PERSPECTIVE

Good piece...read it all.

Seven American soldiers died in Baghdad on Sunday because we failed to respond to last week's Fallujah attacks. Whatever our motives, we looked weak and indecisive. Additional enemies believed their moment had come.

In the Middle East, appearances are all.

Intelligence personnel are routinely warned to avoid mirror-imaging, assigning our values and psychology to an opponent. Imagining that our enemies think like us has cost us dearly in Iraq. The bill will go still higher...

Americans value compromise; our enemies view it as weakness. We're reluctant to use force. The terrorists and insurgents read that as cowardice...

On Sunday, in Baghdad, Kufa, Najaf and elsewhere, the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, bolstered by his militia, rioted and killed seven U.S. soldiers and two El Salvadoran peacekeepers. It should never have happened.

Sadr's militia should have been disarmed and disbanded in the earliest days of the occupation. Sadr himself should have been arrrested for his inflammatory preaching. But we were afraid to stir up trouble.

Now we face a much greater threat than we'd have faced had we acted firmly last year. We set a precedent of timidity.

Recently, we summoned the nerve to shut down Sadr's private newspaper for formenting trouble. But our reluctance to face down the man himself has been read locally as cowardice not tolerance.

Make no mistake: Just because we view restraint as a virtue does not mean our enemies share that view. The refusal to use our power in the face of defiance only makes defiance more attractive.

When U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest.