"Don't you think it emboldens the enemy…?"

This was the rhetorical question that conservatives would ask in response to anyone's criticism of President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. After all, the reasoning went, people on the other side of the world have instant access to international news just like we do, and they will know if there are voices in our country that are undermining our leaders' ability to execute the war. It will embolden them, making them feel like our leaders have one hand tied behind their backs whenever our troops show up for the fight.

Of course, the whole point was that we shouldn't have had any "enemies" to embolden, because we already had Saddam under our thumb, he had nothing to do with 9/11, and he really wasn't a threat to us. We just couldn't figure out that he needed his people to believe that he had Weapons of Mass Destruction far more than he needed us to believe that he didn't. So it was a pointless war that has destroyed countless military and civilian lives, drained our treasury, and redirected our resources from Afghanistan to the point where we may wind up giving that piece of land back to those who actually did give safe harbor to our attackers. And of course there was never any actual evidence to suggest that war protests in America made more American soldiers die.

But never mind all that. Although democracy thrives on a healthy debate, perhaps it is better for us all to work toward the same goal – even if some of us don't agree with it – than it is to try to move forward as a house divided. Got it. Makes sense. Thank you for the wisdom lesson.

Fast forward a few years, and now we have the proposed "mosque" controversy (actually, it's a cultural center with a prayer room which promotes inter-religious cooperation and tolerance, and it is led by the "go-to" man of the Bush Justice Department on matters of promoting peaceful relations with Islam), which magically appeared out of an election-year vacuum. Yet even the staunchest of conservative opponents to the "mosque" have had to admit that there is no question as to the right Muslims have to build a "mosque" near Ground Zero, but they still think it is insensitive for promoters of peace to show up where a lot of people who conflate a terrorist attack with an entire religion are walking by.

Once again, although some of us can't believe that we even have to have this conversation, it is still good for our democracy to talk about the things that matter to us. So the "mosque" matters. However, unlike the scarcity of evidence to establish that protesting a pointless war is a bad thing (especially since it turns out that the war protestors were right, and our government should have listened to them), we have already seen on Islamic extremist blogs and Web sites that news of these protests against the "mosque" is being met with glee, because the notion of American intolerance for Islam is a key plank in the "Islam must destroy America or be destroyed by America" platform. And what could be a greater example of our intolerance to Islam than our actual intolerance for a peace-promoting Islamic cultural center?

So here is my rhetorical question for those who oppose the "mosque"/cultural center: Don't you think it emboldens our enemies when your protests send them countless new recruits?