WASHINGTON: The third or fourth time I heard Vice-President Cheney tell Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday that Al Qaeda was gambling that the United States “doesn’t have the stomach” to keep up the fight in Iraq, it crossed my mind that Cheney may be staring at the wrong part of the national anatomy.

The question, really, is not whether we have the stomach for the fight but the brains to figure out what to do in Iraq.

The vice-president’s effort to reduce it to a question of courage – to suggest that those who want to expand the war are braver than those urging steps to limit it – is a standard rhetorical trick. Whenever any Bush policy is questioned, someone from the administration almost automatically charges that its critics are soft on terrorism.

Iraq requires thought, not just gut instinct, because we are struggling with a situation we’ve never faced before. What does America really know about how to deal with a Shia-Sunni civil war in a land devastated by years of dictatorship, damaged by invasion, infiltrated by terrorists and surrounded by countries with their own territorial ambitions? Not much, which is why it behooves us to move with caution.

The most serious thinking, inside and outside the administration, concluded that it is fundamentally up to the government in Baghdad to curb the militias controlled by rival Sunni and Shia clans. President Bush says the Iraqis can’t do it alone, so he is sending more troops, 20,000 of them, to help Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his forces.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service