Eisenhower's hometown keeps faith

By Rob Watson BBC correspondent in Abilene, Kansas

Abilene Kansas is picture perfect small town America - neat Victorian houses, well-kept lawns and quiet streets. It is the very heart of the heartland.

Dwight Eisenhower, would still recognise Abilene's way of life

Former President Dwight D Eisenhower, who lived there as a boy, once said: "The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene".

A town of some 6,500 people, it is the kind of place where people still do not bother to lock their houses or cars, and where everyone knows your name.

It is almost as if time had been frozen and Eisenhower still president back in the 1950s.

Of course it was not always that way. It was once considered one of the "wickedest and wildest towns in the west", that is until a tough sheriff restored order in the late 19th Century.

These days that is not a role Kansans want to see the US play around the world.

But that is not to say people in Abilene are not supportive of the current mission in Iraq, despite the continuing US casualties.

No quitters

On a trip on the Abilene and Smoky Valley Railway that trundles tourists across the farmland that surrounds the town, the volunteers that run the railway told the BBC they were not sure that America should be in the business of spreading democracy worldwide.

Residents are concerned but not obsessed about Iraq

But most felt that now US troops were in Iraq they should stay to finish the job.

The people of Abilene would not like to be seen as quitters.

In Abilene Iraq does not dominate the news the way it does in Europe.

Its local newspaper, the Abilene Reflector-Chronicle has concentrated more on local stories since the war officially ended.

That is not to say it is not covered at all but rather not with the intensity or focus it receives for example in Britain's major newspapers.

Coffee discussions

But you can still find lively debate in the town. And there is no better place to find it than Bankes, an old fashioned pharmacy with the town's last soda fountain.

Some who meet to chat over a soda are themselves war veterans

At 1500 every day regulars gather there over coffee and "fizzes" to chew the fat.

They are a thoughtful, friendly and impressive crowd, several of them veterans of World War II.

So what, I asked, did they make of the failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction and had President Bush exaggerated the threat?

The broad consensus was that removing Saddam Hussein had been the right thing to do whether or not any weapons are ever found and that the president was a man who could be trusted.

One man said history would be kind to both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.

Troubled and puzzled

And if there is broad faith in the president in the heartland, there is also matching disappointment in the anti-Americanism that the war in Iraq has produced worldwide.

The people in Abilene are both troubled and puzzled by it.

One farmer told me that he could not understand it, that Americans were good people, religious people just trying to do good in the world.

Of course Abilene is not America, just a slice of it.

But there was no doubting the sentiment in this small Kansas town, that the US deserves the world's thanks for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, not its criticism.