Opinion (Terence Samuel): And now, the war on failure

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace

The war on terror is now the war on failure. If you listen to President Bush, it seems clear that avoiding failure has become his bottom-line consideration for continuing to prosecute the war in Iraq. No more weapons of mass destruction; no more avenging 9/11, or fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here; no more establishing a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Now we just can’t fail.

"Whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure,” the president cautioned the Congress in his State of the Union. But the American people now think that they did just that in 2004: Polls show that a majority think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and almost two-thirds disapprove of the way the president is handling his job. And, of course, there were those November election results.

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