Bush Says Iraq is Testing America's Will [Yahoo!] (mods, if this shouldn't be it's own thread, please merge it) To me, this situation "testing America's will" is like putting your hand on a hot stove and seeing how long you can keep it there, all the while knowing you will be suffering pain for some time afterward, and that your hand will be scarred for the rest of your life.
Which makes no sense at all, unless, of course, you have a Revered Mother saying to you "Stop! I hold at your neck the gom jabbar. The gom jabbar, the high-handed enemy. It's a needle with a drop of poison on its tip. Ah-ah! Don't pull away or you'll feel that poison..."
If we had some clear objectives that we wished to achieve and a coherent strategy for achieving those objectives, then maybe Bush would have a point about this being a temporary challenge to our national will to see a finite project through to completion. Unfortunately for Bush, while VietNam analogies can be overstretched, Iraq is coming to resemble the open ended and nebulous VietNam more than it does WW2. We are trying to occupy a nation where the population that clearly does not want us there and has the will to resist while our leaders try to shoehorn reality into their narrow ideological framework and cast about vainly for an ideologically acceptable strategy to deal with their lack of clear, reasonable objectives.