Disagree. Completely.
There is a huge problem when people look at complex issues as entirely one or the other. You might not be nuanced, but that doesn't mean that something like the current war is not nuanced. The entire nature of the struggle, even if you agree with it, is rife with complexities, issues that cannot be accounted for in "love it or leave it platitudes."
From its inception, this war and the rationale for going to war has never been about an issue that is black or white. What can you possibly boil this conflict down to in terms of singularity?
I am not challenging your intellect or anything - I am genuinely bewildered at how you can look at this war which is full of complexities, most of which we are probably not even aware of, and reduce it to something so simple.
The war has changed fronts. The war has changed primary targets. The war has changed objectives. The war has changed alliances with respect to our recent generational history in involvement in the Middle East.
And I would challenge, heartily, the assertion that this war was not polarizing after 9/11.
This is a DIFFERENT war. We had a target identified as being responsible for 9/11. He and his group took credit. That is who we were targeting. There was a national solidarity in seeking reciprocative justice for the terrorist attacks.
The war then shifted to Hussein and WMDs and everything changed.
This was not an abstract construct of the left.
Any national cohesion that existed, and I believe it did, after 9/11 as we involved ourselves in the search for Bin Laden was erased once the administrative manipulation began and the murky accusations that changed the site and motive for being at war. There was a great deal of doubt and questioning that, retrospectively, ended up being absolutely reasonable.
And that had as much to do with departmental policy as with any media bias.
To remove blame from the administration and place it all on this "left media bias" for the current of anger and rise of protestations is an injustice, I believe. It's a gross oversimplification.
I am reminded of a very very poignant passage from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried as the narrator thinks about the people around him after he received his draft notice for the Vietnam War: