Misreading a battle

THE BLOODIEST US battle of World War II was on the mind of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, when he defended President Bush's Iraq policy over the weekend. The comparison doesn't fit. Americans were united behind a common policy in World War II, and the administration needs to acknowledge that its war in Iraq has confused and divided the country.

``The president understands people's impatience -- not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation," Snow said on CNN. ``He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, `Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?' "

A massive German offensive surprised the US First Army in Belgium on Dec. 16, 1944. But General George Patton's army moved up from the south, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's forces counterattacked from the north. Nineteen-thousand Americans died -- the worst American toll of the war -- as the allied armies thwarted Hitler's last attempt to avoid defeat. Nobody had to take a poll during that battle; it was over in a month.

Perhaps Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader in the House, started Snow thinking about the battle when she mentioned her uncle, who was one of those 19,000. The country that Johnny D'Alessandro, her uncle, defended knew that victory was assured despite the temporary setback in Europe. One cannot say the same for Americans today as the Iraq war grinds on.

Pelosi was speaking against an administration-supported resolution that expressed support for President Bush's conduct of the war. The Democrats have difficulty uniting behind an alternative to the Bush war policy. But the debate over the war is cheapened by the administration's insistence that anything less than full support is synonymous with ``cut and run." The savagery of the Iraqi resistance was shown by the murder of two US soldiers this week, but it is not a threat to the United States on par with the Nazis, who controlled most of Europe.

``This is a war unlike any other because we are dealing not with a national force where you can count your victories in terms of winning on the battlefield," Snow said on CBS. ``There's no Battle of the Bulge . . . there's no marching into Berlin. Instead, what you have is an amorphous enemy." Indeed it is, and Americans need to know how long Bush expects the troops to face this difficult foe.

The election campaign this year ought to be dominated not by the faux patriotism of 2002 and 2004, but by a debate free of demagoguery over how to extract US troops without leaving Iraq in chaos. The Battle of the Bulge, bloody and hard-fought, was far less complicated than the ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological divisions exposed by the conflict in Iraq.