Three House Democrats have seized on the irony that the Republicans in the White House seem to fear taxes worse than the deaths of brave soldiers and Marines.

These congressmen propose raising income taxes to pay for the Iraq war.

"Some people are being asked to pay with their lives or their faces or their hands or their arms or their legs," one of those congressmen, David Obey of Wisconsin, told The Washington Post.

"If you're going to ask for that, it doesn't seem too much to ask an average taxpayer to pay 30 bucks for the cost of the war so we don't have to shove it off on our kids."

The congressmen are calling for a tax surcharge of 2 percent to 15 percent, escalating with income. Similar surcharges helped finance the Vietnam War.

The Iraq war is costing $10 billion a month, and the government is running a deficit. But the congressmen seem more interested in making a point than passing a tax.

The point is to make Americans think about whether this war is really necessary, and where our money might be spent better — on health care, children, education, energy independence, climate change or infrastructure, for example.

They do not want to raise taxes for the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Obey says most Americans agree that it, unlike the Iraq conflict, is in the United States' best interest.

But the U.S. has lost ground in Afghanistan since toppling its Taliban regime easily six years ago, and the U.S. has not caught Osama bin Laden — perhaps because we got distracted by Iraq.

If it takes a debate about taxes to make us figure out where we really ought to be spending our money and risking our lives, then let's have that debate.

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