disturbing the peace is an offense against society, but to my knowledge there's no statute anywhere criminalizing "incitement of peace". Have you ever once seen a real estate ad highlighting a non-peaceful neighborhood as a selling point?

Normal people consider war to be an interruption of peace, and that peace should be our normal state of being. Why do RightWingers treat peace like an unwanted interruption of war? How sick is a society that can look upon Bush's promise of eternal war without end with anything but fear and loathing?

If peace is a worthy goal, aren't we already defeated if we accept eternal war?

I think that one poweful factor in the precipitous drop in support for Bush's war in Iraq is that it's open-ended. No manager would accept an employee's commitment to get the job done without a commitment to a date for completion. We all recognize that such a commitment is no commitment at all. If Bush can't commit to ending his war, he's not committing to win it either.

This is related to something I was thinking about from our original topic of wear and tear on the military. There's wear and tear on the taxpayers too, and any leader with an ounce of sense would factor into his planning that support for any war will always decline over time. People intuitively integrate the curve of cost over time and make running cost-benefit judgments. Bush's failure to commit to ending his war reasonably leads people to extrapolate the curve and conclude that the cost may well be infinite; or at least that the final bill will be so unacceptably high compared to its benefits that it's simply a lousy value.

The slope of the curve of declining support is determined by that running tally and extrapolation of cost, versus demonstrable progress made. That's the fundamental "value proposition". Support for WWII was easily sustained because, after the initial period of setbacks, we turned the tide, made steady and inexorable progress, and so Americans could reasonably extrapolate that the cost-over-time curve was not unbounded. Victory was in sight.

Bush's war in Iraq is everything that WWII was not. Of course the American people have had it with Bush. We know incompetence when we see it.