"A good friend recently told me that he supports the war in silence."

I'm among that set, and I try to hold my tongue on most other issues of the day, outside of blog comments.

When I was visiting the Soviet Union in 1974, I noticed the same sense of self-preservation. Everyone was very nice; no one said anything controversial outside of criticizing capitalism and the United States.

This is a real congenial society the progs are building.

"Part of the reason is because they have already heard too much, and they are tired of being scolded in a partisan manner if they so much as utter a war related thought."

* * *

A good friend recently told me that he supports the war in silence."

I can relate to this.

I support the war. Adamantly. Vocally. That doesn't mean I don't have reservations about its prosecution, or how we are now involved in it in the first place - I do.

But, that, right there, is a statement that is guaranteed to receive flak. Not because of the specifics (who has time to pay attention to those?), but because its not the partisan rhetoric coming out of either side.

What's a guy to do?

Hey,

I find myself having to just stay silent. Most of my friends have swallowed the Kool-Aid about the war.

So, I simply read the 'net, absorb the news of the day, and understand that it's going to take the media incontrovertible evidence to bring it kicking and screaming for an update, and honestly report what is going on. We have already seen the beginnings of this.

I think they will have to, in the end. However much it will give them ulcers and piles, there are simply too many sources of news for them to ignore. Mr. Yon and Mr. Trotten, Mr. Roggio, among others, are reaching a more critical mass of readers, and their stories simply cannot be ignored.

FYI: Michael Yon has proposed an invitation for the majority of newspaper publishers to run his commentaries and photographs in Iraq. Go to his site and support his initiative.

This could be something really valuable, but it will take you to help him make it become a reality.

At dinner a year or so ago, I had some friends that were complaining about the President no allowing federal money to be used for fetal stem cell research. I could be convinced either way on this, but understand both sides.

I explained to them the President's position and how the ban was limited to new cell cultures and how state money and private money could still be used.

They both were surprised and although disagreeing with his position could understand why he felt that way. The biggest emotion was that felt let down by the media for not doing their job.

Before Iraqi Campaign started, I read _The Threatening Storm_. I was more informed than anyone else I knew. They seem to think that in a 15 minute speech, that the President can lay out the subtle arguments for a complex issue that took Pollack an entire book.

I haven't given up the fight. I'll be quiet when better men and women than me are done overseas keeping me safe.

I just do not believe you'd ever hear it in the "mainstream" media if GWB tried to tell us how things are going in Iraq. He could talk until he was blue and it wouldn't get past the conservative blogs unless they believed they could mock him or make him look dishonest. I become more certain of that with each day.

You're hearing about the "relevant" comment only because they mock.

I get really irritated when I hear the term "war weary". What the hell have we to be weart fir? What have we given up or sacrificed? The only people who have given up anything have been the soldiers, their families, and friends and loved ones. Otherwise, we have sat here and been content to listen as the trials and tribulations of Brittany and OJ take over the airwaves for a few days. Watch "The War" and then tell me again about how tired you are of hearing about this stuff in Iraq. You gave up sugar, gas, tires; saved fat from cooking. There isn't a single thing that any of us have given up that should make us "war weary!"

Just to add to NDGirl's points, if you are feeling war weary, regardless of your position on the war, one way to fight it is to support the troops by giving to charities such as soldier's angels. You will be pleasantly surprised how good it makes you feel.

"What have we given up or sacrificed?"

Actually, there are some sacrifices we could make:

1. Stop bitching about high oil prices, you selfish twits!

2. Contribute to America's success in the war by keeping one's dissent measured and fair, and vocally and clearly criticizing the enemy when he tries to glom onto your position.

3. Cease questioning the legitimacy of close elections.

4. Prove we really are about individual liberty by eschewing new laws to punish your fellow citizens.

That's for starters. Too onerous? Shame on you.

I worry that Beej is right: it's true Bush hasn't done enough to explain his policies and defend them, but then he may have concluded that it's not going to help even if he does, so why waste the energy and time? (Given the prevalence of BDS, it's not unreasonable to suspect that if he articulated a case, it would actually hurt the war effort. I'll leave aside the larger implications of that, but it is plausible.)

Bush has given three major speeches in which he outlined both the overall strategy of the war and the specific reasons for invading Iraq and treating it as a major theater: the 2002 speech at West Point, the February 2003 speech at AEI, and the 2003 SotU. I do not think I've ever seen these referenced in mainstream media analysis and commentary. During the period a couple of years ago when the pravda was "Democratization is a brand-new justification for the invasion, and originally it was all about WMDs!", I kept waiting for someone to point out that democratization had been identified as the major strategic means of winning the war - not just the Iraqi theater, but the war itself - back in 2002. Nothing. Crickets chirping. You wouldn't think it would be easy to throw a State of the Union down the memory hole, but our press managed it.

So I have a hard time believing it would make a difference to these self-same people if Bush were out there every day explaining anew. La-la-la-la-la I can't HEAR you!

Back in the days of the Vietnam War we at home received gobs of information from the front about firefights, firebases, casualties suffered,
helicopters shot down, the dollar cost, and various other aspects of the war. These were interspersed with comments from experts supporting or opposing (usually, opposing) the war, and (in the later years) comments from war veterans supporting or opposing (usually, opposing) the war. There was plenty of information presented (a lot of it untrue) and absolutely no way for people here to make sense of that information; i.e. there was no way for people to judge, on their own, whether the war was being won or lost.
Iraq is a different war than Vietnam, but I agree that a similar kind of "information fatigue" is taking place today. There are military bloggers from Iraq insisting that progress is being made, while other soldiers show up in the N.Y. Times and insist that no progress is being made; this difference of opinion is echoed by hundreds of scholars, politicoes, and pundits throughout the media and the internet.
As in Vietnam, there is no way for we, the people, to form a realistic opinion about the war; the only thing certain is that our casualty figures continue to go up. In the Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish War, World Wars I and II, a person could follow the events on a map and have some way of knowing if the war was going well or not. This was not true in Vietnam and it is not true now.
Neither the President nor any of his advisers has yet come out with a realistic description of how a counterinsurgency war is fought and how it can be won (or lost). This is obviously far more difficult than describing the conventional wars I cited above, but it can be done he can recuit some of the milbloggers for this), and it would give us some realistic way to judge the war's progress (the President could also describe, in a grownup way, the political situation in Iraq). Until we have some realistic war goals (i.e. that would justify a declaration of war), the information we receive from Iraq will do nothing but cloud the issue.

"In the Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish War, World Wars I and II, a person could follow the events on a map and have some way of knowing if the war was going well or not. This was not true in Vietnam and it is not true now."

Actually, there is--just not the same sort of maps relied upon during past wars of maneuver. His name escapes me at the moment, but a French officer during the Algerian War developed a "counterinsurgency" map involving red, white and pink zones, depending upon the enemy's influence in a given area at a given time.

This model significantly informed and influenced the counterinsurgency strategy employed by General Petraus, and it's producing results--Google "Anbar Awakening". All over Iraq red real estate is going pink to white as Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army lose popular support. This is not as easy to follow as Sherman's March, but it could well be just as inexorable.

I'd hazard a guess that the campaign (there is no "Iraq War"--that's a fiction of a press pining for Vietnam)in Iraq has primarily been won. What we may be seeing is "battlefield shaping" for a pending conflict with Iran and/or Syria, both of whom must eventually be dealt with....