Shades of gray in Basra

In the painful years since 9/11, President Bush has sought to provide Americans with a morally coherent narrative to explain our two long wars and other costly foreign involvements. And although the probity of the Iraq war has been widely debated, most Americans have agreed that we must fight radical Islamist movements that use terror and seek to humiliate and defeat the United States. Many have grudgingly accepted the five-year-plus U.S. military operation in Iraq because the president told them we had to keep foreign Al Qaeda fighters and meddling Iranians from destabilizing the elected Iraqi government.

April 1, 2008