If you subscribed to President Bush's campaign
message that "a victory for the Democrats is a victory for the
terrorists," the election results don't bode well for America's
future. Even the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq expressed
a favorable view of the Democrats' recapturing of the Congress,
lending himself to the president's assertion. From NSA
surveillance to renewing the Patriot Act to the issue of torture,
Democrats have made the prosecution of the war on terror more
difficult every step of the way.
Voters will soon be wondering whether it was
prudent to give our enemies what they wanted, but voters should
not be blamed for the outcome of the election. Congressional
Republicans were plagued by scandal, runaway spending, and an
ineffective leadership team. More importantly, the Bush
administration did not satisfy America's need for success in
Iraq. We had an opportunity in the months following the
invasion, but the clock ran out.
Democrats made political hay out of the Iraq
war, which only served to embolden our enemies. The terrorists
-- many having infiltrated from across the Syrian and Iranian
borders -- knew that if they could only continue killing American
troops, public support for the war would dissolve. The Democrats
advanced the terrorist cause, sniping at the president at every
opportunity -- saying the president lied about WMDs in retribution
for Saddam's assassination plot against his father and that
we were there to take Iraq's oil. (The Democrats never
fail to amaze me. They bemoan the fact that we're dependent
on foreign oil, but they prohibit new oil wells and refineries
in the United States.)
True to their defeatist nature, Democrats also
have been trying to draw the parallel between Vietnam and Iraq. The key similarity to Vietnam, of course, is their contribution
to our failure by helping to subvert the political will of the
American public. The president is given no credit for
his desire to protect Americans from attack or for being someone
who takes the harder right rather than the easier wrong.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the war
in Iraq is that it has now lasted longer than WWII. To
be sure, we're not engaging a uniformed enemy organized under
a sovereign nation. And we lost more Americans on D-Day,
6 JUN 1944, than we have in almost 4 years in Iraq. In
WWII, we won the war by advancing through territory and denying
its use to the enemy. This is next to impossible to do
in Iraq, given our current troop levels. To put it in
perspective, the number of military personnel on the ground
in Iraq roughly equals the full seating capacity of the Rose
Bowl in Pasadena. And Iraq itself is roughly equal in
size to California. Moreover, the standard we must reach
for success in Iraq is much higher that the standard the terrorists
must reach to achieve their aims. Their easily employed
weapons are suicide bombers, IEDs, and, in the near future,
WMDs.
Americans have been lulled into a false sense
of security. Some Democrats actually believe that the
global warming threat is greater than the terrorist WMD threat,
but the real 'inconvenient truth' is we remain at war and the
terrorists are plotting to kill more Americans in attacks far
more catastrophic than 9/11. What are we going to do to
stop them? Are we going to listen to their phone calls? Not
if the Democrats get their way. They held hearings on NSA surveillance -- what the press incorrectly dubbed "Domestic
Spying" because it made a better headline. Are we going
to have all available means in order to extract information
that might save hundreds of thousands or millions of American
lives? Unlikely -- the Democrats pushed a non-torture resolution
through the Congress, which the president mistakenly signed
with the November election looming. Are we going to maintain
a fighting force in Iraq and not cede the field to the terrorists?
No -- the majority of Democrats in Congress will be advocating
for a complete withdrawal from Iraq inside of 12 months.
We could defeat the terrorists more quickly
if we were truly a united country, but we're not. So it's
going to take another attack on U.S. soil to reawaken the country
and reinvigorate its fighting spirit.
