HunterByrd

Winning the War

Columnist Ralph Peters's long-time military buddy requested that Mr Peters write one more 'Our Guys Are Winning the War' column before election day. He did.

"Kerry's rhetoric is giving the bad guys a thread to hang on," wrote the soldier. "They're hoping we lose our nerve. They're more concerned with the U.S. elections than with the Iraqi ones."

My pal has been involved in every phase of our Iraq operations — dating back to Desert Storm. And he's convinced that the terrorists have risked everything to create as much carnage as they can before Nov. 2. Our troops are killing them left and right. The terrorists are desperate. They can't sustain this tempo of attacks much longer.

But Sen. Kerry insists that we're losing — giving our enemies hope that we'll pull out. No matter what else John Kerry may say, the terrorists only hear his criticisms of our president and our war.

You know...Kerry has come full circle. That's how he started his political career, by giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He has gotten much better at it. Instead of fronting the VVAW, now he speaks for the entire DNC. Go John!

Muqtada al-Sadr is quiet as a mouse. Najaf is being rebuilt. Two-thirds of Iraq's provinces are quiet. We never see any headlines about our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq — because they're building a successful modern society in the Middle East. Good-news stories aren't welcome in our undeniably pro-Democratic media.

Even the French are uncharacteristically subdued. The serpents of the Seine thought they'd seduced the terrorists with a few anti-American apples. Instead, they've found that they can't even free two kidnapped French journalists.

After their own recent terrorist debacle, the Russians repented their criticism of the Bush administration. The Spanish, too, discovered that appeasement doesn't work any better for them than for the French — an Islamist plot to blow up justice-ministry buildings was recently uncovered. And there's more to come.

One hears little of the northern Kurds, except that they might be an incendiary factor in a free Iraq. I do not believe it! Kurds aren't reported on precisely because things are decently well there. Twinkie-eating cleric al-Sadr was reported on the other day -- on NPR -- he wants in on the politics, but commentators WARNED that if he couldn't fit in, well, then he was gonna call his jojos back up (they'd find arms and munitions somewhere) and they WOULD fight again... you know NPR, they can't say anything that leaves a warm impression on Bush or conservatives.

Of course, the United Nations is still doing everything it can to undercut President Bush. Embarrassed by Oil-for-Food corruption revelations, the U.N. would like to get back to the good old days of the Clinton administration, which winked at outright U.N. criminality.

We do a fair amount of reading in the papers and on the internet. Does anyone know whether Kerry criticizes the United Nations? Even on a limited or sporadic basis? . . . . Didn't think so.

The terrorists are pulling out all the stops to shed blood in Iraq this week. While the media makes every mortar round sound like the end of the world, the encouraging news is that the terrorists haven't been able to do more. They can harass convoys and murder civilians — but they haven't budged our troops or the new Iraqi government.

Of course, the terrorists aren't suddenly going to quit if President Bush wins at the polls — but his re-election would be a terrible psychological blow to them. They know how high the stakes are in Iraq.

The struggle isn't just about the fate of one country, but about the future of the entire Middle East. If freedom and the rule of law get even a 51 percent victory in Iraq, it's the beginning of the end for the terrorists and the vicious regimes that bred them.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rapidly using up the human capital they've accumulated over decades. The casualties in Iraq are overwhelmingly on the terrorist side. Extremist leaders have paid a particularly heavy price. But they won't stop fighting because they can't. The terrorists have to win in Iraq. They have to defeat America.

The astonishing thing is that so many of our fellow Americans don't get it. The terrorists aren't committing their shrinking reserves because the outcome's a trivial matter. They recognize the magnitude of what we're helping the Iraqi people achieve.

Yes, sir.