Derek Copeland wrote:
Q1. Do you honestly think that capturing or killing
Bin Laden would make a scrap of difference? There are
plenty of others ready to take his place?

Q2. Do you have any proof that the Iraq or Afghanistan
Governments had anything to do with 9/11? I can think
of several more likely Middle Eastern countries. As
far as I am concerned the invasion of Iraq was a bit
like kicking the cat after a bad day. I would have
hoped that the US would have at least obeyed the rule
of law as layed down by the UN. If the most powerful
country in the World won't accept the rule of law as
laid down by an International body, why should anyone
else?
June 16, 2006

Betting on Defeat?
It's far from a safe bet.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When 2,500 Americans
are lost, and when the improvised explosive device monopolizes the war
coverage, it is easy to see why - especially with elections coming up
in November, and presidential primaries not long after.

Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable exasperation at
the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks of public
supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive. It is hard to
find any consistent public advocates of the American effort in Iraq
other than the editors and writers here at National Review, the Wall
Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn,
Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.

But for all the despair, note all the problems for those who have
triangulated throughout this war.

First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often fall prey to
disingenuousness. Take John Kerry's recent repudiation of his earlier
vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists, he now
laments, "We were misled."

Misled?

Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction and the use
of the royal "we," was the senator suggesting that Iraq did not
violate the 1991 armistice accords?

Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder his own people?

Perhaps he was "misled" into thinking Iraqi agents did not really
plan to murder former President George Bush?

Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really shield
terrorists?

Apparently the Iraqi regime neither violated U.N. accords nor shot at
American planes in the no-fly zones.

Senator Kerry, at least if I remember correctly, voted for the joint
congressional resolution of October 11, 2002, authorizing a war against
Iraq, on the basis of all these and several other causus belli, well
apart from fear of WMDs.

Second, those with a shifting position on the war sometimes cannot keep
up with a war that is shifting itself, where things change hourly. And
when one has no consistent or principled position, the 24-hour
battlefield usually proves a fickle barometer by which to exude
military wisdom.

Even as critics were equating Haditha with My Lai, al-Zarqawi, the al
Qaeda mass murderer in Iraq, was caught and killed. And what was the
reaction of the stunned antiwar pundit or politician? Either we heard
that there was impropriety involved in killing such a demon, or the
former fugitive who was once supposedly proof of our ineptness suddenly
was reinvented as having been irrelevant all along.

The Iraqi army - well over 250,000 strong - is growing, and the
much smaller American force (about 130,000) is shrinking. How do you
call for a deadline for withdrawal when Iraqization was always
predicated on withdrawal only after there was no Iraqi dependence on a
large, static American force?

After lamenting that the Iraqi government is a mess, we now see a tough
prime minister and the selection of his cabinet completed. So it is not
easy to offer somber platitudes of defeat when 400,000 coalition and
Iraqi troops are daily fighting on the center stage of the war against
Islamic terrorism. Someone from Mars might wonder what exactly were the
conditions under which a quarter-million Muslim Arabs in Iraq alone
went to war against Islamic radicalism.

Third, there is a fine line to be drawn between legitimate criticism of
a war that is supposedly not worth American blood and treasure, and
general slander of the United States and its military. Yet much of the
Left's rhetoric was not merely anti-Bush, but in its pessimism
devolved into de facto anti-Americanism.

Senator Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay to the worst excesses of the
Nazis. Senator Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib, where thousands
perished under Saddam Hussein, had simply "reopened under new
management: U.S. management." Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean
confidently asserted that the Iraq war was not winnable. John Kerry in
his youth alleged that Americans were like Genghis Khan in their
savagery; in his golden years, he once again insists that we are
"terrorizing" Iraqi civilians. With friends like these, what war
critic needs enemies? Americans can take disapproval that we are not
fighting "smart," but they resent the notion that we are somehow
downright evil.

Fourth, the mainstream media is now discredited on Iraq, and their
drumbeat of doom and gloom is starting to rile more than pleases the
public. Aside from the bias that counts always our losses and rarely
our successes, we are sick and tired of manipulations like the lies
about flushed Korans, forged memos, and the rush to judgment on
Haditha. Most weary Americans want at least a moment to savor the death
of a mass-murdering Zarqawi, without having to lament that he might
have been saved by quicker medical intervention.

Fifth, the historical assessment of Iraq is still undetermined, despite
the pontification of former supporters who think they gain greater
absolution the more vehemently they trash a war they once advocated.

The three-week effort to remove Saddam Hussein was a landmark success.
The subsequent three-year occupation in his place has been messy,
costly, and unpopular. But the result of the third and final stage that
Iraq has evolved into - an existential fight between Iraqi democracy
and al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism - is still uncertain. If we
draw the terrorists out, defeat them in the heart of the ancient
caliphate, and win the allegiance of enough democratic Iraqis to crush
the Islamicists, then our military has won a far greater victory than
the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Sixth, note how critics now rarely offer alternative scenarios. All the
old gripes such as the paucity of body armor or thin-skinned humvees
have withered away. The Iraqi elected government is sympathetic and
earnest, so demonizing them ultimately translates into something like
"Cut these guys lose; they weren't worth the effort." Yes, the
American people want out of Iraq, but on terms that preserve the
democracy that we paid so dearly to foster.

Even the one legitimate criticism that we were too slow in turning over
control to the Iraqis, and that the Bremmer interregnum had too high a
public profile, is now largely moot, as Ambassador Khalilzad and Gen.
Casey are in the shadows, giving all the credit to the very public
Iraqis and taking most of the blame for the bad news.

So we are nearing the denouement of the Iraq war, where we wanted to be
all along: in support of a full-fledged and democratically elected
government that will either win or lose its own struggle.

Seventh, the old twin charges - no link between al Qaeda and Saddam,
no WMDs - are also becoming largely irrelevant or proving untrue. It
must have been difficult for Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, in
their coverage of the death of Zarqawi, to admit that he had been
active in Iraq well before the end of Saddam Hussein, along with a
mishmash of old killers from Abu Nidal to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi
American who helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing.

In addition, most abroad were convinced before the war that the CIA was
right in its pre-war assessments. The publication of the Iraqi archives
points to a real, not a phantom and former, WMD capability - in line
with efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, from Iran to Libya, to
reclaim something akin to the old Soviet deterrent.

The costs in Iraq have been high and the losses tragic. But nothing in
the past three years has convinced me otherwise than that:

1. in a post-September-11 world Saddam had to be removed on ethical and
strategic grounds;

2. the insurgency, though unexpected in its intensity, could be put
down by a U.S. military that would react and evolve more quickly than
the terrorists to changing conditions on the ground;

3. our mistakes, though several and undeniable, are tragically the
stuff of war, and so far have not proved to be irreversible or beyond
what we experienced in any of our past efforts;

4. the maligned secretary of Defense was right about troop levels and
the plan for Iraqization - although demonized for trying to transform
the very nature of the American military in the midst of a war;

5. we are engaged in the great humanitarian effort of the age, as
"one person, one vote" has brought to the perennially downtrodden
Arab Shiites a real chance at equality;

6. the best method of winning this global struggle against fascistic
Islamic terrorism remains fostering in the Middle East a third
democratic alternative between autocracy and theocracy that alone can
deal with the modern world.

Once a democratically elected Iraqi government emerged, and a national
army was trained, the only way we could lose this war was to forfeit it
at home, through the influence of an adroit, loud minority of critics
that for either base or misguided reasons really does wish us to lose.
They really do.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

Anyway, you have got yourselves into three unwinnable
wars entirely of your own making, so I suggest that
you elect a President and a Government who are intelligent
enough to negotiate a way out next time.

On your Independence Day (from us), I hope you will
spare a thought for all those suffering in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the victims of 9/11, the Madrid and London
bombings and their families, and our respective soldiers
who have to enforce these unsanctioned policies.

Derek Copeland