Well, we're back to calling each other names now, are we? I will not do that to any of you, and I hope you will not do it to me.

For the record, since I voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, I don't think I meet anyone's definition of a "Bushite." Gore was not a player by the time we went to war in 2003; Kerry was, and he supported the decision. It is possible to have real objections to how Bush has done his job, and still believe that we needed to take military action in Iraq. That's where I am at, and I have a lot of company.

War is an ugly business, Amos; there's no denying it. The only legitimate justification for war is to prevent something worse. The belief that a lot of us had when we supported going to war was that there was a worse outcome likely if we did not depose Saddam; and since deposing him through either assassination or promotion of an internal uprising was not feasible. Hence, military action was necessary.

I wish our current President had been more artful in how he went about it, in working more closely with prospective allies to form a more broad-based coalition that would have had greater claims to legitimacy (probably outside of UN auspices, as the UN was and is clearly a dysfunctional agency), and in paying more attention to how one fights the type of war that we were obviously getting into, where the real test comes after the initial large-scale assault has captured territory. There is much to criticize about how this was handled, and I am not shy about doing so.

But I continue to believe that the status quo before the war was unacceptable, and military action was necessary. That doesn't make me a "Bushite," an "Osamaite," or any kind of "ite," in fact. It just means that I am a thinking person who believes that war is neither always necessary, nor is it never necessary.