EDITOR'S LETTER

The Forgotten War

Excuse me, but what ever happened to the war in Iraq? You remember it, surely. You must— it's still going on. It is the war that has taken the lives of more than 1,550 U.S. troops and an estimated 20,000 Iraqi civilians, and caused life-altering injuries to more than 6,000 other American soldiers and countless more Iraqis. It is the "self-financing" war that has cost the U.S. upwards of $ 165 billion and contributed to a 23 percent increase in the price of gas since we invaded Baghdad. It is the war that divided our nation, earned the mistrust and animosity of many of our allies and neighbors, and established Iraq as ground zero for further terrorist recruitment. It is the war that was not mentioned once in President Bush's 21-minute 2005 inaugural address. And it is the war now buried back around page A12 of The New York Times and relegated to the "Iraq Watch" ghetto on the NBC Nightly News, sometimes trailing the health update.

The war is not gone, but, in this land of serial obsessives, it is forgotten. Iraq has been canceled; its 15 minutes are up; it's so last year. Six months ago we re-elected a president who ran on the issues of national security, the global war on terrorism, and that all-purpose right-wing truncheon moral values. So what does the president focus on as soon as he's sworn in? Social Security—about as unpressing an issue as you can choose at a time of war, looming environmental crisis, and ongoing terrorist threat. The rest of Washington turned out to be no better, dropping just about everything in order to confront that other urgent national emergency: steroid use in professional baseball. And what did Americans do—they went along with it.

For the more than a quarter of a million brave American souls whom we have sent over there to do our blood work, the war is anything but over. It may have disappeared from the corridors of power and the front pages of the nation's newspapers, but in Iraq, in brutal heat and living conditions, the conflict grinds on, hour after horrific hour. During the month of March, when the nation's politicians and news media gorged themselves on the death throes of poor Terri Schiavo, 32 more U.S. troops were killed in Iraq, and 362 were wounded. The truth is, we just don't have the stomach or the attention span for war the way we used to. Which means we should probably get out of the business.

Republicans have proved themselves If so adept at campaigning that it I m seems as though they are playing chess while the Democrats fiddle away at checkers. And, as Michael Wolff points out in his superb column this month ("No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal," page 106), the Republicans are having more fun, too. It's almost not fair. In fact, the time may have come to consider handicapping federal elections the way it's done in golf. Karl Rove, the Tiger Woods of American politics, a scratch warrior with admirers on both sides of the red-state/ blue-state divide, has not only created in the eyes of American voters a hardened image of Democrats as amoral wusses but is also sending out envoys to tamper with his opponents' selection process for the next presidential election. Deploying that old warhorse Newt Gingrich to preach the virtues of a Hillary Clinton candidacy, and tout her winnability, was a devilish tactic. And the Democrats, judging by their response, appear to be dumb enough to have fallen for it. You've got to give Republicans credit: they stay focused on their political wars. It's the real wars they forget about.

GRAYDON CARTER