Hmmmm, I may end up being in a far worse position than you come election time.

Jeff, I appreciate your ability to get past my hefty dose of wise-ass W mockery. What you have to say here I find quite illuminating.

I supported going into Iraq from day one, and I never thought WMDs were the real issue. I thought Saddam was evil and his regime needed to be stopped. Because of this, I’m glad we went into Iraq.

An evil guy certainly, but when we start to think about "needs to be stopped' I wonder why we aren't presently landing Marines in the Congo. It'll be interesting to revisit this every few months to see what the condition of average folks in Iraq is like...

My uncle is a USMC officer and he sends emails back regularly to family back home, and he has been very supportive of the effort and feels that he and his company were doing the right, upstanding thing.

Key word is "officer". I have no doubt that there are many military in Iraq right now across all ranks who believe in the mission and are still pleased and proud to be there. In general, though, officers and senior NCOs have the job of convincing the rest of the troops that the cause is just, thoughtful, and worthwhile and that their morale should remain high. That morale maintenence effort won't succeed for too long among the privates and corporals unless there are some signs that they are welcomed rather than resented. Never mind the prospect of getting shot and killed by people who pretend to ask for your help. Other than being generally unpleasant, I don't know what the daily relationship is like between troops and Iraqis is like, but it doesn't sound very good.

I’ve also been a strong Bush supporter, and being very conservative I’ve agreed with a lot of his stances on various issues. Though I’ve been frustrated at times with some of his political maneuvering, I’ve come to grips with the fact that any politician is going to have to embrace political strategy, even if it frustrates me a lot of the time.

However, I am beginning to feel lied to, and that is not a good thing. I still don’t think Bush went into Iraq to fulfill some “manifest destiny” concept, but it’s sure hard to have faith in what he says if he talked about having “hardcore evidence” and it turns out it was all very speculative. Again, I supported the war effort, and I think it was the right thing to do. But if Bush and his people had to manipulate or overlook information to get us to buy into his plan, that makes his administration untrustworthy. I suppose I’m mostly just naïve about politics, but I believe in honesty and integrity, and I fear to say that these traits seem to be lacking. Perhaps I’m getting a wrong sense from all the information that I’ve seen (which is very little), but at what point do I ask if perhaps we were lied to?

That is my dilemma. I don’t want a liberal in office (sorry guys, I just don’t agree with your views), but I don’t really feel good about voting for a dishonest republican either, especially one I’ve stood up for time and time again and now am feeling betrayed by.

Like I said, I find this illuminating. While there is a lot that we would disagree about, I appreciate that you have a very principled, consistent approach to all of this. This fact that you have questions about Bush at this point I find both 1) very interesting and 2) healthy.

It's hard to know how far to push arguments about the motives of Bush/Cheney without treading into conspiracy territory that detracts from credibility, but the administration has no credibility with me. Their primary interests are in feeding the wealthy, they expose basic contempt of government and democracy, they are very arrogant, and, when it comes to foreign policy, they are directly influenced by far-right hawk philosophy.

I just finished reading John "Rick" MacArthur's Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Pretty readable. Only about 200 pages. I expect, unfortunately, that MacArthur is presently gathering material for a sequel. MacArthur is publisher of that wonderful liberal magazine, Harper's wherein the vocally anti-war Lewis Lapham offers a few quotes this month's issue that I had never seen before:

"All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. it works the same in every country"

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"

This latter quote is from a contemporary quarter that I think could be argued has some influence with the current administration. It's from Michael Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

The former quote? Harder to draw a connection. Hermann Goring.