"WARS ARE NOT CHOREOGRAPHED"

Some perspective on 5 months into this effort.

To anyone old enough to remember World War II, this is all a painful reminder of how much our country — or at least the press — has declined since those days. Although this was a deeply divided country before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that wake-up call woke everybody up.

Organizations that had been striving to keep us out of the war suddenly disbanded. They didn't stay in business to carp.

Where were we five months after Pearl Harbor, compared with where we are today in Iraq? We entered World War II — or, rather, the war came to us — on December 7, 1941. Five months later, on May 7, 1942, where were we?

We had no real victories in all that time. On May 6, 1942, we suffered a devastating defeat with the surrender of U.S. forces in the Philippines. This was followed by the infamous Bataan death march, in which many American and other prisoners of war lost their lives, either to the inhuman conditions or by being brutally executed by the Japanese when they fell from exhaustion...

Through all the years-long, uphill struggle of World War II, you seldom heard the phrase "war-weary" soldiers that has already become common in some media quarters during the five months of the Iraq war.

No one demanded that President Franklin Roosevelt tell them how long World War II was going to last or how much money it would cost, or what his "exit strategy" was. It would have been considered not only unpatriotic, but absolutely childish, to do so. Wars are not choreographed.