Haven't we Heard This Story Before?
Don't miss Ralph Peters this morning. He describes an old friend who is serving in Iraq:
Now he's working to help Iraq become a democratic model for the Middle East. And he's worried. Not about terrorists or insurgents. He's afraid John Kerry will be elected president."Kerry's rhetoric is giving the bad guys a thread to hang on," he wrote. "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.
Peters reviews the great progress that is being made in Iraq, which is seldom reported in the American press. The terrorists, understanding the stakes and knowing they are losing, are doing all they can to influence the American election:
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.
This is the big one. The fate of a civilization hangs in the balance. And all we hear from one presidential contender is that it's the "wrong war, at the wrong time."
It's deja vu all over again. American troops are winning on the ground, but we are losing on the critical home front. And the man leading the effort to demoralize Americans and blind them to the success the military is enjoying is, once again, John Kerry.
