Why?

Usually I lay the morning newspapers on the "island" in the kitchen. The kids quickly go right to the comics section, and do not comment on any of the headlines. Today was different. First, Jon yelled, "What? Obama is bringing home all the troops from Iraq! Why is he doing that?" Later, Greg discovered the same headline and asked "Why? Is he surrendering to the terrorists?"

I told the boys it is always hard to know for sure why Obama is doing something, because we have learned that what he says and what he does are two different things. I told them I thought it might have something to do with Obama wanting to be reelected next November. The people who voted for him in 2008 liked it when he promised to end our involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now it will appear to those voters that he is following through on his promises.

In his book Known and Unknown Donald Rumsfeld points out that he thought America should have emphasized that the war was about freedom and liberation from the thug rule of Saddaam Hussein. Instead, Bush emphasized building democracy. Rumsfeld points out that in America women did not even get the right to vote until well into the twentieth century, and blacks were denied full guarantee of voting rights until 1964, not to mention enduring a long history of slavery, which was only abolished after a bloody civil war that saw hundreds of thousand of Americans killed. Iraq, according to Barack Obama, goes back to the "cradle of civilization," with no history of implementing democracy.

In the minds of boys, however, terrorists are to be fought and defeated. No ifs, ands, or buts.