Hey, Raise Our Taxes!

Apart from running with the most ironic headline you can run about the war on terror (Return of the Living Dead fans, back me up), this editorial at the newly-redesigned New York Post is notable for its pioneering pro-war Bush-bashing.

True, Bush has spoken of sacrifice: "Wars are not won without sacrifice," he said last year, "and this war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve. The terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we have ever faced . . . . No one should underestimate the difficulties ahead." Yet the president has never held most Americans to that. Never asked them to step up and support the men and women who are fighting the nation's battles—by providing sufficient tax dollars.

Are tax hikes inevitable?

No.

There ought to be something to cut in a nearly $3 trillion federal budget.

But if tax hikes are necessary, then so be it. Tax hikes it must be.

Plenty of war supporters (not so many that I can find a link right now) have suggested that some of Bush's negative numbers are not related to the Iraq War merely going poorly and we should get out; some of those "disapprove" numbers are conservatives who don't think Bush is fighting hard enough. But there might be a macro effect from what the Post is groaning about—an intellectual disconnect between voters and the war, who feel no connection to the U.S.'s efforts and are not asked to sacrifice anything to win it. This worked fine when voters thought the Iraq war would be another coupla-weeks-of-bombing-and-we-win affair. But when the grinding war is spun as a historic struggle that we must win or get absorbed into the new, improved Caliphate, if voters aren't actually asked to sacrifice anything, they simply get annoyed.