Lately a lot of politicians, mostly democrats, have come out of the woodwork to criticize George Bush for lying to the American people and leading us into an unjust war in Iraq.  Most of them, armed with the same shaky intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, voted in favor of the war.

Apparently everyone is entitled to twenty-twenty hindsight but the President.  Fortunately, he doesn’t much care about his critics, who have blamed him for rising gasoline prices, global warming, hurricane Katrina, and God knows what else.  In this respect the Bush haters are no more constructive now than the Clinton haters were during the alleged Whitewater scandal, but the stakes are much higher this time.

My take on the Iraq war is that someone in the Arab world had to pay for 911 and the logical response of the United States was to base troops in the Middle East to make sure that radical Arabs and their sympathetic governments got the message.   The Taliban in Afghanistan were a logical first target.  Next came Hussein and Iraq.  The world intelligence community believed that Hussein was developing a nuclear weapons program and had little doubt that he possessed chemical weapons, largely due to the fact that he had already gassed the Kurds.  Hussein was a loose cannon.  He was becoming more dangerous.  He had to go.  We took care of him.

While the United Nations and the French stood by, criticizing us while they took their food-for-oil kickbacks from Hussein, the United States did what had to be done.  The international community was largely unsupportive and critical of the United States.  What else is new?  Real leaders with guts and purpose are always resented and despised.  If you are in the software business and your name is Bill Gates, plenty of people will resent your success and call you a greedy monopolist.  If you are a retailer and your name is Wal-Mart, you’re hated by plenty.  The United States is the world’s undisputed military and economic super power.  It is human nature that our first-place status results in resentment from many of the world’s peoples.  After all, doesn’t everyone enjoy seeing the big guy on the block get a bloody nose?

The Iraq war has been messier than we had hoped.  Radical Muslims from all over the Middle East and Africa have flocked to Iraq to harass our soldiers.  Most of these terrorists have paid with their lives and many more of these radicals will line up and die beside their irrational colleagues.  So be it.  If the world’s radical Muslims want to come to Iraq and be killed, it is much better that we kill them in Baghdad than in New York.

Our largest mistake in Iraq has been to bend to political insistence that this war be fought in a “sanitized” fashion.  How dare we kick the Koran of a confessed roadside bomber!  After all, don’t those who kill innocent women and children by planning the bombing of markets and schools deserve the same humane and dignified treatment as a shoplifter in Cincinnati?  We should have been much tougher from the beginning, making it clear to all Iraqis that anyone caught with a weapon or bomb would be shot on sight with no trial and no detention.

Over the past two weeks George Bush and Dick Cheney have gone on the offensive, pointing out the reprehensible harm that is done to our troops and our country when politicians continually spew negativism and call for a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.  This has irritated the Bush haters.  The counter attack by the Bush administration has finally flushed out left-leaning democrats for what they really are, pathetic quitters who shamelessly display the flag of surrender.  They are championed by Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, who called this week for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq!

Most of our brave soldiers who have returned from Iraq tell us that that the US media has skewed what is really happening there and that despite many difficulties we are doing good in that country.  This is ignored by the democrats who’s supreme goal is the embarrassment of George Bush, even if it comes at the expense of the withdrawal of our troops, victory for Al Quaeda, and the spread of international terrorism.  In a recent communiqué the leader of Al Quaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared to the world that the US doesn’t have the stomach to finish the job in Iraq and that it is not a question of if the US we will cut and run, but when!  With each negative pronouncement and criticism of our efforts in Iraq, the democrats shamelessly fuel al-Zarqawi’s expectations.

Maybe al-Zarqawi is right.  Perhaps we, the people of the United States of America, don’t share the steely resolve of our commander in chief.  Unlike our predecessors who defeated the Nazi’s and Imperial Japan, maybe we don’t have the guts to finish the job.  Maybe we should just listen to Murtha and al-Zarqawi and leave Iraq.  Maybe we should pull out of Afghanistan as well and have no military presence in the region.  Perhaps we should go back to our past administration’s policy of “containment” of radical Muslims.  After all, if we leave them alone, they won’t hate us anymore.  They will be peaceful.  They will stop teaching hatred in their schools.  They will no longer bomb trains in Spain, subways in London, and skyscrapers in New York.  Let’s give them one more chance to be good guys.  Maybe this time they will be nice to us!