I wrote on 11/22, Contempt for democracy, that the left has contempt for democracy. As I wrote:

There is certainly a reason for the assault on the election. It is a concerted attempt to subvert the democratic process, to cause people to lose faith in our democracy. The left has a long history of doing this. Up until now, they have waged a covert war. Now, they are in full assault mode. The next four years will bring unprecedented attacks on the president and everything he does.

Let's see what we have seen in the past few days:

In Washington state, dead people were voting. At least that paragon of virtue, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer declares, Voting by dead people isn't always a scam. It's only a scam if they vote Republican I guess.

In Washington state, democracy means recounting the ballots until the democrat wins, even if it means paying for a recount and "finding" uncounted ballots, dead people voting, or more votes than voters.

In Washginton, D.C., Senator Babs Boxer challenges Ohio vote. "I think this is the first time in my life I ever voted alone in the United States Senate, and I have to tell you, I think it was the right thing to do." Courage or utter stupidity. You be the judge. She is joined in the House by several members to:

draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems.

In other words, the system is horribly broken and the results can't be trusted. But then again, the the people are too stupid and hateful anyways. But why the fuss, when the purpose of the elecoral challenges wasn't to affect the election outcome? The answer is simple.

One, as I wrote in March:

The liberals hate President Bush so much that they are willing to sacrifice our national security and our war on terrorists. They are willing to lie, to support a liar, and to turn the 9/11 commission into their last ditch attempt to remove President Bush. Their hate is so intense it is all that guides them.

Liberals hate Bush somuch, anything is acceptable. As I wrote in September regarding voter fraud:

The right belives the left to be ill-informed and wrong. Thus, fraud is wrong. They win with ideas.

The left (and I exclude liberals, Joe Lieberman being a true liberal, for example) believes the right to be evil. Thus, fraud is fighting evil. However they win is acceptable.

That's why its okay to say Bush wants to lynch Blacks, throw old people out of their homes, starve children, etc. One, they really do believe it, and two, who cares, Bush is evil.

Thus it is okay to challenge a decisive victory and question the legitmacy of voting in America and for Kerry to repeat "one million African Americans were disenfranchised" time after time.

Last month I wrote:

At one time, the two parties had similar goals for the country, just different paths to reach the same destination. Word for word, Kennedy's inaugural address could well have been spoken by Reagan or W. Word for word, FDR's Arsenal of Democracy speech in 1940 could have been spoken by Reagan or Bush. Need one wonder what FDR or Kennedy or Truman would say about the democratic gala at the opening of Moore's vile propaganda film.

Today, the situation is radically different. It is not so much that they have different paths, but different goals. And what is truly worse, and far more dangerous, is that they have put party ahead of country. Their inability, their refusal to face the threats and challenges the country faces makes it essential that the party implode and start anew.

Clearly, they couldn't care less that they are making a mockery and disgrace of themselves, the Congress, or our political system.

I wrote in the same piece:

The democrats are still living in fantasy land, the pollyanna Ruy Tuxeira being the latest example. Vote fraud in Ohio and voter intimidation in Florida are not just cooky conspiracy theories of a few deranged leftists trolling dailykos. They are mainstream democratic dogma.

From Washington state to Washington DC, democrats will do whatever it takes to steal elections, undermine duly elected Republicans, and destroy democracy in America.

Now we know what Kerry meant when he said he would restore relations with our traditional allies, or maybe he misspoke and meant our traditional enemies. If this doesn't make you glad that Kerry is back in the Senate, then nothing will.

After visiting Syria, yes Syria, a state sponsor of terror, funder of the Hezbollah, who blew up Marine barrakcs in Beirut killing more than 230 Marines. He has this to say about thte visit:

"I think we found a great deal of areas of mutual interest, some common concerns and some possibilities for initiatives that could be taken in the future to strengthening the relationship between the U.S. and Syria"

What exactly is this man thinking. Improve the relationship? This implies it is a two way street, that we are to blame for the poor relationship. And that would of course fit in nicely with his world view, the one he espoused in 1970 when running for Congress. What exactly did he say about the US forces? Hmmm...Oh yeah, I rememebr:

"I’m an internationalist. I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."

Well, if your soldiers were committing daily war crimes and were pillaging in the manner of Jenjis (Genghis for us non-European educated proles) Khan, yeah, I'd guess a little self effacement would be in order.

To his credit, Bashar Assad stressed:

"the importance of dialogue between the two sides over all issues under discussion, especially those of common interest,"

We have a common interest, it's called Iraq. Except we have entirely different desired outcomes. Kerry is a disgrace to the Senate and the country. To meet with an enemy, during a time of war, oh wait, nevermind.

When Kerry said we had to pass a "global test", I never assumed he meant it included our enemies as well.

Imad Moustafa, Syria's ambassador to the United States says Syrian-U.S. relations are passing through a "critical but positive" stage.. He also states that his country wants constructive dialogue with the Bush administration.

Of course they do. They know what is going to happen after the Iraq elections when it becomes public that they are funding the insurgency, hiding the Ba'athists controlling it, hiding Saddam's WMD's and still continuing to fund terrorsists.

Hopefully it's acts like this remind us how fortuitous it is that President Bush ws re-elected.

This is getting to be fun. Back on December 12th, I write in The Great Intel Failure of 2003

When the history of Operation Iraqi Freedom is written, much will be made about the failure to find WMD's. But this is not the great intelligence failure of OIF, as everyone, from the CIA to France, Russia, even the UN, all believed Saddam had WMD's. Lost will be the real intelligence failure, the knowledge of post-Gulf War I Iraq.

...we began to focus on ELINT (electronic intelligence) versus HUMINT (human intelligence). If a satelitte could read a license plate, why put an agent in the field? What was impossible understand then becomes painfully and tragically obvious today.

All this led to the great intel failure of 2003, the failure to appreciate the Iraqi situation on the ground. We still were working under the assumption that Saddam was governing as a secular leader. He wasn't. He was actively recruiting Wahabi/Salafi clerics to preach in the newly construct mosques he began to build.

Mackubin Owens write in Judging Rumsfeld:

The second heresy might be called "technophilia." The technophiles contend that emerging technologies, especially information technologies, have so completely changed the nature of warfare that many of the old verities no longer hold true. The technophiles argue that the U.S. must do what is necessary to ensure its dominance in military technology even if it means accepting a substantially reduced force structure...
Once Baghdad fell, the criticism of Rumsfeld evolved: Now, said the secretary's detractors, the force employed in the war was too small to stabilize the situation after the capture of Baghdad. The secretary, say the critics, did not foresee the emergence of a guerrilla war.

But there is little evidence that his critics foresaw the kind of guerrilla war that has raged for the last few months.

As I noted last month, nobody cold have forseen what has happened. Owens cites the Army's recalcitrance at change as a major factor. He refers to a December 25, by Tom Ricks, which analyzed a paper written by Gen. Isaiah Wilson III. Wilson has criticism for Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, but reserves his harshest critques for the Army:

Many in the Army have blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilians for the unexpectedly difficult occupation of Iraq, but Wilson reserves his toughest criticism for Army commanders who, he concludes, failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and so not did not plan properly for victory. He concludes that those who planned the war suffered from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt."

I noted this just a on 12/15, when I wrote:

Is the army moving fast enough? No. The massive bureaucracy built up over years, which moves at a glacial place, has been fighting serious efforts at reform from the very same secretary who now comes under fire for not being able to get the army to move fast enough. More than a few feathers had to be ruffled when Rumsfeld picked retired Special Forces General Schoomaker to be the Army chief of staff.

One of the biggest problems we face in the War on Terror is how we are going to reshape the military to meet the new threats. Since the end of the cold war, the role and mission of the military has continually changed. It became untenable to maintain a large post-Cold War/pre-Gulf War military, as budgetary contraints and lack of direct threat relegated the military's importance. Few could have predicted the war on terror, and even still, the debate rages in a special forces and law enforcement approach versus the regime change of terror supporting nation-states approach.

The decision will be made as much by who wins the debate within the military. As Owens notes:

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld has ruffled feathers from the very beginning of his tenure as secretary of Defense. He has been called a "takedown artist" and a "control freak" who exhibits little patience with the niceties of military protocol. His critics say he thinks nothing of insulting general officers and running roughshod over those with whom he disagrees. Anti-Rumsfeld leaks to the press have been unprecedented during his time as secretary. For four years, hardly a week has gone by without a story sourced by anonymous officers characterizing Rumsfeld as the reincarnation of Robert Strange McNamara or trashing him in some other way.

The main source of the problem is Rumsfeld's commitment to the president's agenda of "transforming" the U.S. military — reshaping it from a heavy, industrial-age force designed to fight the USSR during the Cold War to a more agile, information-age force capable of defeating future adversaries anywhere in the world. While all the services have undertaken transformation policies, Rumsfeld's demand for more rapid change — and a particular model of transformation — has put him at odds with the uniformed military, especially the U.S. Army.

As I also noted on 12/15, regarding Rumsfeld's selection of Schoomaker:

Such a move should have drawn praise from the military's critics. Instead, all it did was make more enemies, both inside the army and out. And now troops in the field, and more importantly the missions' objectives, are paying the price for such intransigence. So, Rumsfeld was moving the army, the army just wasn't having any of it. The situation on the ground was changing, and the army wasn't.

Glenn Reynolds posts about toture, and his and others' positions on the its use in the WOT.

We need to define exactly what torture really is. Ceratinly it is the infliciton of pain to a single individual for purposes of extracting information or other results. But isn't it still torture if the same concept is applied to thousands or millions?

I understand that torture isn't nearly as effective as sleep deprivation and other less coercive intelligence gathering methods. However, the threat of torture could be a powerful motivatational tool. But, it begs the question, whether have we already used torture or similar methods.

Would it be fair to say that blockading and starving a nation is in essence a form of torture, as we did to Japan in WW2? Projections were that if we continued the blockade into the winter, millions of Japanese women and children would starve to death.

Would it not be considered a form of torture fire bombing cities, causing hundreds of thousands of dead, leaving many times that homeless. The fire bombings of Tokyo and the other major Japanese cities killed far greater numbers than did the atomic bombs did.

In both these instances, we brought unbearable pain and suffereing to women and children, in an attempt to shorten the war. Is this not a form of torutre?

We did the same thing to Germany. Arthur Harris and Ira Eaker coordinatied the single greatest aerial offensive in history. We bombed factories and railroads, then later oil, in an attempt to disrupt the Germany war economy while the British bombed the German cities by night. Was not the utter destruction of Dresden, the firestorms and the tens of thousands dead a form of torture?

In WW2, we brought the war directly to civilian populations in a way never before seen. We caused the popualtions great pain and suffering in a direct attempt to crush their will to fight. Isn't bombing civilians mercilessly, including firebombing, nothing more than jamming bamboo into the fingernails of millions?

And perhaps the threat of torture, the fact that we're having the debate proves to the terrorists, that we are throwing the rule books out, and will fight to win. It's the old adage about the War on Terror: "Rules. There are no rules." We've gone through civil wars, depressions, world wars, and never turned into a police state.

America bashing has always been in season, ans more prevalent and pandemic now that the tsunami has pummeled Indoensia. Cheap tricks and statistics are used to show the "stinginess" of the US. Whether we gave 30, or 300 million is irrelevant. As far as the rest of the world is concerened, we can never give enough. But they forget are greatest contribution: we give our blood and our treasure.

When Europe was imploding in 1917, we came to the rescue and gave blood. Many thousands perished in the same forests that had been the great battlegrounds of Europe of centuries. And a generation later, their ghosts would be awoken in the same battlegrounds, fighting the same enemies. And once again, we gave blood and treasure.

The same was true in the other hemisphere, as Philippines, China, Okinawa, Burma, India, the whole of the South Pacific came under Japanese control.

More than 400,000 would pay with their lives, twice as many again with wounds.

Before the 20th century was half over, its wars had claimed more lives than in all the wars, in all the previous centuries combined. And it was American blood that saved the world, be a quaint French shore turned into hell, or a volcanic island turned into "8 square miles of hell."

The world lay in shambles, millions homeless and dispossessed, enemies shattered, allies not much better. One nation stood alone, her factories safe from bombs, her shores safe invasion, her lands almost a century removed from the last armed conflict.

And so America stood alone in the world. If history should serve as a guide, any nation in such situation would have ruled the world. Would that Hadrian or Trajan were alive today. Our response was to rebuild the shattered and destroyed nations, friend and foe alike. Billions and billions were invested. After 5 years of giving blood, she now gave her treasure.

Japan and Germany did not get the reparations of the past war, but new factories and democracies. And then they got treaties and alliances to protect from the new great menace, the Soviet Union. And so again, they got our treasure.

Hundreds of millions lived in safety in Europe and Asia, safe because the treasure of the US was protecting them. Block access to Berlin? More US blood and treasure. Communist uprising in Greece? More US treasure. One million Soviet soldiers ready invade through the Fulda Gap, checked only by US blood and treasure.

While our treasure went to their defense, their treasure went to building a social welfare state. Even when many in the US asked our wealthy allies to shoulder the burden, our leaders always were mindful of our role, and their fragility.

Every Pole, Czech, Hungarian knew full too well what the east would do to the west. Budapest and Prague were all too vivid reminders that our treasure was not being squandered. The dock workers in Gdansk knew full well they weren't enjoying a workers' paradise.

And so, we continued to spend billions every year, and finally, the world watched as walls came down in Berlin, dictators were killed on television, and Poles went the polls. Added to the hundreds of millions spared the fate of communism were hundreds of millions more liberated from the yoke of the hammer and sickle. All the direct result of a willing US to expend her treasure abroad.

Trillions went to others that could have lined our streets in gold and built everyone mansions so large as could make Vanderbilt jealous. And yet, we were still willing to give our blood, whether it was in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and dozens of places in between. For comparison, right now world collective bodies discuss the meaning of the word genocide, whether it applies in Darfur, and still refuse to send a dime.

Right now the US is spending hundreds of billions to rid the world of brutal regimes that supported terrorism. Every jihadi that is killed in Ramadi or Fallujah will not kill Americans. Nor will they kill Dutch filmmakers or Russian schoolchildren either. And again, that price is being paid in US blood as well.

Equally important and historically unique, is that for all the blood spilled, all the treasure spent, we have never asked for anything in return, save a plot of land to bury our dead. More notably has not been our cowboy militarism that is the point of derision for the left, but rather it is our cautious restraint.

Imagine what we could have done. We could very well have turned half the Arab world into a parking lot, taken their oil, and had the other half clean up the mess. Yet, in spite of counting on their oil revenues to fund the war, we have not asked Iraq to pay us back, but rather use the revenue to build up their country.

This also raised the most ironic of ironies for the left. We are asking the US taxpayer to fund the war with money that could be used to provide "health care to children", yet had we taken the oil money, we'd surely have proven that we went to war for oil.

And right now, whose aircraft carrier, the mightiest non-nuclear weapon ever created, is being used for the most humanitarian of purposes? Who else maintains an aircraft carrier, let alone a carrier fleet? And who would send a warship to perform a mission of peace? Once again, it is our treasure.

So when they ask how much we have given to the tsunami relief fund, remind the questioner that the US has given literally trillions the world over. If we quit now and never gave a dime for another century, we'd still be the largest benefactor by several orders of magnitude. We continue to give, in spite of, not because of, the slings and arrows that the world feels, compelled by jealousy and protected by our benevolence, to hurl.

What the world ought take a moment to consider is a world without US blood and treasure. What they ought consider is if we really were as selfish, stingy, greedy, imperialistic, hegemonic, racist, bigoted, theocratic, closed-minded as they say we are, they'd have neither the time nor the freedom to entertain such thoughts. The very fact they live in such safety and wealth is proof to the contrary, all provided by US blood and treasure.

What is it with Pat Buchanan's rag, American Conservaitve. I guess even dinosaurs need a place to die. The most recent screed comes to us via William R. Polk called A Time for Leaving. Let's have a look:

From childhood, we Americans are deluged with slogans...So we fall easily into accepting evocative expressions in place of analysis even when it comes to national security. Our parents were sold on the slogan that the First World War was the “war to end all wars,"...We went into Vietnam fearing the “domino effect,” although the struggle there had little relationship to events in any other Asian country. We were rushed into the war in Iraq by the assertion that little, poor, remote Iraq was at the point of attacking mighty America, and now we are bogged down there allegedly by a ragtag faction of Ba’athist diehards.

Wilson did everything he could to keep us out of the war, even ignoring the sinking of the Lusitania. And who exactly was sending all those weapons to Vietnam, and what happened to Cambodia afterwards? And as for Iraq, it was Saddam's potential to gove WMD's to terrorists, not that Iraq would attack us directly.

When I was the member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I had the duty to try to understand the reality in the problems we then faced, to comprehend the forces at work, and to identify what could be done.

And you did a wonderful job I might add. You failed to appreciate the growing threat of al Qaeda, the corruption of Arafat and the PA, in addition to the usual Foggy Bottom Arabist aplogist mentality.

Leaving aside Kurdistan, where roughly a quarter of all Iraqis live, Iraq is a shattered country. Its infrastructure has been pulverized by the “shock and awe” of the American invasion.

Saddam had nothing to with that I assume. Didn't all those billions he swindled under oil-for-food build those palaces?

Few Iraqis today even have clean drinking water or can dispose of their waste.

We've been rebuilding these facilties, but they keep getting blown up by the insurgents not US airplanes.

Iraq’s society has been torn apart, and perhaps as many as 100,000 Iraqis have died. Virtually every Iraqi has a parent, child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague, or neighbor—or perhaps all of these—among the dead.

Citing anti-war websites will not earn scholarly credit. And virtually every Iraqi has a close relative killed - by Saddam. Or did those hundreds of mass graves appear after March 2003?

Hatred of the enemy appeared in a film made by NBC News inside a mosque in Fallujah showing a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi. It also appeared in the photographs of the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

First, calling the insurgents "Iraqis" is wholly disingenuous. They are not fighting against an invader, they are trying to prevent the transition to representative government, something Osama just called heretical in Islam. The Marine in question saw his friend killed the previous day by a terrorist using the tactic of appearing wounded, then taking advantage of our humanity. As for the reatction to the shooting and Abu Ghraib, there were no protests nor outrage among Iraqis, even many Sunni. They know full well what Abu Ghraib was. The outrage is in European streets and American university lecture halls.

Guerrilla warfare is not new. In fact, it is probably the oldest form of warfare.

Characterizing this as "guerilla" warfare is inaccurate as the vast majority of attacks have been against Iraqis. In fact, one of the goals has been to start a sectarian civil war by killing Shias and blowing up even their mosques. All of the gueriila movements cited, Ireland, Yugoslavia, China, even Chechnya were nationalist or communist movements being fought against colonization or subjugation. Characterizing our Iraqi operation as such is a grotesque distortion.

Today, in Iraq and in occupied Palestine, Americans and Israelis are repeating these campaigns, focusing primarily on the application of overwhelming military power designed to dishearten the insurgents. In 40 years, the Israelis have not achieved security; the chances that the Americans will in five years appear unlikely.

For the past decade and a half, since 1979, the Israeli policy has been to trade land for peace. Pressure has been applied from the UN, the US, even within Israel to give strategic land in exchange for empty promises. Sharon has targeted Hamas leadership, built a wall, and is successfully turning the Palestinians away from support of the homicide bombers. The leading candidate, Abbas, has commented that the bombings had a negative impact. One would have to say their security is far better today than five years ago.

...people of all religions and races share a common desire to control their own lives. Our Declaration of Independence puts it eloquently for us, and President Woodrow Wilson summed it up neatly for others when he spoke of the quest for “the self-determination of peoples.” Thwarted in this quest, some people—whom, if we approve of them, we call “freedom fighters” or, if not, “fanatics” or “terrorists”—take up arms, as Americans did in our revolution.

Let's hope this is the case, that all people desire to control their own lives. Indirectly referring to the insurgents in Iraq as "freedom fighters" is Michael Moore delirium. These people in Iraq are not fighting for self-determination. They are trying to restore a brutal regime.

Knowing that they cannot defeat the foreign enemy, they seek not so much to win battles but to wear him down, to inflict upon him what he will regard as unacceptable casualties and other costs, and to erode his political support.

And they know they have willing allies in the US press willing to their bidding.

At the beginning of the struggle against Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration charged that Iraq was a terrorist state acting in close collaboration with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

And he was accurate. Saddam had longstanding ties to terrorist groups, including al Qaida, for over a decade.

In fact, Osama bin Laden, a religious fundamentalist, had offered to raise a military force to fight Saddam’s secular government and denounced Saddam with the strongest condemnation a Muslim can utter, that he was a kafir, a godless person.

That was before the firsrt Gulf War. Afterwards, Saddam began to pursue a much more religious policy, building mosques, importing Wahabi/Salafi clerics, and funding and training fundamentalist terrorists. In fact, in 1999 Saddam offered bin Laden sanctuary. We entered the war with a pre-Gulf War appreciation of Saddam that was vastly different than the Saddam of the post-Gulf War. This was the major intelligence failure of the war, and probably one of the roles you might have had which you described as "...the duty to try to understand the reality in the problems we then faced, to comprehend the forces at work, and to identify what could be done. " Again, nice job.

The first option has been called “staying the course.”

Do elections sound like "staying the course?" We have hardly been static in our approach to Iraq.

The second option is “Vietnamization.”

The transfer of power last June was part of that process, which elections will continue.

The third option is to choose to get out rather than being forced...America would have to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses, and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces rather than by an American monopoly.

What oil monopoly? If we had this, wouldn't we be using the revenues to pay for the operation? This is more Moore hysteria.

Then, and only then, could Iraqis themselves set about creating a national consensus.

What planet are you living on? Are the terrorists going to suddenly stop blowing up Shia mosques? The whole point of their actions are to stop that from happening.

The danger during this period is twofold: on the one hand, Iraq, like Afghanistan, could shatter with local warlords seizing the pieces, or Iraq could split into a sort of eastern Balkans...

And this is the best option?

On the other hand, in an attempt to avoid this disaster, we and our Iraqi protégés could, as we are now attempting, create a new Iraqi army. We should heed the lesson of Iraqi history...In the period during and following American evacuation, Iraq would need a police force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be easier, cheaper, and safer...

So we are attempting to create an Iraqi army. A UN peacekeeping force. What part of the UN do you not undestand. They left Rwanda in such humilation that Dutch soldiers cut up their blue hats. They have completely abrogated any responsibility in Darfur. They were absent in the Balkans, and when they did show up, they left a refuge camp allowing Serbs to kill hundreds of refugees. Even today in Indonesia, they are unable to provide anything other than complaints about US stinginess. And the Iraqis are well aware of the UN, and its partnership with Saddam.

And lastly, where are the UN peacekeepers going to come from? The UN has made it clear they will not send anyone to Iraq. And UN peacekeeper is a hollow term. name one instance when UN peacekeepers actually "kept the peace?"

With its vast potential in oil production, probably the greatest in the world, it could soon again become a rich country with a talented, well-educated population. Step by step, health care, clean water, sewage, roads, bridges, pipelines, electric grids, and housing could be provided by the Iraqis themselves, as they were in the past.

By whom? This is pure fantasy. The infrastructure was not intact "in the past." Sure, in Sunni areas where Saddam's cronies lived, but most of Iraq was not functional before the war. We counted on that being the case prior to invasion, and we were sorely disappointed.

Economically, Iraq will also have to mend itself.

Again, how, and by whom?

As fighting dies down, reasonable security is achieved, and popular institutions revive, the one million Iraqis now living abroad will be encouraged to return home. In the aggregate they are intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated and can make major contributions in all phases of Iraqi life. Oil production will play a key role.

"As the fighting dies down"? Seriously? What do you think the insurgents are doing, fighting for a better Iraq? You think those intellectual Iraqis are going to return to an Iraq comtrolled by Ba'athists? They want to set up a Fallujah throughout Iraq, not a modern Mesopotamia.

Contracts for reconstruction paid for by Iraqi money...supervised by the World Bank

The same World Bank that has been heavily criticized for what is tantamount to extortion regarding Latin America? Having the World Bank over see development and construction financing is equivalent to having the UN oversee the peace.

Would that this were simply a difference of opinion regarding Iraq's future. But this is simply a blatant lie, supported by faulty and disingenuous analogies. The people who are blowing up Americans and Iraqi alike are not interested in remaking Iraq into a civilized society. And the professor surely knows this.

Our exit will only give rise to the belief that the US is weak and easily defeated. We will most assuredly see a rise in terorrism as the US is viewed as the paper tiger bin Laden predicted. Our cresibility will be destroyed in the Arab world, as well as everywhere else. We have a huge deficit there already, having supporting Shia uprisings in 1991 only to walk away and let Saddam kill tens of thousands. That we are getting help from the Shia at all, including Sistani, is one of the triumhs of our policy.

Once, it was the far left the rewrote history to suit their purposes. Tracts like this are comparable to a Howard Zinn distortion. The author commits serious sins of omission as he fails to remark that the vast majority of Iraqis support the elections, even a majority of the Sunni. He also omits the fact that 14 of 18 provinces are stable. The problems are in the "Sunni triangle" and he also knows this.

The author knows full well what will happen if we leave, and it certainly isn't this: "...carrying out the rebuilding and reordering process, particularly at the grassroots level, Iraqis would begin to take control of their lives and start building the neighborhood institutions and consensus on which, if it is to grow at all, representative government will depend."

The professor is blatantly lying, and he knows it. For that he deserves our contempt. If he actually believes this, than he is far worse off than imaginable, and deserves our sympathy.