But can our country, now of all times, afford to run itself like a high-school debating society? As a nation acting upon the world stage, and within our own borders too, we're playing for keeps -- no do-overs permitted. And yes, we're growing ever closer to Election Day 2003 and the "big one" in '04. Major decisions and choices must be made, and made correctly.

A quick digression to explain my stance: Fuzzy logic is a form of artificial intelligence, a respected part of math and computer science. Faulty logic is more like a bug in your software -- or an assertion that, on closer look, falls apart through inconsistencies or over-optimistic leaps of faith.

Now let's get specific. Below are four sentiments I've seen in print that deserve some modification or refuting. I'll try to be nonpartisan; my patriotism will go undisguised. In quotes, distilled to their essence, we'll take the items one by one.

1. "The American military is so massive and invincible that we don't actually need it anymore."

This justification for neo-pacifism -- big defense cuts -- gets more odd the more you read it. Because we liberated a Third World country (Iraq) from a dictator who had no navy or air force to speak of, the whole globe now cowers in fear of us? And since they fear us so very much, we can now stop having a big military ourselves? Machiavelli did say a long time ago that it's better to be feared than loved. But Jacques Chirac said much more recently that "Old Europe" needs to bond and create a unified armed-forces command, specifically to challenge America's might. Frankly (no pun intended on General Franks or on Francophiles), I think the sense or nonsense of Item 1 speaks for itself.

2. "Modern U.S. weapons technology has given our military the ability to strike effectively, with low friendly losses and low collateral damage, to a degree never seen before in history."

While this is true, we shouldn't get carried away. Yes, it was a tremendous breakthrough that going from a "Saddam sighting" to a smart-bomb attack was accomplished in mere minutes when such a thing would once take hours or days -- and thus be way too late. And yes, skillful electronic psy-ops and computer information warfare, and robotic reconnaissance drones, powerfully leveraged our main line formations. But full fledged network-centric warfare, this total real-time fusion of battlefield data at all levels, is still in its infancy. Else, why would a maintenance convoy take a wrong turn on a road in the dark and wander into an ambush, producing some dozen tragic KIAs, WIAs, and POWs? Why would the Patriot missile system shoot down a friendly plane or two? And, with all due respect to the Pentagon, the State Department, the defense contractors, and all our intelligence services, how come we still don't know for sure if Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are dead or alive?

3. "America is being misled by our own distorted secular Creation Myth. Since the days of our Founding Fathers, we have grown our nation by violent conquest, in other words, imperialism. The current Administration continues to do so, striving to found a New Empire. They just won't admit it aloud."

I'm the first to concede that grade-school versions of American history leave out many unpleasant facts. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves... A U.S. Army general intentionally gave blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans... McCarthyism -- our country's closest thing to the Spanish Inquisition -- thrived at the same time the Cold War ramped up, when we were supposedly fighting (yet again) to make the world safe for democracy. All this sound more than a bit hypocritical? It certainly does to me. But as I've said in my own column here before, real history is ugly. Some of our former wartime presidents, proclaimed in grade school to be among our greatest national leaders -- I mean Lincoln (at least in the Northern states) and FDR -- were utterly ruthless politicians behind the scenes. They rarely hesitated to manipulate or deceive the public on grounds of "national security."

To me, it's largely an academic (and moot?) exercise to complain about a war afterward, on the grounds that the reasons given for starting that war only now appear flawed. Whether or not Saddam actually held weapons of mass destruction right before Operation Iraqi Freedom, his willingness to use WMDs was already amply proven, and his eagerness to get more seemed very real. Intelligence estimates are by their nature incomplete, politicized, fragmented, and often contradictory; they're infamous for missing surprise attacks. With WMDs, we can't afford even one surprise attack. Israel knew this twenty years ago, when they bombed Saddam's French-built Osiraq reactor before the fuel rods could be installed! (To the motivations and intentions of terror-mongers like Saddam or bin Laden -- and therefore from an evidentiary standard too -- twenty years is as relevant as yesterday.)

Recall the saying, "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," from about a hundred years ago. The premise was that a U.S. Navy battleship blew up while visiting Cuba -- then a possession of Spain -- because of a USS Cole-like attack with a mine by Spanish agents. This gave the excuse for us to launch the Spanish-American War. After a couple of decisive naval clashes half a world apart, and a charge up San Juan Hill by Teddy Roosevelt, the U.S. suddenly owned the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and some other nice real estate. American imperialism? I'd have to say yes. Just cause for the war? In retrospect I have to say no. Modern research mostly indicates the deadly explosion on the Maine was caused by a coal-bunker fire too close to an ammunition magazine within the ship -- it was all a tragic accident. So do we now intend to give Guam and Puerto Rico back to Spain, our staunch ally in Gulf War II? Not that I know of. Welcome to realpolitik (German for "realistic politics").

I did promise to be balanced and nonpartisan. So, room for one more thing.

4. "American troops are better than ever at transitioning from war to peace, and maintaining order against the inevitable dissidents who emerge when main combat stops."

Alas, if only "better than ever" could change to "perfect." Photos of Iraqi demonstrators confronting American tanks and throwing stones, with accounts of actual and alleged civilian Iraqi deaths caused by our troops opening fire in self-defense, appear in our daily newspapers right now. There's a genuine, painful mini-crisis here, but there's a solution on the way too: a new generation of non-lethal weapons for crowd control, when the crowds contain "embedded" enemy sniper/agitators, or armed local citizens who from their point of view sincerely feel wronged. It's too bad the tech just isn't ready in the field quite yet. In the meantime, it's a people problem: Maybe our troops need improved training in post-combat-phase fire discipline, more polished friend-making skills with the locals (the Brits I think can teach us a lot), and shrewder Special Forces black ops to halt those hostile agitators and shooters before they have a chance to shed additional innocent blood. For leadership on this, we and our troops need to look to the Pentagon, the Congress, and the White House.

Ultimately, that means we should look to (and at) ourselves -- the American public. Discourse going forward needs to be founded on reason, not rhetoric. Illusions of complacent invincibility, or unchecked domestic moral outrage, could both be very dangerous, even lethal, to our personal safety and global peace. The stakes for all of us and for the rest of the world are much too high to let ourselves get mired in twisted illogic, sourced either from well-meaning folks at home or from our various critics abroad.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com