With all deliberate speed

The talk of the panel on Fox News Sunday was worry that the Iraqis will miss another deadline in completing their constitution. As is typical, Juan Williams characterized it as a failure for the Bush administration and called for an exit strategy, meaning a date to pull our troops out. Fred Barnes rightly pointed out that the issues involved are tough ones and may take a lot longer to work out completely. He says they should "kick the can down the road," and give the people a governmental structure that provides for public self-determination and which protects the rights of all three major groups and balances their powers in the government that finally emerges, and leave the most contentious ones for continued negotiation.

Brit Hume pointed out that we can't press them too hard, but we can't tell them to take all the time they want, either. This point needs to be appreciated by the American people, and kept in mind as the media turns up the attacks on Bush for not hitting these deadlines, and when Bush dismisses their complaints and then promises that it's almost there. This is a stage that requires patience, but we can't give them the impression that our patience is infinite. The casualties taken my our military are very low, but there is that strange argument at work that one death is too many. And there is the Cindy Sheehan line that "This country [I assumes she means America.) isn't worth dying for," so a fortiori neither Israel nor Iraq are either. The MSM continues to eat away at our resolve with it's constant fretting and emphasizing failures, without reporting the successes and progress being made.

We need resolve, not the impulse to cut and run whenever we lose another soldier. We ought to read In Flanders' Fields and keep faith with those who have given the last full measure of devotion. We should understand that the measures advocated by jerks who second-guess the military, have been vetted, as all military options are, and there is a reason they weren't adopted. There will always be experts on the sidelines who would have used more troops, deployed them differently, or given Saddam more time, etc., but they aren't in command. Those who are bear a huge burden that the others don't. If strategy and tactics fail, there will be plenty of recriminations. Why start before we know whether they've succeeded or not?

Dealing with guerrilas is a tough problem, and we have yet to solve it completely, but that isn't a reason to run out on people who have trusted us. Sooner or later, we need to find a way to defeat these tactics and terrorism in general, because it is the strategy and tactic of the new enemy, and it will be used until we figure out how to defeat it. We should appreciate that the situation in Iraq is also an opportunity to work on the problem under real war conditions. The impulse to flinch and run is human, but it must not be allowed to control us. Each war teaches new things, but the media and the anti-war types are determined only to see Vietnam, which this is not. We are not fighting the last war. Our training and equipping of the Iraqi military and security forces and continually reminding them that we won't have their back forever--those are some of the lessons we learned in Vietnam. Another is that we have to affirmatively defeat the enemy, whether it be the Viet Cong, the NVA, the Baathists, Al Qaeda, Iran or Syria, and not just drive them back where they will regroupt, resupply and pick up more warriors and then come at us again.

We're still a superpower but without the consensus of our people and the resolve to see our fights to the end, our military power will be paralyzed and useless. We tolerate a determined chorus from our free press. There's nothing we can do about that but keep countering their deadly counsel and defeatist rhetoric with exhortations to have courage.

Those who demand instant withdrawal or dates certain for it, make no sense, except to people who didn't want us to be there in the first place and whose interpretation of Vietnam ignores the human disaster our abandonment of the South caused.

Arguments for sending in more troops has the disadvantage of making those we help cling to our military strength, yet resent our presence, as Germany does. It also makes for even more casualties from terrorist attacks and problems of force protection.

I have no military training or experience, but it seems to me that we are vulnerable to two things, the ability to kill our troops and destroy very expensive armaments with IEDs and cheap weapons, like RPGs, and, secondly, our inability to control of national borders to stop Iraq's meddling neighbors from sending men and materiel to aid the guerillas. We haven't been willing or able to control our own borders here at home, but we really need to figure out how to do it and we shouldn't give up in Iraq until we have figured it out. Fortunately, we don't necessarily have the same constraints in Iraq that we have here. We can shoot border crossers there. It will take better technology, but also new methods to stop the infiltration.

For example, what would happen if we had UAVs like Predator running constant surveillance of the borders and destroying anything and everything that breaches them unless it's identified as friendly? I mean besides the U.N. and the E.U. condemning the tactic. Wouldn't that force all traffic through the checkpoints we establish? Surely there would be horror stories of innocent Bedouins getting killed, but that should be acknowledged up front and getting the word out that those aircraft cannot and will not distinguish people on camels from people in motor vehicles or on foot.