On August 17, 2009, President Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

“But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a — this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

This is either true or not true. If true, then winning the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to the defense of the homeland, and there can be no sacrifice too great. Because the last thing we want to be engaged in is a half-hearted, one foot in, one foot out, kind of war. If it is a war of necessity, then there is no question about giving the generals all the troops and equipment and support they need for as long as they need. America’s at war, dammit.

But David Brooks in this morning’s Times just blows past the basic question– do we need to win this war or not? Instead he dwells on Obama’s feelings and his level of determination. Brooks doesn’t believe Obama is really telling us the truth about how he feels about the war. He thinks the president needs to spend some quality time looking at himself in the mirror. “If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now.”

Actually, no. I don’t really care about President Obama’s feelings about the war. I care about his judgment. And if he says we must win this war, then we must win this war. If he’s changed his mind, then we need to have new goals articulated, and we need to achieve them. We can’t just increase or decrease troop levels depending on the president’s serotonin levels.

I do want to know more about what the President means when he says “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” I thought most of those plotters died in the attack, or have been caught or killed since, with the significant exception of Osama bin Laden himself. (How is it that this lunatic, flitting from cave to cave, supposedly on and off dialysis, under constant surveillance from our hundreds of millions of dollars of drones that cruise the area, is able to survive while the comparable uninsured American, during the same time period, has probably suffered the fatal consequences of our patchwork health-care system? Just asking.)

And I’m troubled about the basis for Tom Friedman’s judgment that we really don’t need to win the Afghan war. In the first place, Friedman was such a great champion for the Iraq pre-emptive war and then for repeatedly calling for staying the course “just another six months” that in many circles, six months is now simply referred to as a Friedman Unit. (At last count, the Iraq war, from March 19, 2003 to now has required 19 Friedman Units, soon to be a smooth 20 to 1 error in judgment.)

Now we have a new Friedman measure of progress in the world, from a column this week. Progress is now to be measured by “when a key player in the Middle East actually does something that puts a smile on my face.” Oh Oracle of Delphi, how far we’ve fallen! Somehow the idea that I’m going to be spending the rest of my life peering into that Friedman mustache trying to find traces of a smile makes me, how to put this delicately, have flashes of driving the big white bus.

Friedman blows past the basic question of whether or not we must win this war to keep America safe. Friedman gets the big questions completely backward: the real question seems to be not must we win, but how hard will it be to win: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.” So under Friedman’s logic we wind down the Afghan war even it means the possible destruction of America. Since it’s too hard to win. Gee, Tom. WWII was hard, too.

And that kind of logic ought to be enough to lower everyone’s serotonin levels.