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Were you listening to President Bush in the days after September 11 when we were trying to figure out how to respond to our enemy? Did you pay attention when we sent troops to Afghanistan the first time to seek and destroy Al Qaeda? If so, then nothing the president said this week is really news. He has been honest with us about the likely duration of this conflict from the beginning.

We are currently engaged with the terrorists in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. In the future we may need to engage this enemy on additional fronts. We are not fighting a nationalist political war; we are fighting terrorism which can crop up anywhere. We are not fighting a war which will end with the signing of a treaty in a setting like the battleship Missouri. This war will not be made up of long campaigns where progress can be mapped toward a physical objective. This war is not a battle against uniformed military combatants; it is a series of battles in which the combatants on the other side will look just like the other people in the street.

The problem with this sort of war and this sort of conflict is that it isn't easy to define where we are relative to victory. We can defeat this enemy, but we can't do it if we insist that he doesn't exist unless he is uniformed and fighting according to the rules. The terrorists who hijacked airplanes and made them into attack missiles were not in uniform, they represented no political entity, and they followed nobody's rules of engagement. It will be a challenge for us to be true to the principles we live by in our civilization when we are fighting people who don't share our principles. Our enemy not only has no regard for the lives of our military troops. Our enemy has no regard for anyone in the way of his objective. The objective of our enemy is to do away with western civilization and everyone who believes in it.

This war won't be over in the fall. This war won't be over in the summer of 2008. This war won't be over when the president elected in 2008 is up for re-election. If the war is over before that date, then there won't be any election, because the USA will not exist any more.

This is the kind of war we are in whether we like it or not. President Bush keeps trying to tell us the truth, but a lot of people who don't like war think they can make it go away by not liking it. That won't happen.

Thursday night the president told the truth about the war. Anybody has the right not to like the truth, but nobody can change the truth. If we quit fighting this enemy, then the enemy will destroy us. That is what the president said, and we need to listen to him.

Learn more about this author, Katherine Harms.
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