Editorials from The Roanoke Times-A dubious exercise as the inept wage war: "President Bush should abandon his vacation and head to Brook Park, Ohio, and attend the military funerals of those Marines. He should see, and allow the public to see, the flag-draped coffins of just a few of the 1,828 service men and women killed in Iraq.

When he rises to eulogize those Marines, he needs to tell America again exactly why he sent them to fight.

He can explain the strategic decisions that failed to quell rebel factions intent on blowing up members of Iraq's congress, U.S. military personnel and Iraqi children.

He can talk about the blunder made in disbanding Iraq's army and the incompetence in fusing together an inept, partly corrupt police force that he just decided last month needs more hands-on guidance and training.

The president can then speak of the democracy that the Iraqi people would embrace if granted self-determination, and how that meshes with their determination and their nature to form a government in which Islamic clerics will be invested with supreme power. Or how the envisioned pluralistic society that offers freedom and equal protection to all its citizens will fade when women, by law, become subservient.

When Bush finishes explaining all this to the families of the fallen Marines, he can return to Crawford and conjure more rhetoric that runs antithetical to all that has yet occurred."

(Via Martini Republic.)