Oct. 29, 2006
 
EDITORIAL: This Election is About National Character
 
Albuquerque Tribune
 
With poll after poll showing Democrats apparently on their way to reclaiming control of Congress, it's still hard to be optimistic.
 
After all, there were similar polls in 2000 and 2004. The better man did not end up in the Oval Office. The nation has suffered.
 
There also were the congressional elections in 2002, when Americans chose to consolidate Republican rule rather than elect a Democratic counterweight to what was -- even then -- a rogue White House.
 
Each of these, it turns out in retrospect, was a substantial fork in the country's road. Votes mattered. Many were cast mostly out of 9/11 fears and hyped national security, but also because of an illusion of prosperity. The reality: record debt for our kids' kids.
 
Issues like the health-care crisis, immigration and global warming were sidelined by a do-nothing Congress.
 
The same strategy is in play for Nov. 7. But polls suggest it is backfiring, that the costly Iraq war -- and more generally a failed national security policy -- is the dominant national issue.
 
Still, there is talk of an "October surprise," presumably in which the Bush administration again plays the fear card. How many times, I wonder, will American voters allow the Oval Office to cry wolf?
 
In the bright, awful Iraqi light, it is not about "cut and run," as some die-hard Republicans would have you believe. It's not about "stay the course," as even President Bush has been forced to concede.
 
It's about who we are, who we intend to be and the legacy we leave our children. In this regard, Iraq is our deepest wound.
 
Aside from the heavy cost in American lives -- nearing 3,000 -- and resources projected ultimately at $1 trillion, it is a war most of us now know should never have been fought. It defies who we are as a people. It cuts our very soul. It hurts.
 
It is more than most of us can bear to know that American forces, acting in our name, have:
 
Led to the deaths of between 400,000 and 900,000 Iraqis, depending on whose numbers you believe. A recent study by medical researchers at Johns Hopkins University pegs the number at 655,000. For what?
 
Tortured hundreds of people at our base in Cuba, at secret CIA prisons and at military prisons, most notoriously Abu Ghraib in Iraq. For what?
 
In isolated Iraqi cases, callously murdered innocent civilians. For what?
 
By the government's own recent analysis, created an environment favoring terrorist recruitment and training in Iraq. For what?
 
In this context, this election is about national character -- honor, accountability, contrition, reparations, healing and resolving to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
 
Most importantly, it is about Americans battling terrorists not on their terms but on ours; and about a free people defending, not imposing, freedom.