As for the silly commentary that our general war effort is off the mark, what else would you do?
--We took down the Afghan government which sheltered al Qaeda.
--We decimated al Qaeda and put them on the run.
--We destroyed the Saddam regime and turned a hostile nation that was a threat to the region and to us into an ally that sheds blood at our side fighting our common enemies.
--We gained the cooperation of Pakistan.
--We ended the Pakistani nuclear market.
--We brought Libya out of the nuclear business.
--We've strengthened alliances with Eastern Europeans, India, Japan, and Australia.
--We've kept a Coalition of 20,000+ in Iraq despite the difficulties.
--We've gained the cooperation of scores of nations in the Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept WMD trade.
--We've gained the intelligence and police cooperation of Europeans and many others.
--We've gotten Saudi Arabia to fight the jihadis rather than hope they just hit us.
--We've reminded the Moslem world that terrorism is indeed evil by exposing the Moslem people to the jihadis' wrath.
--We've moved quietly to strengthen nations around the globe to hunt jihadis and keep them out in the first place.
--We've kept on the offensive seeking out jihadis in cooperation with our allies and despite the New York Times' best efforts to thwart our covert means of fighting our enemies.
Yet the enemy fights back so people think we are losing.
And what of our threats still out there? Some say Iraq distracts us but if not in Iraq, where would those 140,000 troops be?
Invading North Korea? I doubt it. Same population but tougher army and terrain.
Iran? Three times Iraq's population?
Blanketing Afghanistan? Same population but inland in a mountain range so the cost of maintaining 140,000 troops in Afghanistan would be about 4 times as great as in Iraq even if sending them there would be smart.
Sending them to Pakistan to hunt Osama? Don't insult my intelligence. Pakistan is huge, with too many jihadis, and has nukes.
So Iraq isn't distracting us and we've achieved a lot already by eliminating a threat and creating an ally. If we can help Iraqis build a democracy, we will have created a beacon that could one day tip the region away from autocracy and military rule.
As for Iran, what hope do we have other than trying to engineer a revolution taking advantage of the pro-American sentiment? We may have to strike to put off the day of a nuclear Iran but revolution is the best strategy.
North Korea has to be squeezed until they collapse and die.
And we need to help Moslems defeat their jihadis by enlisting as many Moslems as we can on our side and bolstering them against the beheading thugs who would kill you for drawing a cartoon.
We are doing what we need to do. And without sacrificing our freedoms as the craziest among us assert.
Let me end with a quote Orson Scott Card:
The frustrating thing is that if people would just look, honestly, at the readily available data from the Muslim world, they would realize that we are winning and that the course President Bush is pursuing is, in fact, the wisest one.
Critics of Bush love to cite the many "mistakes" his administration has made. Most of these "mistakes" are arguable -- are they mistakes at all? -- and when you sum up the others, with any kind of rational understanding of military history, the only possible conclusion is that this is the best-run war in history, with the fewest mistakes. And most of the mistakes we've made are the kind that become clear to morning-after quarterbacks but were difficult to avoid in the fog of war.
Read it all, as the expression goes. Right now would be good.
I haven't seen any alternatives out there to what we are doing. Bitching ain't even strategery.
And make a gut check to continue our winning path in the war both in Iraq and overall.
