A New Questioning of the War

WATERLOO, Iowa -- Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, visiting here in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, was making points with the 10 party activists who joined him for coffee the other morning at the Country Kitchen cafe.

He had been asked where he would find fault with President Bush, and he replied, "As far as domestic policy is concerned, I can't think of anything he's done that I agree with." He ticked off a list of Bush "outrages," ranging from an education bill he called the "largest unfunded mandate in history" to Bush's "appointment of ideologues to the courts." Heads were nodding in agreement.

And then he added, almost as a throwaway line, "I think he's done a good job on the war on terrorism."

"Are you sure?" responded Vi Neil, a veteran Democratic worker and the wife of Dave Neil, the head of the United Auto Workers in Iowa. "A lot of us think we are wasting a lot of money on trying to find the guy with the beard [Osama bin Laden]. We have to find a new way to fight terrorism."

Taken aback, Dean said, "I don't agree with that," adding that he believed that the United States had to strike back against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and arguing that it is not the war, but the Bush tax cut, that has pushed the budget back into deficit.

The exchange brought vividly into focus for me a realization that was slowly dawning during a two-week swing that took me from Madison, Wis., to Lansing, Mich., to San Francisco and finally to Des Moines, Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Much of my time was spent with Democrats, ranging from a mayors' convention to interviews with candidates for legislative and statewide office in all four states. And what I heard convinces me that the nine-month moratorium on dissent from Bush's war on terrorism is coming to an end.