Christian Science Monitor
by Philip Gold

11/28/05

There is a process in American political life by which the unthinkable becomes the inevitable and the inevitable becomes, inevitably, a big mess. Central to this process is a peculiarly American inability to ask, let alone answer, the vital questions of any endeavor: an inability empowered by that peculiarly American attitude, 'We don't have to understand the world, we only need to know about us.' This is how we got into Vietnam. This is how we left. This is how we got into Iraq. It would be tragic, were we to leave the same way. In the spring of 2002, a year before the event, I became one of America's first conservatives to oppose the Iraq war. I did so for so many hard military, political, and economic reasons that they amounted to a moral reason...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1128/p09s01-coop.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp