Over Simplification

There's a new article from Ms. Suzanne Fields entitled, "It's the Context, Stupid." For the most part it's an article about how the Democrats running against President Bush don't understand that we are at war and are therefore traitorous monsters.

She does take a much more intellectual approach than others who have made the argument, but it falls to the same problem; she equates the entire anti war position as "the war in Iraq was bad because liberals don't like President Bush."

I'm not going to deny that President Bush is a polarizing figure on the left; but there's a bit more to the position of those who opposed the Iraq War and those who, today, think the president made the wrong call. It's hard to know what Kerry (or Gore) would have done differently as President, but it seems sure that he would not have pushed to invade Iraq on the same timetable as President Bush. It strikes me as probable that he would have continued the containment strategy, that at this moment seems to have been successful.

The oversimplification is the excluded middle. Suzanne Fields suggests that the two proposals are to either fight the war on terror in exactly the same way as President Bush or to do nothing. Unfortunately for Ms. Fields and President Bush, I suspect that most Americans are able to see that there are ways to fight terrorism without turning our allies against us (to take one example).