There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn’t want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn’t get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital “H.” Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it’s on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don’t think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don’t just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there’s someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel’s original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world’s capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven’t managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel’s insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel’s modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history– which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region.

The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearhead by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night.

The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly into Tehran’s paws. Add nuclear weapons to the Iran-Iraq-Syria trinity and you are looking at the worst nightmare of every Sunni Arab prince living in polished oil mansions near what he still insists on calling the Arabian Gulf.

A Shiite superstate will checkmate the Sunni oil monarchies and leave them no choice but to beg America to garrison them with so many troops, air bases and nuclear missiles that they might as well be the 51′st through 59th states. Using foreign soldiers to protect themselves isn’t all that objectionable to the fat lazy oil monarchies who already use armies of foreigners to do everything for them. But the American troops who saved the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam also gave Bin Laden a pretext for turning the conflict on its axis.

The Gulf Sunni Arab princelings know that a massive infusion of American troops will bring out more Bin Ladens, and even the American military hierarchy which knows to salaam to the princes will lose patience fast when the Khobar Towers bombing repeats itself enough times. Americans fighting their own people will quickly turn their countries into another Afghanistan. On top of that the Americans won’t stay there forever.

The Gulfies could develop competent armies, but no Muslim state trusts its own military. If all those billions and billions in state of the art American military equipment were put into the hands of competent generals, instead of the cousins and nephews of the royal family, then very shortly the generals would be running the country. And even if they could trust the generals, the locals have no reliable military tradition except as caravan raiders and have gotten a little too used to the good life to fight for any other reason than an outburst of Koranic fanaticism by the third son of the family.

The Persians have a long proud military tradition. The Egyptians and the Syrians picked up something from their European colonizers. But the Gulfies are not good for much except beating their Filipino maids and getting high on hashish and blowing themselves up to get to paradise. The Iranian military even in its current state would clean their clocks faster than you could say, Alakazam and they know it.

What the Gulfies lack in military skills, they more than make up for in underhanded cunning. If they can’t import an infidel army and they can’t build their own army, then they will follow the honorable tradition of finding a counterbalance to the enemy. The Gulfies have been nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood and funding Al-Jazeera. Combine the two with an American administration eager to win over the Muslim world by reforming American foreign policy and the Gulfies got their own Arab Spring.

The real purpose of the Arab Spring was to create a Sunni Islamist superstate or regional alliance to counter the threat of a Shiite Islamist superstate. With the Muslim Brotherhood sweeping across North Africa all the way to Egypt, the harvest includes semi-secular states with competent armies and if Syria can be tipped into that camp, then Iran will lose its puppet and the Sunni superstate will have a military tipped with top of the line American and Russian equipment, funded by Gulfie oil money and backed by the lunatic fanaticism of Islamist fighters.

With America in decline, the Gulfies touched off the Arab Spring to create Janissary armies, but this time composed of devout Muslims, to keep the Shiites at bay. Iran pushed back contesting Saudi influenced territory in Bahrain and the Emir of Qatar is demanding that his slaves in Washington get cracking and “liberate” Syria for membership in the Sunni Caliphate.

That just leaves one wild card. Not Libya, which has been swung into the Sunni Islamist camp the hard way with NATO jets and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists. Not Turkey, which has repressed the last of its secular military, and is now pushing for Sunni regime change in Syria. The regional wild card is the only non-Muslim state in the area. Israel.

The theological relationship of Sunni and Shiite Islamists to Israel is murderous. The ascendance of Mohammed and the triumph of his Caliph successors was supposed to put an end to an independent Jewish existence. The triumph of Islam was directly measured through the subjugation of Christians and Jews. As the more apocalyptic of the duo, the Shiites would like to wipe Israel out to showcase their own private little armageddon. Turning the Jewish state into dust, or at least its inhabitants, would help lock in their case to being the rightful successors of their genocidal prophet who had purged the Jews from his part of the desert.

The Sunnis tend to be more patient. They want Israel gone, but they also recognize it as a valuable pawn in their own games. Rather than being a disruptive influence on the region, like Iran, it’s a unifying force that gives Muslims a common enemy and a common aspiration. Israel is a theological enemy, but useful in practice. And whatever happens they cannot allow the Shiites to wipe it out. Like comic book supervillains, they have to be the one to kill the superhero or their existence is meaningless.

Whoever is blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities, it isn’t likely to be roving teams of Mossad agents, most likely it’s Iran’s own internal divisions being exploited by some combination of Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence and the intermediaries between the local Iranian opponents of the regime carrying out the attacks and foreign intelligence agencies who are almost certainly Iran’s own neighbors.

On May 10^th, 1994, just a few months after signing the Oslo Accords (September, 1993), Yasir Arafat addressed an assembly of Muslims in a Johannesburg mosque  where he justified his actions by explaining: “This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Quraysh.”  And he concluded by calling on the worshipers “to come and to fight and to start the jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”

What did those words mean?

Muhammad signed a 10-year truce with the Arabian pagan Quraysh tribe in the city of Mecca (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, 628 AD). At the beginning of the second year of that ten-year period he found a pretext to justify breaking the truce. He pounced on the Quraysh in a surprise attack, conquered Mecca and defeated the Quraysh, who were not prepared for more hostilities since they were honoring the 10-year accord and assumed that Muhammad was too.  Since then this agreement between Muhammad and the Quraysh has been an example for Muslims world-wide of how to trick the enemy in wartime. In other words, Arafat explained to his Muslim audience that he gave his word to President Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin, and signed the Oslo Accords, only because he planned to annul his commitments and attack Israel as soon as it was expedient for him to do so.  He lied to Clinton and Rabin; but once he was out from under the scrutiny of western media and in the comfort of a Muslim group whose support he could assume, he told the truth to his Muslim audience.  He was not aware that his speech was recorded.

Arafat’s lies to Clinton and Rabin were an excellent example of a 1,400 year old Muslim tradition of Taqiyya: tricking the enemy in wartime by offering a false peace or truce, but preparing to attack once the enemy lets down its guard.

Taqiyya (lit. ‘caution’) denotes the deceit or dissimulation used by Shiites, who may lie and even commit blasphemous acts to conceal their religion when they are under threat of persecution from majority Sunnis. It has long been used in its other manifestation, as an integral part of Muslim military strategy, employing trickery and deceit to mislead the enemy (for a detailed discussion see John Esposito’s The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford University Press, 2003).

The Qur’an in a variety of verses (2:225, 3:28, 3:54, 9:3, 16:106, 40:28, and 66:2) establishes the religious legitimacy of breaking oaths, lying, unilaterally violating treaties, and generally scheming against non-Muslims.  Allah Himself is described as “the best of schemers” (3:54, 8:30, 10:21), and Muhammad declared, as a justification for murdering unarmed prisoners after offering them safe passage, “war is deceit” (see the Hadith collection of  Bukhari, vol. 4, book 52, nos. 268-271).  So during the negotiations of Oslo I and II, Arafat’s willingness to acquiesce to Israeli demands was merely his acting as a good Muslim warrior, using taqiyya, deceit in warfare, to put his enemy at a disadvantage.

Arafat’s taqiyya began long before Oslo. For decades he told the West that he was just a scruffy little guy doing his best to keep his rough-neck boys (Fatah, the PLO, the el-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas, inter alia) under control so that he could make peace with Israel; even as he called in Arabic for a million martyrs to march on Jerusalem to destroy Israel and create their “Palestine…from the river to the sea”.  Similarly he told the west that he was trying to rein in Hamas and enforce the ban on terrorism to which he had agreed in the Oslo Accords.  Yet, as became apparent when Israel invaded his muqata (military compound) in Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, and translated thousands of documents taken from his files and computers,  he in reality had partnered with Hamas, funded Hamas, armed Hamas, and aided in Hamas’ terrorism.  Far too many in the West fell for his “good cop – bad cop” act.

Hamas too uses the taqiyya ruse at will, frequently telling the West that it really wants peace, but reminding its followers in Arabic that they must continue the ‘struggle’ (the terror war against Israel) until victory or martyrdom.

Examples of taqiyya are endless.  To the west the PA explains its refusal to negotiate with Israel as a result of Israel’s settlement construction.  But the reality is revealed in the Palestine Strategy Group’s 2009 proposal for a strategy of “intelligent resistance”  (i.e., the priority of law fare, boycott campaigns and other anti-Israel propaganda over terrorism) as a means of continuing the struggle against Israel.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Nigeria, not a creature was stirring except for the members of the militant Islamic sect Boko Haram, preparing to bomb Christian churches across the country and setting on fire the cars of worshippers inside a church just outside of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state.

Christmastime in the United States now brings with it a new tradition that is becoming as familiar as eggnog, mistletoe, and the Macy’s Parade: skirmishes in the ongoing cultural war on Christmas. But as the recent attacks in Nigeria prove, in Muslim lands around the world there is also a very real and very violent war on Christmas, or more specifically on Christians themselves minding their own business in peaceful celebration of the birth of Jesus.

In Iraq, for example, all Christian services and masses were scheduled for daylight hours. Why? “Midnight Christmas Mass has been canceled in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk as a consequence of the never-ending assassinations of Christians,” bluntly stated Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. In Egypt, where we are witnessing the outright, state-assisted genocide of the dwindling Coptic Christian population, churches were also threatened with violence. Christian prisoners in Pakistan, incarcerated for such crimes as blasphemy against Islam, were refused Christmas Day visits from their families.

America itself has not been exempt in the past from Islamic Grinches determined to dampen Christmas spirits. Recall the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber, for example, and the failed Portland bomber who had hoped to slaughter and maim thousands of families gathered to watch the annual lighting of a community Christmas tree. Racist Islamophobes managed to prevent both those men from carrying out their jihadist obligations against Christmas celebrants. (FrontPage contributor Daniel Greenfield catalogues past Islamic Christmas assaults here).

But on this Christmas Day, Nigeria was the scene of the greatest holiday devastation. A series of coordinated bombings perpetrated by Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia across the country, struck three churches during services. Conflicting reports of casualties suggest that 40 or more were killed, at least 27 at a single location, and of course dozens more were wounded.

The New York Times reported that rescue workers faced not only a shortage of ambulances for the dozens wounded in the bombings, but also “an enraged crowd that initially blocked them from entering the church until soldiers arrived to restore order.” The Times didn’t specify what kind of enraged crowd would seek to block rescue workers from attempting to assist the suffering and dying Christians.

Setting off deadly holiday fireworks is becoming an annual tradition for Boko Haram, a sort of African Taliban, who carried out another series of lethal Christmas Eve bombings last year. It is often noted that the group’s name translates to “Western education is sacrilege,” but in fact its more official name in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” As part of that solemn commitment, Boko Haram has propagated at least 465 killings in Nigeria this year alone while spreading the Religion of Peace. Misunderstanders of Islam, as scholar of Islam Robert Spencer, tongue in cheek, might call them.

The multiculturalist Left wants to dilute Christmas into a vacuous, stern celebration of Winter, divorced from culture and religion.  Not content with banning crèches, trees and carols, anti-Christmas zealots are often even threatened by Santa Claus.  The transcendent authority behind Christmas, even in its commercialized form, is an unwanted challenge to the Left’s preference for all authority vested in the state and its secular clerisy.

Fox News has delighted in lampooning the ongoing absurdities of the “War on Christmas,” which sometimes even include banning green and red from classrooms.  The American Family Association, a para-church group, has also challenged the anti-Christmas campaign by affirming companies that affirm Christmas.

Naturally the Religious Left is troubled by this defense of Christmas, especially by Fox News or conservative Christians, both of whom it despises.  So the Religious Left has decided that the cultural defenders of Christmas are instead betraying Christmas by actually promoting commercialism.

“The Fox News Christmas proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to every conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and the gospel of American dominance,” insists Evangelical Left activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners at his most rhetorically lugubrious.

A colleague of Wallis at Sojourners has even labeled Fox News the “Headquarters of the Lord’s Resistance Army against the War on Christmas.”

Although this colleague noted that anti-Christmas crusaders were even warring against the display of Poinsettias,  Wallis is still blind with rage against his least favorite cable network:  “The Fox News Christmas heralds the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power, the adulation of money and markets, and the regular belittling or attacking of efforts to overcome poverty.”

Wow, who knew that Christmas, as supposedly defined by Fox News, is so cosmically evil?

Wallis claims that Fox is leveraging its “War on Christmas” campaign to discredit “atheists, agnostics, liberals, leftists, progressives, and separation of church and state zealots — i.e. Democrats.”  The long-time activist for leftist causes, and recipient of George Soros philanthropy, has his own politicized definition of Christmas.  Jesus was born in an “occupied country” under an “imperial power,” adding “political context” to the Christmas season.  “In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets,” Wallis announces.  “That Jesus was born poor…radically defines the social context…and clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.” Wallis rejoices that Jesus will “end our warring ways.”

Below is Colonel Allen West’s speech at the Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club on October 21, 2011. He is first introduced by David Horowitz. To see the video of the introduction and speech, click here.

David Horowitz: Colonel Allen West, one of the bravest and wisest members of Congress, and already — even though he’s only a freshman still — a leading voice in the Republican Party.

Colonel West is also the number-one congressman the Democratic National Committee has targeted for defeat.  In the coming national election, which promises to be the ugliest in our lifetime, he will be a prime focus of the Democrats’ incoming fire.

Have you noticed that the Republicans most viciously targeted by the Democrats are women and blacks?  There’s a reason for that.  Democrats will tell you that it is because they care about women and blacks.  But that just tells you what you already know — that Democrats are hypocrites and liars.

Democrats control the school systems of every major inner city in America, from Harlem to Detroit to South Central Los Angeles.  They control them 100 percent and have for more than 50 years.  There is no greater oppressor of poor black and Hispanic Americans than those responsible for these failing schools.  Democrats run them as a jobs program for adults and a cash cow for their leftwing union base.  Every year, the lives of millions of poor black and Hispanic children are destroyed by the Democrats who run these schools and fail to teach in their classrooms.  But Republicans are too polite to mention it.

Democrats view politics as war conducted by other means, a fact that Allen West is the only Republican I have known to recognize.  Democrats view women and blacks as cannon fodder in their war.  They are not ends in themselves, but a means to power.

If Democrats lost just 10 or 20 percent of the black vote nationally, they would lose virtually every state in the Union.  That’s why they hate and fear Colonel West.  They hate him because he is black, and they fear him because he will not fold under fire.

Democrats have stamped everyone in this country with a racial or gender tag, doled out privileges on the basis of the tags, and deployed the so-called race card as a weapon of choice.  “Race card” is a euphemism for the reflexive racism that is the Democrats’ first and last resort.

Republicans respond by pretending not to notice race.  Or gender, for that matter.  The Republican Party of California does not have a single female elected official.  How politically obtuse is that?  Why are there so few black elected officials in the Republican Party?  Because Republicans think that they are above noticing race or gender and make no sustained effort to recruit blacks or women.  That would be acting like Democrats.

Well, politically speaking, if you want to understand the art of political combat, study the Democrats.  They are very good at it.  Democratic attacks are always directed at rich, white Americans and their Republican defenders, and are always conducted on behalf of poor Americans and minorities, particularly black Americans, the victims.

Here’s why Democrats are terrified of an articulate black Republican like Colonel West, who will not be intimidated by their racist tactics.  He will blow their cover and destroy their game.

I loved it when Colonel West joined the Congressional Black Caucus, uninvited.

In effect, he said — you’ve got a race club, and I’m the correct race, so here I am.

Until that moment, the Congressional Black Caucus was a group of extremist left-wingers, which said to Americans the Left cares about black people, and the Democrats represent black people, and Republicans don’t.  In one gesture, Colonel West blew the lid off this charade and said — well, no.  Actually, black people can make up their own minds, just like everyone else.  And this black man understands that Democrats are bad news for African Americans, as they are for all Americans.

In an event last night, Colonel West pointed out that the head of the Congressional Black Caucus recently said that if Obama, a black Democrat, wasn’t in the White House, they would be marching on Washington.  Why?  Because while the nation is suffering from a disgraceful 9 percent unemployment rate, as Colonel West pointed out, 17 percent of black Americans are out of work — 20 percent of black males and 45 percent of black teenagers.  Obama and the Democrats have pursued policies that have devastated the black community.  But most Republicans are too proper, too above-it-all, to mention that black America has suffered more from Democratic policies than any other group; that Democrats’ policies have racial consequences.

Republicans are very good at talking about the current economic crisis in terms of numbers and ratios and deficits.  But they are very poor at talking about it in terms of the people that Democratic policies hurt.  They know that the subprime mortgage crisis was created by Bill Clinton and Barney Frank, and Obama’s ACORN criminals.  That’s a good beginning.

But what about the victims?  Who are the number-one victims of the Democratic housing tsunami?  They are poor, largely black and Hispanic Americans who were snookered into buying homes they couldn’t afford, and then lost them.  How traumatic is that?

But even worse is the devastation visited on the black middle class.  If you are rising on the economic ladder in America, your chief investment is your home.  That’s where your money is.  And because of the mortgage crisis created by Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and Obama’s ACORN, home values have dropped 30 percent.  In this crisis, middle-class African Americans have lost $100 billion.  Democrats don’t want any Republicans, and especially articulate black Republicans, telling black America that.

I’ve introduced many speakers on this platform, and many elected officials, but none who’ve inspired me or given me such confidence in the American future as Allen West.  Colonel West was born into a military family in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Martin Luther King.  Four generations of the West family have served in the United States military, defending our country.

Colonel West joined the army after graduating from the University of Tennessee, and also has a master’s degree in political science from Kansas State.  In the army, he was a member and training officer in the 325th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, and then assigned to the First Infantry Division, where he was a commanding officer in the 6th Field Artillery Regiment.

During this service, he was promoted to captain and was then deployed to Iraq during the Gulf War, where he participated in Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  He returned to the United States to participate in the Reserve Officers Training Program and was named ROTC Instructor of the Year in 1993.  He was then assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division and promoted to major.  He was then made the executive officer of the 377th Field Artillery Regiment.  In 2002, he was promoted to colonel and made a battalion commander in the 4th Infantry Division.  He was then deployed to Iraq for the final battle against Saddam Hussein and his monster regime.

While in Iraq, Colonel West was nearly court-martialed for attempting to pry information out of an Iraqi police officer who was suspected by an intelligence specialist of participating in a plot to ambush Colonel West and his men.  Colonel West’s crime was using rough methods to get information which might save the lives of his men.  This included the charge that he fired his weapon next to the man’s head and threatened to kill him, a method which immediately produced the information.

Colonel West was eventually fined $5,000 by his own government for the incident and retired after 22 years of service.  At his hearing, Colonel West was asked if he would act differently if the same circumstances came up again.  He said — if it’s the lives of my soldiers at stake, I would go through hell with a gasoline can.

The most important characteristic of a political leader is his moral fiber.  If our leaders can’t stand up under fire, if they won’t protect us and our country, we are lost.

Allen West was nearly court-martialed during a Republican administration, which was already folding under the attacks from the Left.  After voting for the war, the Democratic Party turned against it and conducted a five-year scorched-earth campaign against our men and women in arms.  They portrayed their own country as an aggressor without principle and their Commander-in-Chief as evil — a man who launched a war for no reason and lied to get hundreds of thousands of men and women killed.  The Democrats accused their country of wantonly murdering Iraqi civilians and of deceiving the American people to lure them into a war against an adversary who was no threat.  And no Republican fought back.

The Commander-in-Chief remained silent and never defended himself.  The Democratic saboteurs who conducted a psychological warfare campaign against their own military and their own country, who called their commander a traitor and their military personnel torturers and killers, got away with it, with no consequences.

With leaders on the one side who will attack our country and on the other who will not defend it, we are lost.  We have a long way to go and a lot to make up to get back to an America that we can be proud of, to an America that is proud of itself.  If there are men and women who can lead us back and restore our nation, Colonel Allen West is certainly one of them and is a model to others and to all of us.

Colonel West.

Allen West: Thank you.  Thank you so much.

You know, it is really an honor to be here.  And, you know, having gone to the University of Tennessee, and now being in Beverly Hills, I kind of understand how Jed Clampett felt when he finally got to move to Beverly Hills.

This is special.  Because four years ago this time, I was packing up my gear, getting ready to end a two-and-a-half-year assignment in Afghanistan down at Qandahar.  Here today, I’m standing before you all, here in Beverly Hills.  And I just want to tell you — that is a testimony to the greatness and exceptionalism of the United States of America.  Because parents who were born in 1920 and 1931 in South Georgia probably never thought that their young son, who was born in 1961 in that inner city, would ever have the opportunity to be here at the Four Seasons Hotel, speaking to such a distinguished group of Americans here in the city, which everyone recognizes as the capital of the entertainment industry of the world.  So, that’s what we must never forget, is the greatness of this nation.

But today, we’re here to talk about — how do we secure the greatness of this nation?  And I want to thank Mike so much for bringing me here to the Horowitz Freedom Center, to have this opportunity to speak to you all.  And I just want to understand one simple thing — the moxie that it takes to make an ideological pivot, which is what Mr. David Horowitz did.  To sit now and be such a strong champion of conservative values, to publicly denounce the things that you once stood passionately for — that’s not easy.  Because now he has taken on that great liberal establishment in places where its foothold is the strongest.

But I know one simple thing about Mr. David Horowitz — that he is committed to ensuring that our young people — the future of this United States of America, these great states, this great Constitutional republic — enjoy the freedom, and decide for themselves what they can believe in.  And he recognizes how crucially important it is that our schools and universities be places that are wholly and deeply welcoming for all perspectives, and not just those of the Left, the center Left and far Left.

So David, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you’re doing.

Before I get started, I want to give everyone a framework about our discussion today about national security.  Cuts to military [in strength] — today, the United States Army has 569,400 soldiers.  With the force budgets that we put in place, about $478 billion over the next 10 years, that will take the military, the army, down to 481,000.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, it will take the United States Army down to 426,000.  The United States Marine Corps today sits at 202,000 Marines.  Under the current force structure and budget cuts, they will go down to 173,000.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, they will go down to 145,000.

In 1990, the Army had 172 combat maneuver battalions.  Today, we have 100.  Under the current funding, we will go to 78.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, we go down to 60 to 70.

Naval warships — in 1990, 546.  Today, we have 285.  We’re going to go down to 263.  And if the Super Committee fails to do their job, we will go down to 238.

United States Air Force fighters — 4,355 in 1990.  Today, we have 1,990.  We could go down to 1,512.  Strategic bombers — in 1990, we had 282.  If the Super Committee fails to do their job, we will go down to 101.  Strategic and tactical airlift — in 1990, we had 872; with the current funding, 572.  And if the Super Committee fails to do its job, we will go down to 494.

Those numbers are what is happening in the United States of America when we talk about our national security.  And for those of you that don’t know, I do sit on the House Armed Services Committee.  I sit on two subcommittees — the Military Personnel and Emerging Threats and Capabilities, which does have the oversight of our Special Operations forces.

So with that being said, came here to talk to you about what I think is still the most important issue for the United States of America.  And that’s our national security.  How do we stand strong in the face of internal and external threats that seek to tear us down?  There are those who are uncomfortable talking about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.  But I think it’s critical that we have that conversation.

You see, our enemies believe that the things which make us great — they think it actually makes us weak.  They see us as tolerant, pluralistic and inclusive.  And they believe that those values will be our undoing.  If we avoid mentioning the dangers we face for fear we’ll offend someone, then we let our oppressors win.  Because when tolerance becomes a one-way street, it will lead to cultural suicide.  And if we continue to show them that they’re right — and that we are weak and unable to defend ourselves — then we are not holding true to our American way.

We must not fall prey to the need of being PC, politically correct, to those who are morally devoid.  Instead, we must demonstrate that we can still be strong when it comes to protecting those principles and values for which we stand — that we are doubly capable of rooting out evil and bringing it to justice.  Our values animate us and give us the legitimacy that allows us to exist in this republic — and that far from bringing about the downfall of this great experiment in democracy that we call America, those are the reasons why we thrive.

We must be ever-vigilant, for there will always be those who are seeking to bring about our destruction.  And for us to believe otherwise would be foolish, and totally unbefitting of what we tend to be, which is a superpower.

But vigilance requires realism on our parts — not blowing the threat of terrorism out of proportion, but accepting it for what it is — a very real danger to our cherished way of life.  There should be no question whatsoever on the lips of the world about America’s commitment to eradicating evil.  And it must be absolute.

And the first step in combating evil is being honest with ourselves about the scale of that which we are facing and who’s behind it.  We have to now understand that it is an Islamic totalitarianism, a great black cloud that stains our age, and it’s up to us to rise to the occasion of defeating it.  We must come to the grips with a theocratic political ideology that is fundamentally the antithesis to our American principles, way of life, and our values.

In our Declaration of Independence, it says — we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights — among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And if we fail to protect the first of these rights, we fail to protect them all.  Because without your life, there is no other safeguard that will matter.  And that is why national security is, and must remain, America’s number-one priority.

And we have to do a better job in supporting our men and women on this present 21st century battlefield.  That means not just with bumper stickers, but with proper funding and supplies, with assistance for their families, with high-quality healthcare when they’re injured, and with good-paying jobs for them when they come home, when their tours of duty are complete.  Because an 11.7 percent unemployment rate for our veterans is unacceptable.  It is reprehensible, and we should not allow that to happen.

It is easy in the aftermath of conflict periods to become complacent, to lose sight of the reason for investing in our troops.  And we have seen this play out in our history.  We have seen it after the World Wars.  We saw it after the Cold War.  And we’re again seeing it today.  We spend and spend as the wars rage on, and then watch as our military atrophies for the lack of funding as soon as they’re over.  We cannot continue with the practice that I call the peaks and valleys of military readiness, where we try to ramp up for an operation and then, as soon as we believe that that operation’s complete, we look to the military to be the bill-payers for the fiscal irresponsibility of this nation.  And we put their readiness and their preparedness at stake.  That type of thinking cannot be any more misguided.

The bottom line is this — if you wait until your forces are called upon to fight before you think about their needs, then the war is already over.  You’ve already lost it.  Our servicemen and -women are the very embodiment of everything that’s right about America.  And after 22 years of serving beside them, after having a father who served in World War II, an older brother who served in Vietnam, and a nephew who is serving now, I think I know a little bit about the steel and the spines of the American fighting man and woman.

The young people who comprise the armed forces of the United States are, without a doubt, today the strongest and most competent soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coastguardsmen the world has ever known.  They serve willingly and with valor.  And they are imminently deserving of our gratitude and our support.  As long as we are faithful to the cause and to those who fight it, as long as we recognize what we are up against and resolve that we will not be defeated, there’s no doubt in my mind — and should not be any doubt in any of your minds — that we will come out on top.  Because there’s a resiliency in the American fighting spirit that cannot be broken, even in the face of the impossible.

We are a nation that was forged in the heat of a revolution, that has truly been through hell and back, that has been through civil wars, world wars, regional combat conflicts.  But the flame of our fighting spirit continues to burn as bright as ever.  Even through the darkest days and the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, we somehow rose to that challenge.  And that is why I have great faith in our ability to weather any storm.  Because that is, after all, the American way.

But for some, that means just weapons and ammunition.  But what I have to tell you today — it means strategic foresight.  American troops, when you study our history, have never lost at the tactical level on the ground.  But if we do not have leaders that can provide for them well thought-out objectives, they can win every single battle, but we will still lose the war in the end.  For those who served in Vietnam, they can tell you that is exactly what happened.

So let me ask you a question — when was the last time you heard anyone, any leader, over the past 10 years or so, say — these are our strategic objectives as we prosecute this war?  War on terror is a horrible misnomer.  Terror is a tactic.  A nation cannot fight a tactic.  But yet, we are [ruttle a ship].  Because when you read the most recent national security strategy coming out of the Obama Administration, it talks more about global warming, and it never mentions radical Islamism, jihadism or violent Muslim extremism.  It wants our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines to fight the weather.

See, the problem is you haven’t heard that.  You haven’t heard anyone talk about this new 21st century battlefield, which is so different from the battlefield that I participated on in 1991 as a young captain in Desert Shield-Desert Storm.  We have to recognize the emergence of the non-state, non-uniform belligerent that does not respect borders and boundaries.  We have to understand that we must move away from a Cold War-era forward-deployed military, and get back toward a power projection military that can go into all of these geographic areas of responsibility and deny the enemy sanctuary, to cut off his flow of men, material, resources and supplies.  It means that we have to go back to those numbers that I gave you first and foremost.

And we’ve got to do something that we have not done since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  We’ve got to go geographic area of responsibility by geographic area of responsibility, and look  at the requirements that are necessary based upon an analysis of the enemy and an intelligence assessment that sets our capability and our capacity for the next 20 to 30 years.

But I can tell you, that’s not what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  When you read things like Francis Fukuyama, who wrote that this is the end of the world as we know it in all type of ideological conflict — he had it absolutely wrong.  If you had instead read Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” — Huntington had it right.  But yet, once again, we saw the military as the bill-payer of such things such as midnight basketball.

We have to get away from nation-building and occupation-style warfare, and understand that it’s the strategic mobility and maneuverability that is the strength of these great United States of America and our military, so that we can then be in those places where the enemy is not suspecting us to be, and we can strike him quickly, and we can pull back.  On this modern-day battlefield, we don’t have any need to think that it’s our responsibility to rebuild.  Because that’s not what this enemy understands nor respects.  They understand strength, they understand you going in, they understand you kicking his tail and then being ready to kick his tail again.  That is what strategic-level thinkers need to be considering.

We need to look at our rules of engagement.  When we have rules of engagement that say we cannot engage the enemy until he shows you some hostile intent — well, having been in a few firefights, in two to three seconds, someone starts to lose their life.  And if you’re telling our fighting men and women that they have to wait those two to three seconds, that they have to wait for this enemy to show that he is a bad guy, that he has hostile intent, then we do not have the initiative on this battlefield.  We have to have the rules of engagement that allow our men and women to be able to be successful on the battlefield, and be on the offense.  Because you don’t win on the defense.

It means that we must starting sitting back and looking at all of these different countries.  We must look at Iran and understand that we’ve been at war with Iran since they took our hostages, that Iran is the one that is the number-one state sponsor of terrorism.  They are the center of this Islamic totalitarianism.  And the fact that now we have had a President that says we’re going to zero out our combat force in Iraq — I can tell you that Muqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army, are just waiting for 1 January.  And it will be a bloodbath.

We have to understand that now the Kurds in Northern Iraq will once again look and say — we’ve been abandoned for the second time, just the same as we did after Desert Shield-Desert Storm.  That affects your credibility as a strategic superpower.

We need to look at Afghanistan and Pakistan, and understand that you will never have a secure Afghanistan until you contend with the enemy that has sanctuaries over in Pakistan.  The Hikani network is now far more powerful than al-Qaeda is.  And we know where their sanctuaries are.  If they don’t respect the borders and boundaries, then we must not, either.  And the ISI are not on our side.  But yet, we continue to spend and send $3 billion of aid over to a Pakistan which really is deteriorating into a radical Islamist state.

We have to look at China and understand that we are already in an economic war with China.  When you have a China that owns 27 percent of your national debt, that affects your foreign policy, that affects your national security.  And the trade and balance that China now has is not going towards building up a better infrastructure, the standard of living for the Chinese citizen.  Just recently, their first aircraft carrier rolled out.  Their strategic air force is being built.  And a lot of that technology they’re starting to get from us, even.

We have to understand that China poses an economic threat to us which will eventually become a military threat.  Because, don’t forget — when was the last time a major Asian nation invested in its naval force?  I think we all remember what happened then.

We must understand that Russia is still more so Soviet Union than it is a modern Russia.  And if you are to be fooled, Vladimir Putin is still KGB.

We must understand that you have a Stalinist regime in North Korea.  But once again, they are able to act out and continue to have international extortion because they believe that China has their back.  And as long as China owns 27 percent of our debt, they will continue to act out.  We must understand that Taiwan is very nervous about the military growth and development of China.

We must understand in Egypt that since Hosni Mubarak has been deposed, nothing has gone right in Egypt.  Ask the Coptic Christians.  Ask Israel what is happening.  The number-one strongest political entity in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood.  A lot of people are cheering today about Muammar Khadafi losing his life.  But what happens next?  Someone tell me, where are the chemical weapons, the biological weapons, the 30,000 shoulder-fired [man pas] that are missing from that country?  My concern is that somehow they will make it through Egypt, and the next thing you know, they’ll be over in Gaza Strip.

We must look at Syria and understand that that is still a satellite of Iran.  And they do not want to see that fall.  Because so goes Syria, then so may affect that link to Hezbollah.

We have to look at what is happening south of our border, in Mexico.  Illegal immigration is a national security issue.  Because there are certain elements that are coming across our border that are not favorable to us.  And we know that Iran was working with drug cartels to execute this assassination in Washington, D.C.  And the drug cartels are getting stronger and stronger.

We must be concerned about Venezuela, and the influence that they are having in South America, as well as the alliances that they are developing with Iran.  We must be concerned about Turkey.  Prime Minister Erdogan is taking that country down the road of being a radical Islamist.  And the deteriorating relations that we see between Turkey and Israel should cause us a lot of concern.

We must be worried about Yemen and Somalia.  Because we are playing whack-a-mole with this enemy, who will always try to establish himself anywhere that he can find a volatile, unstable situation.

We must understand that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.  And freedom is under attack every day on faraway streets.  We have to be fearless in our support of our closest ally in the Middle East, which is the modern-day state of Israel.  Because anything less –

Anything less will weaken Israel, and there are threats from all sides.  Israel and America are united by a common enemy — this Islamic totalitarianism and terrorism.  And our shared commitment of liberty and freedom, and freedom of worship and democracy, are what brings us together.  But I am concerned, when you look at Gaza Strip and you see what happens with Hamas and Hezbollah.  Because the UN Mandate 1701 is not being strictly enforced.  So now you have 50,000 rockets and missiles that are stationed in Southern Israel, all pointed south toward Israel — Southern Lebanon, I’m sorry — pointed toward Israel.

And I must admit there’s an incredible precedent that has been established, when you trade one soldier for 1,037 terrorists.  If the recidivism rate is 10 percent, think about what that brings about.  We have now told a terrorist organization that a modern-day nation state is willing to go into negotiations.  That is not a good thing.  What happens if they get two soldiers next time?

Who is Davidi Gilo? That’s the question the San Jose Mercury News asked ten years ago. The question wasn’t an unreasonable one. Davidi Gilo had seemingly appeared out of nowhere to flutter to the top of the contributors list for the Democratic Party. At 1.2 million dollars, not only was he the single biggest Silicon Valley donor, but he was also the third largest donor to the Democratic Party in the country.

There was no reason for Gilo to be throwing that much money around. That same year Forbes had placed him at the very bottom of its list of tech industry high rollers. But though Gilo was 99th on the Forbes list, he managed to be at the top of the liberal donors list, tossing something like 1 percent of his net worth to the party.

Davidi Gilo was a member of Soros’ Democracy Alliance, which was set up to direct large amounts of money into the causes of the Left. A number of other board members of the Democracy Alliance also ended up closely involved in J Street, including Patricia Bauman, Gail Furman, Deborah Sagner, as well as Herb and Marion Sandler.

Glance today at the J Street bio page and you’ll see that Gilo’s name is one of the rare few that doesn’t come with any supplementary information. No titles or background. No “Former President of X” or “Board Member of Y” or anything at all despite the fact that Davidi Gilo is not just another name at J Street. He’s the chairman of the board of J Street.

Besides being the chairman of the board of J Street; he’s also a major donor. And before J Street, he was on the executive committee of the Israel Policy Forum. The IPF was a J Street predecessor with enough overlap that J Street could be considered a rebranding of it.

J Street is the front group for the agenda of powerful liberal billionaires, one of many groups that serve this purpose. Like the old Communist Party front groups, different groups are targeted at different demographics. J Street was created to provide a left-wing Jewish lobby that would demand concessions from Israel on behalf of the terrorists.

But the Gilo story goes back long before all that. The son of an Israeli government bureaucrat at a time when the bureaucracy was a network of left-wing associates, Gilo cut his teeth on left-wing activism in student union leadership and then in protests against the Lebanon War.

For Israeli leftists, the Lebanon War was the equivalent of the Vietnam War, allowing them to build a strong anti-national movement. As a Peace Now member, Gilo participated in an organization whose co-founders had a vision of bringing down Israel and gunning down those who didn’t comply. Or as Peace Now co-founder Yigal Tumarkin put it: “My true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil and killed them.”

Still Peace Now wasn’t radical enough for Gilo. One of his comrades said that they viewed the organization as too anemic and together tried to see how they could become even more militant.

Moving through the United States and Europe, Gilo made his fortune selling tech companies to multinationals with deep pockets. But when the multinationals didn’t show up to make an offer, then problems arose.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed that Hezbollah possessed chemical and biological weapons. The news comes as the IDF contends the terror organization has now amassed more than 50,000 missiles and rockets, heightening Israel’s concerns over its vulnerability to a Hezbollah assault.

The assertion by Gates followed reports in April 2011 that Libyan rebels had ransacked chemical weapons storage depots in and around the Libyan city of Benghazi. There they obtained at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells, which they sold to both Hezbollah and Hamas.

Not surprisingly, Iran was believed to be the broker of the deal. Of course, Iran has long been accused of supplying Hezbollah with chemical weapons, the last time in 2009 when chemical traces were discovered in a Hezbollah weapons warehouse.

Although Hezbollah denies having chemically-armed missiles or rockets, it doesn’t deny their importance to the terror organization. According to Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, “These are our pride and dignity… no one will be able to grab them, neither in Lebanon nor in the world.”

Unfortunately for Israelis, Hezbollah’s precious stockpile has now surpassed over 50,000 missiles and rockets according to the IDF. The IDF has also determined the number of pre-designated targets of Hezbollah launch sites to have grown from around 200 in 2006 to now somewhere in the thousands.

In fact, in April 2011 Israeli officials had already identified 550 underground bunkers, 300 surveillance sites and 100 other facilities south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, the zone where Hezbollah is supposedly banned from keeping weapons under the UN-sponsored truce that ended the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war.

The entire situation has added to growing Israeli concern over its increasing vulnerability from Hezbollah’s already enormous and growing stockpile of weaponry, which according to former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens can now “reach every corner of Israel and threaten its entire civilian population.”

Even though Israel has a newly deployed Iron Dome anti-missile system, that system remains vulnerable to massive salvos fired from Hezbollah’s short-range missile systems. For example, during the 34-day war in 2006, Hezbollah unleashed nearly 4,000 missiles and rockets — around 120 a day — into northern Israel.

However, 2009 Wikileaks documents reveal Israel expects a new war with Hezbollah to last two months, with 500 missiles a day, including 100 that would reach Tel Aviv.  More worrisome is that Israel’s Home Front Command admitted in April 2011 that only 31 percent of Israel’s 7 million people had been supplied gas masks.

Added into this troubling equation are reports surfacing of Hezbollah busily moving weapons from the chaos in Syria and distributing them immediately to its forces so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.

The death of Osama bin Laden has driven a stake into the heart of the Left, causing progressives to bleed and moan as their unholy alliance with radical Islam absorbs the devastating May 2 blow.

The radical Islamic half of the romance is in agony as it sheds bitter tears for the mass murderer. Indeed, Hamas, Hezbollah, the armed wing of Fatah, and tens of thousands of radical Muslims around the world have prominently displayed their sorrow and anger for the world to see.

The alliance’s leftist half is, meanwhile, also deeply grieving. The guru of the leftist political faith, Noam Chomsky, is responsibly leading the way. Having distinguished himself, among other intriguing ways, as a Jew who has traveled to Lebanon to embrace personally the leaders of Hezbollah, whose stated top priority is to rid the world of Jews, the M.I.T. professor emeritus has not disappointed the faithful, progressive flock. Furiously responding to the assassination of the Left’s idol, Chomsky fumed in his recent article: “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

The al-Qaeda leader’s killing is an outrage, in Chomsky’s mind, because Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” Chomsky is outraged not only that the operation was clearly “a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,” but also that its victim had never been legally proven to be the perpetrator of 9/11. Undoubtedly, Chomsky’s Gulag Denial mindset continues unabated, for having shamelessly attempted to deny the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust in Cambodia was clearly not enough to satiate Chomsky’s totalitarian odyssey.

Following in the leftist guru’s tracks, Glenn Greenwald fumed over at Salon.com that Americans were cheering and feeling patriotic that “someone just got two bullets put in their skull.” This is terrible in leftist eyes because that “someone” is not George W. Bush but rather America’s most wanted enemy-terrorist. Greenwald is also very upset that a question lingers over whether bin Laden really had to be killed and not taken prisoner instead.

Heaven forbid! A targeted assassination of the leader of al-Qaeda, a jihadist terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent American citizens. Oh, the unjustness of it all! One wonders whether Greenwald will be able to soldier on.

Meanwhile, Curtis Doebbler, a leftist “human rights” lawyer who teaches at a Palestinian university, grieves that the “West is now celebrating the death of someone who, however misled and wrong-minded, was a person who was willing to fight for the poorest and the most vulnerable people in the world to the very end of his life.” He continues: “That the US had to kill him in violation of international law makes all the more believable Osama Bin Laden’s claims of Western hypocrisy and the need for a better alternative.”

The “alternative” that Doebbler is dreaming of and that Osama had in mind? Well, it’s not that complicated: it’s what Islamists are offering leftists – and that which leftists are salivating over – in their unholy alliance: Sharia law.

Let’s also not be too confused over why “progressive” feminist Naomi Klein called out for bringing “Najaf to New York” in her infamous 2004 column in The Nation, in which she reached her hand out in solidarity to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Islamo-fascist Mahdi Army in the Iraqi Shi’ite stronghold of Najaf. Klein understands very well what bringing Najaf to New York means: the Shi’ite stronghold, where Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army at one time ran their torture chambers and sowed their terror, replicated on America’s shores.

The list of leftists weeping over the death of Osama is endless: Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun complaining that killing Osama is “not justice”; Laura Flanders at The Nation condemning the raid as “Americans seeking sense and getting vengeance”; former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt denouncing Osama’s death as “clearly a violation of international law”; and the terrorist-loving Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin unable to disguise her agony over at the Huffington Post, counseling us not to sink “into a false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Bin Laden’s passing.”

It is no surprise that members of the political faith are mourning over the death of Osama. The context for their grief is perfectly explained, as I have documented in United in Hate, by how much they celebrated 9/11. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to regain the picture. It is important to understand the Left’s sadness right now by briefly recreating the chilling scene of a decade ago.

September 11, 2001, clearly represented a personal vindication for leftists everywhere. The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked glee from them – as they clearly saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with American citizens. For leftist believers, the jihadist terror war now promised to succeed where Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself.

In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.

Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, Chomsky exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.

Leftist academics across the country echoed Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions. History professor Robin Kelley of New York University stated: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.” History professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina asserted that “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.” Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, the renowned Marxist historian, expressed his personal confusion about “which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University, felt 9/11 was a justified response to the “fascism” of U.S. foreign policy. Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, thought the WTC buildings were justifiable targets because they were a “symbol of today’s wealth and trade.” Robert Paul Churchill, a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, rationalized that the terrorist attack was justified. “What the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the poor and its starving; the expression of a soulless pop culture . . . and a domineering attitude that insists on having our own way no matter what the cost to others.”

Of course, the infamous Ward Churchill, as we know, outdid all the others, blaming not only Bush and America but the “little Eichmanns” themselves for the attacks.

Churchill, Chomsky, and their kin on the academic Left were joined by prominent figures in the progressive culture at large. Norman Mailer stepped forward to opine that the suicide hijackers were “brilliant.” In his view, the attack was completely understandable, since “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Oliver Stone affirmed that he saw 9/11 as a “revolt” and compared the ensuing Palestinian celebrations with those that had attended the French and Russian Revolutions, while Susan Sontag held that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” From the religious camp, Tony Campolo, a leading Christian evangelist who served as one of former President Clinton’s “spiritual advisers,” believed that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the Crusades.

The American flag, a hated symbol to the Left, also became a target. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver was incredulous that her daughter’s kindergarten teacher instructed the students to come to school the next day dressed in red, white, and blue. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt had the same reaction regarding her teenage daughter’s impulse to fly an American flag outside the family home. Pollitt told her that she could “buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This was, Pollitt explained, because the American flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war.”

The death of Osama bin Laden has driven a stake into the heart of the Left, causing progressives to bleed and moan as their unholy alliance with radical Islam absorbs the devastating May 2 blow.

The radical Islamic half of the romance is in agony as it sheds bitter tears for the mass murderer. Indeed, Hamas, Hezbollah, the armed wing of Fatah, and tens of thousands of radical Muslims around the world have prominently displayed their sorrow and anger for the world to see.

The alliance’s leftist half is, meanwhile, also deeply grieving. The guru of the leftist political faith, Noam Chomsky, is responsibly leading the way. Having distinguished himself, among other intriguing ways, as a Jew who has traveled to Lebanon to embrace personally the leaders of Hezbollah, whose stated top priority is to rid the world of Jews, the M.I.T. professor emeritus has not disappointed the faithful, progressive flock. Furiously responding to the assassination of the Left’s idol, Chomsky fumed in his recent article: “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

The al-Qaeda leader’s killing is an outrage, in Chomsky’s mind, because Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” Chomsky is outraged not only that the operation was clearly “a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,” but also that its victim had never been legally proven to be the perpetrator of 9/11. Undoubtedly, Chomsky’s Gulag Denial mindset continues unabated, for having shamelessly attempted to deny the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust in Cambodia was clearly not enough to satiate Chomsky’s totalitarian odyssey.

Following in the leftist guru’s tracks, Glenn Greenwald fumed over at Salon.com that Americans were cheering and feeling patriotic that “someone just got two bullets put in their skull.” This is terrible in leftist eyes because that “someone” is not George W. Bush but rather America’s most wanted enemy-terrorist. Greenwald is also very upset that a question lingers over whether bin Laden really had to be killed and not taken prisoner instead.

Heaven forbid! A targeted assassination of the leader of al-Qaeda, a jihadist terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent American citizens. Oh, the unjustness of it all! One wonders whether Greenwald will be able to soldier on.

Meanwhile, Curtis Doebbler, a leftist “human rights” lawyer who teaches at a Palestinian university, grieves that the “West is now celebrating the death of someone who, however misled and wrong-minded, was a person who was willing to fight for the poorest and the most vulnerable people in the world to the very end of his life.” He continues: “That the US had to kill him in violation of international law makes all the more believable Osama Bin Laden’s claims of Western hypocrisy and the need for a better alternative.”

The “alternative” that Doebbler is dreaming of and that Osama had in mind? Well, it’s not that complicated: it’s what Islamists are offering leftists – and that which leftists are salivating over – in their unholy alliance: Sharia law.

Let’s also not be too confused over why “progressive” feminist Naomi Klein called out for bringing “Najaf to New York” in her infamous 2004 column in The Nation, in which she reached her hand out in solidarity to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Islamo-fascist Mahdi Army in the Iraqi Shi’ite stronghold of Najaf. Klein understands very well what bringing Najaf to New York means: the Shi’ite stronghold, where Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army at one time ran their torture chambers and sowed their terror, replicated on America’s shores.

The list of leftists weeping over the death of Osama is endless: Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun complaining that killing Osama is “not justice”; Laura Flanders at The Nation condemning the raid as “Americans seeking sense and getting vengeance”; former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt denouncing Osama’s death as “clearly a violation of international law”; and the terrorist-loving Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin unable to disguise her agony over at the Huffington Post, counseling us not to sink “into a false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Bin Laden’s passing.”

It is no surprise that members of the political faith are mourning over the death of Osama. The context for their grief is perfectly explained, as I have documented in United in Hate, by how much they celebrated 9/11. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to regain the picture. It is important to understand the Left’s sadness right now by briefly recreating the chilling scene of a decade ago.

September 11, 2001, clearly represented a personal vindication for leftists everywhere. The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked glee from them – as they clearly saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with American citizens. For leftist believers, the jihadist terror war now promised to succeed where Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself.

In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.

Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, Chomsky exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.

Leftist academics across the country echoed Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions. History professor Robin Kelley of New York University stated: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.” History professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina asserted that “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.” Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, the renowned Marxist historian, expressed his personal confusion about “which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University, felt 9/11 was a justified response to the “fascism” of U.S. foreign policy. Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, thought the WTC buildings were justifiable targets because they were a “symbol of today’s wealth and trade.” Robert Paul Churchill, a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, rationalized that the terrorist attack was justified. “What the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the poor and its starving; the expression of a soulless pop culture . . . and a domineering attitude that insists on having our own way no matter what the cost to others.”

Of course, the infamous Ward Churchill, as we know, outdid all the others, blaming not only Bush and America but the “little Eichmanns” themselves for the attacks.

Churchill, Chomsky, and their kin on the academic Left were joined by prominent figures in the progressive culture at large. Norman Mailer stepped forward to opine that the suicide hijackers were “brilliant.” In his view, the attack was completely understandable, since “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Oliver Stone affirmed that he saw 9/11 as a “revolt” and compared the ensuing Palestinian celebrations with those that had attended the French and Russian Revolutions, while Susan Sontag held that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” From the religious camp, Tony Campolo, a leading Christian evangelist who served as one of former President Clinton’s “spiritual advisers,” believed that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the Crusades.

The American flag, a hated symbol to the Left, also became a target. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver was incredulous that her daughter’s kindergarten teacher instructed the students to come to school the next day dressed in red, white, and blue. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt had the same reaction regarding her teenage daughter’s impulse to fly an American flag outside the family home. Pollitt told her that she could “buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This was, Pollitt explained, because the American flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war.”

As last week’s SEAL strike on Osama bin Laden continues to sink in, the military codenames given to earlier efforts to eliminate this one-man terror superpower come to mind: Operation Infinite Reach was the Pentagon’s codename for the 1998 missile attacks on bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan and a purported chemical facility in Sudan with tenuous links to bin Laden; and the original codename for the post-9/11 campaign actually was Operation Infinite Justice—not Operation Enduring Freedom. To be sure, these codenames are just words. But set against the backdrop of the last decade—and especially last week—these words have a deep meaning that is not lost on America’s enemies.

In short, the enemy is learning that the U.S. military has staying power—and gets its man. This is an important message to get across because America’s enemies—especially bin Laden and his ilk—grew to doubt both propositions over the last few decades.

From bin Laden’s vantage point, America talked tough but seldom if ever followed through. “When tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he yelped. “The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim and a remedy to the chests of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.”

For the record, he was referring to the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 Marines and forced President Reagan to abruptly pull out a U.S. peacekeeping force; the “Blackhawk Down” debacle in 1993, which ended with 18 Americans killed in an ambush, the man responsible for the ambush—Farrah Aidid—granted safe passage and U.S. forces hastily withdrawn by President Clinton; and the 2000 USS Cole attack in Aden, which claimed 17 sailors and went unanswered. Add to this list Iran’s attack on the U.S. embassy in 1979, a humiliation which was never punished or avenged, and Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which was reversed by a U.S.-led coalition but left Hussein in power and left many in the Middle East with the impression that America didn’t have the nerve to finish the job.

This is the prism through which bin Laden saw America. This is why he concluded, with a smirk, that America was a paper tiger lacking both the stomach and the staying power for the kind of war he unleashed on 9/11.

He was wrong.

Indeed, in my discussions with active-duty officers, many say the reason we had to go into Afghanistan and Iraq—boots on the ground—was not only to topple terror states like the Taliban’s Afghanistan, not only to remove regimes with the means and motives to do worse than maim Manhattan, not only to begin the long-overdue process of remaking the Middle East, not only to end the cynical realism that propped up Hussein and his kind, but to obliterate this notion that America could not or would not fight.

It is not yet clear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact President Obama’s promised draw down of American troops from Afghanistan set to begin in July. The Wall Street Journal reports that staff officers with Central Command in Kabul have written a report with the recommendation that only 5,000 troops be rotated home in July with another 5,000 withdrawn by year’s end.

But this report was written before bin Laden’s death. And the war’s opponents in the administration and on Capitol Hill are calling for a faster timetable in withdrawing American troops, making the argument that bin Laden’s demise has weakened al-Qaeda to the point that the president can bring our commitment in Afghanistan to an end on schedule in 2014.

Meanwhile, even as some in Congress are calling for a redefinition of the War on Terror, the facts on the ground in Afghanistan may prevent President Obama from satisfying war critics because of the slow pace of progress in training shown by the Afghan army and police and the inability of the Afghan government to entice the Taliban to negotiate.

When the president announced the 30,000 increase in troops for Afghanistan in December of 2009, it was with the understanding that the number of soldiers to be withdrawn beginning with the July, 2011 target date would depend on both the military success on the ground as well as the progress made by Afghan police and army units in their training. To date, the military is pleased with their counterterrorism strategy that has seen substantial progress in the south, especially in Kandahar province where the Taliban is strongest.

But the success in training the Afghan army and police has been uneven at best. For example, in February, we withdrew units from the Pech Valley in northeastern Afghanistan, turning over security to Afghan forces. Within weeks, the Taliban was back, setting up bases and taking over towns and villages that once had been cleared of them. In some villages, the newly trained police and army simply melted away. While there have been local successes with the new Afghan units, the military believes the training will go on for a decade or more before the Afghans will be able to take complete responsibility for their own security.

But there are some in the administration who believe that bin Laden’s death will change the psychology of the war and lead to a more measured draw down of troops. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls bin Laden’s death a “gamechanger” and believes that besides delivering a blow to al-Qaeda, the terrorist’s death may make it easier for the Taliban to agree to a negotiated a settlement with President Harmid Karzai’s government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also sounded optimistic about the salutary effect in Afghanistan as a result of the al-Qaeda leader’s death. “We must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts,” she said.

Others, like Senator Lindsey Graham, believe now is not the time to pull back, but rather, to increase our efforts. Graham believes the killing of bin Laden has given the US effort in Afghanistan “momentum” and that what “we ought to do is pour it on now.”

But voices in Congress calling for a quick pullout from Afghanistan see bin Laden’s death in a different light. A leading Republican war critic in the House, Representative Jason Chaffetz, wrote that “it was not the 100,000 troops that took out bin Laden.” He believes we can still be effective fighting terrorism even if we bring most of the troops home.

Indeed, there is a strategy being crafted that anticipates the American withdrawal that would rely heavily on special forces to fight with the Afghan army as well as participate in the efforts to rebuild the civilian infrastructure. The Associated Press reports that the strategy is a “hybrid” between conventional counterterrorism strategies and a more Afghan-friendly policy that sees the role of special forces as trainers and facilitators rather than pure warriors. It has apparently led to some local successes that have encouraged General David Petreaus to expand the program.

There is nothing bad about Osama bin Laden’s death, nothing our post-modern, post-heroic culture should apologize for, anguish over, deconstruct or lament. The elimination of bin Laden—and not by some faceless drone or double-dealing “ally,” but by the force and skill of American arms striking at close range—is a victory for the country, for the notion of justice, for America’s troops and intelligence officers. This is a good day to be an American.

How good? News of bin Laden’s death made today’s crop of college students—poisoned by years of moral relativism and politically correct bunk equating all uses of force as the same, declaring war as our enemy, teaching that nothing is worth fighting for or against—take to the streets and spontaneously sing the Star Spangled Banner while waving the American flag. They were waving the Marine Corps flag and Old Glory on the streets in front of the White House, chanting “USA!” in Times Square, climbing up trees to hoist the colors—our colors—high. Anything that can do that is wonderful and wondrous.

They have every right to be proud and wave flags and sing songs of victory. This is a great country that can do great things in war and in peace, with a great political system that can sustain and win long, twilight struggles, protected by a great military that is amazing not just because of its reach and determination, but also because of its restraint.

Never forget that as our elite strike force of Navy SEALs hunted down a mass-murderer masquerading as a holy man, other U.S. forces were feeding the hungry in sub-Saharan Africa, trying to stop a massacre in Libya, nurturing a fragile peace in Iraq, building bridges while fighting the medieval Taliban in Afghanistan, fighting pirates off the Horn of Africa. In recent years, they have rescued Haiti and Pakistan and Sumatra and Japan after disasters of biblical proportion; liberated Iraqis and Afghanis from vast prison states; and shielded Kosovars and Kurds, Kuwaitis and Koreans.

Their work never ends and never ceases to amaze and humble. They are America’s very best not because they wear a uniform, but because of what they do in that uniform, which leads us to our system of government and politics. Our defenders take their oath to the country and its constitution, not to a man. It pays to recall that the U.S. military’s long hunt for bin Laden began in the 1990s and was the shared work of three administrations, three commanders-in-chief. They are very different men, serving at very different moments in history: one in the pre-9/11 world, in a decade when the burdens of leadership and history seemed to be quaint relics of some bygone era; one amid the flames and fury of bin Laden’s maiming of Manhattan and the Pentagon, in the early days of a new twilight struggle; one in a decade when the scars and memories of that terrible Tuesday had started to fade. Yet for all their differences and disagreements, flaws and failures, imperfections and indiscretions, they pursued the same goal, the latter two with virtually the same team of warriors, generals and commanders in place, keeping just enough of the country on the same page to realize this day.

That’s the kind of tenacity and resolve that, viewing America through the distorted and grimy prism of our own popular culture, bin Laden and his ilk will never understand. Beneath the soft, flabby outer edges of our nation, there exists muscle and bone that can unleash an unspeakable, unrelenting fury. As one wartime president soberly put it, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war.”

After mocking America as impotent and cowardly, the enemy now understands this.

Despite claims by NATO’s military command — and President Obama himself — that killing Col. Muammar Qaddafi is not part of their military objective in Libya, they have set about to do just that. On April 30th, in what appears to be an attempt to assassinate Qaddafi through targeted air strikes, NATO missed getting Qaddafi and his wife, but allegedly killed one of Qaddafi’s sons and three grandchildren, a claim that Libyan rebels dispute and remains unconfirmed. Although the son in question happens to be the black sheep of the family and played very little part in the current fighting, the attack raises serious questions about NATO’s unstated commitment to directly effecting regime change in Libya — contrary to both UN authorization and President Obama’s pronouncements on the conflict.

Another NATO strike on April 30th badly damaged a non-military, non-governmental building housing the Libyan Down’s Syndrome Society. NATO is clearly willing to risk destroying civilian buildings, including schools, as part of its unauthorized campaign to take out Qaddafi. Nevertheless, the NATO mission’s operational commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, continues to maintain that NATO is only going after clear military targets.

“All NATO’s targets are military in nature,” Bouchard said, “and have been clearly linked to the Qaddafi regime’s systematic attacks on the Libyan population and populated areas. We do not target individuals.” Such denials of the obvious parrot the official US position, which distinguishes between the political goal of seeing Qaddafi go and the more limited “humanitarian” goal of protecting Libya’s civilians from Qaddafi’s forces. However, not everyone in the international coalition is willing to be so coy about the real objective. British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, for example, has said that Qaddafi is a “legitimate target.”

When the United Nations Security Council approved the use of military force in Libya on March 17, 2011, it authorized member states, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to “take all necessary measures” to protect civilians under threat of attack in the country. Supporters of Security Council Resolution 1973, including the United States, stressed that the military objective was solely to protect civilians from further harm. There is no authorization to use military force in order to bring about regime change through assassination of Libya’s leader or otherwise. Foreign occupation of Libya in any shape or form is also expressly prohibited.

Initially, NATO, led by US air power, adhered to the limits set by the UN resolution. It intervened just in time to prevent an impending massacre of civilians in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. It established a no-fly zone and attacked Qaddafi’s ground troops and weaponry to further protect civilians from harm.

However, when the Libyan regime did not immediately collapse and the rebel forces proved incapable of mounting a serious challenge without substantial assistance from the international coalition, NATO upped the ante. It made a deliberate decision to take the side of the rebels in what amounts to a civil war. It is also waging its campaign against the Qaddafi regime in Libya’s most densely populated areas, including the capital of Tripoli, with inevitable civilian casualties from NATO attacks added to the mounting civilian casualties caused by loyalist and rebel forces.

Supporters of NATO’s aggressive campaign against Qaddafi argue that the only way to make sure that civilians are protected is to get rid of the dictator who is harming them. However, this argument is fallacious for both pragmatic and legal reasons.

On March 31, the Obama Administration gave command over military operations in Libya to NATO over French objections. The U.S. combat role officially ended but, like in Iraq, this declaration is nearly meaningless as American pilots continue to risk their lives. The U.S. is now engaged in military operations that are hamstrung by unreliable alliance members for the sake of preserving a stalemate.

The Obama Administration delayed action in Libya until it received the approval of the Arab League, the United Nations and NATO. It was eager to make sure the war was fought under an international banner, even though the U.S. would bear the brunt of the burden. The French government staunchly opposed giving command over to NATO, leading to fierce arguments between officials. France felt that it, along with the U.S. and U.K., should have political leadership over the war with NATO playing a supporting role. The French caved under American and British pressure.

It didn’t take long for fractures in NATO to appear after the handover. The French Foreign Minister and the British Foreign Secretary openly criticized other alliance members for not committing to the effort. Half of NATO’s members officially participated in the war, as did some other non-NATO countries, but only six were willing to actually carry out bombing raids with the other four being Norway, Canada, Denmark and Belgium. Many of the countries placed heavy restrictions on their military’s participation, forbidding bombing raids and attack missions and refusing to destroy certain types of targets like trucks. The end of the U.S. combat role decreased the amount of American aircraft available, such as the A-10 Warthog close-support aircraft.

The Libyan rebels quickly noticed a change and complained about the sudden decline in air strikes. “NATO has become our problem,” Abdul Fatah Younis, the rebels’ top military commander, proclaimed. He threatened to complain to the U.N. Security Council and said that he would recommend that the National Transitional Council suspend its partnership with NATO if the problems persisted.

“One official calls another and then the official to the head of NATO and from the head of NATO to the field commander. It takes eight hours,” Younis complained. He specifically pointed out the unwillingness of NATO to protect civilians in Misurata, which has been under siege from Qaddafi’s forces. “This crime will be hanging from the necks of the international community until the end of days,” he said. The local opposition government in Misurata is now asking for U.N. or NATO ground forces to save them.

With Robert Gates set to leave his post as Pentagon chief this summer, reports are circulating that President Barack Obama will soon appoint CIA Director Leon Panetta to take over as secretary of defense and Gen. David Petraeus to slide into the top spot at the CIA. Given the alternatives that Obama could have chosen—and probably would rather choose—Panetta and Petraeus are solid picks. Not only do they have proven track records and backing in Congress; they also underscore that despite all the rhetoric, Obama continues to fill key security and defense posts with people who understand the country is at war.

A little history is in order. It pays to recall that as a candidate and in the early months of his presidency, Obama rejected the Bush administration’s characterization of America being a nation at war. For example, the Obama administration made a concerted effort to expunge the “war on terrorism” phraseology from official pronouncements, ordering the executive branch to use the banal, bland and bureaucratic “overseas contingency operations” instead. In quick succession, Obama ordered the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, sped up the pullout of troops from Iraq, put a time limit on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and made entreaties to the thugs who run Iran. In the midst of this 180-degree turn, Obama’s secretary of homeland security even went so far as to use the Orwellian phrase “man-caused disasters” rather than call terrorism by its name.

But Panetta refused to succumb to political correctness or the left-wing politics. “There’s no question this is a war,” he bluntly said of the struggle against Islamist terrorism.

“Unless they’re convinced the United States is going to win and that they are going to be defeated,” he said of proposals to cut a deal with the Taliban, “I think it is very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that is going to be meaningful.”

While others talked about talking to Iran, Panetta told it like it was, reporting that Iran has “enough low-enriched uranium right now for two weapons.”

And he was an early and vocal advocate of the so-called drone war in Pakistan, calling it “the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.”

That brings us to the man who has fought al Qaeda on two fronts. Petraeus, it pays to recall, came into America’s field of vision at a time when nothing was going right in Iraq—and virtually no one thought the Iraq project could be salvaged. But that’s exactly what Petraeus did. After rewriting the military’s counterinsurgency manual, he put it to the test in Baghdad and Fallujah and Ramadi, altered the course of a war, saved Iraq from itself, and rescued America from defeat. As The London Telegraph put it in 2008, when it named Petraeus Person of the Year, he gave “another last chance to a country that had long since ceased to expect one.”

Iran launches its WAR ON TERRiOR:

Amid heightened concerns that Iraq’s democracy is becoming increasingly vulnerable to an array of internal political and economic threats, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki strongly repeated his stance that the remaining 50,000 US troops will be gone from his country by the December, 2011 deadline. Not surprisingly, the main beneficiary of this action appears to be, once again, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Despite objections from both Iraq’s army chief of staff and the US commander in Iraq, Maliki said Iraqi security forces were more than capable of filling the American void, arguing they are “able to take responsibility, to maintain security and to work efficiently.”

Maliki’s comments came after a recent meeting in Baghdad with Speaker of the House John Boehner, one in which Boehner afterwards released a statement that read in part, “Just four years ago, a terrorist insurgency was killing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc across the country. Today Iraq is a different country.”

However, Boehner’s statement proved to be a little premature. Hours after its release, two suicide car bombings blistered Baghdad, killing nine people and wounding 26. It was just the latest in a string of amplified insurgent attacks across Iraq over the past several months, assaults that have led the State Department to issue a warning that “no region should be considered safe from dangerous conditions.”

Added into this fearful and dangerous atmosphere has been a string of increasingly violent nationwide demonstrations centered on political reform, ones which call for an end to widespread government corruption, better government services and better paying jobs. The protests — which began in February — have killed at least 14 people and wounded hundreds.

So, while popular opinion in Iraq may seem to be on the side of Maliki, not all Iraqis — most notably Sunnis and Kurds — are desirous to see a final exodus of American troops during this chaotic time.

That sentiment was best expressed by an advisor to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who said in March, “In practical terms, Iraq is already divided. If the U.S. withdraws its troops as scheduled at the end of this year, it will trigger the splitting up of Iraq. There will be civil war, maybe even a regional war.”

Unfortunately, the specter of an Iraqi civil war reared its head following the recent ominous comments made by Muqtada al-Sadr, the notorious anti-American cleric who led the brutal Shiite Mahdi Army that killed untold thousands of Iraqis during the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq from 2004-2007. In a statement to supporters, al-Sadr promised to revive his militia if the American “occupation” is extended.

In an effort to extinguish this fuse, Maliki said through his media adviser, “The security agreement cannot be extended without the acceptance of all the Iraqi political forces.”  Of course, it’s no surprise Maliki took this course of action, as he owes his second term as prime minister to al-Sadr’s endorsement, one which required Maliki to offer several positions in his cabinet to al-Sadr loyalists.

Still, it may have come as a surprise to Maliki when al-Sadr subsequently added new criteria to his bottom line demand of an end to an American military presence in Iraq. In a rhetorical challenge to his supporters, al-Sadr asked, “What if their companies and embassy headquarters will continue to exist with the American flags hoisted on them? Will you be silent? Will you overlook this?”

The Mexican government and the media have consistently blamed the U.S. for the vicious drug war in Mexico that has resulted in over 35,000 deaths since late 2006. A diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks will disappoint them, as it shows that 90 percent of the heavy weapons used by the drug cartels come from Central America. The strength of the drug cartels is more attributable to the Mexican government’s inefficiencies than America’s gun laws or consumption of narcotics.

According to the published documents, U.S. diplomats in Mexico believe that these weapons, such as grenades and rocket launchers, are being stolen from the armed forces of Central American countries. They arrive in Mexico via the 577-mile Guatemalan border that only 125 Mexican immigration officials guard. Hezbollah and the Colombian FARC terrorist groups also deserve blame, as there are increasing indications that they are in bed with the drug cartels and are providing them with training, financing and possibly arms.

Other cables show that U.S. diplomats are frustrated with Mexico’s handling of the drug war. The army is said to be so risk-averse that it declines to act on intelligence provided by the U.S. One document dated November 9, 2009 written by U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual says, “Mexico’s use of strategic and tactical intelligence is often fractured, ad hoc, and heavily reliant on the United States for leads and operations.” The responsibility for the failure to tame the escalating drug war lies with Mexico, as no U.S. gun restriction can disarm the drug lords when the Mexican army is unwilling or unable to fight.

These documents are unlikely to stop the blaming of the U.S. for the war in Mexico. Secretary of State Clinton said on March 25, 2009, “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.” The media constantly cites the dubious claim 90 percent of the guns used by the drug lords come from the United States. This statistic comes from a report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It is based on the fact that, of the 29,000 guns seized in 2007 and 2008, 6,000 were sent to the U.S. for tracing. Of these, 90 percent were indeed found to have come from the U.S. But there is much more behind this fuzzy statistic.

As Matt Allen, Special Agent of Immigration Customs and Enforcement explained to FoxNews.com, “[N]ot every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market.” Of the guns sent to the ATF for tracing, a large amount could not be traced and therefore are not accounted for in the statistic. Guns known to be from domestic sources, like the Mexican police or military, and guns from foreign countries are not submitted.

On the Daily Beast, Leslie Gelb, Assistant Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter, has an analysis of the situation which liberals eager to give Obama cover might find useful: the neocons made him do it!

Neocons and liberal interventionists stampeded Obama into imposing a no-fly zone against Libya—despite the absence of vital U.S. interests there […]

The manufactured crisis in Libya is a prime case in point. No foreign states have vital interests at stake in Libya. Events in this rather odd and isolated land have little bearing on the rest of the tumultuous Mideast region. Also not to be dismissed, there are far, far worse humanitarian horrors elsewhere. Yet, U.S. neoconservatives and liberal humanitarian interventionists have trapped another U.S. president into acting as if the opposite were true.

Obama’s been “trapped” into ordering airstrikes? How?

Once this terrible duo starts tossing out words like “slaughter” and “genocide,” the media goes crazy. Then, the chorus begins to sing of heartless inaction by the U.S. president, blaming him for the deaths. White House common sense crumbles into insanity. The reason why neither President Obama nor his coalition partners in Britain and France can state a coherent goal for Libya is that none of them have any central interest in the outcome there. It is only when a nation has a clear vital interest that it can state a clear objective for war. They’ve all simply been carried away by their own rhetoric.

The drama usually starts when leaders and thinkers are seduced by the feeling they must do good. Sometimes, they essentially ignore the killings, even as deaths climb into the hundreds of thousands, as in Rwanda and millions as in Congo. Other times, the deaths number in the hundreds or so, as in Libya—and the guy doing the killing is someone they have good reason to dislike, and so they want to do good and stop him. It was just so with the irresistible trio of Senators—John McCain, John Kerry, and Lindsey Graham—and with their counterparts in foreign-policy land.

And just like that, interventionists insist there’s “no time to deliberate,” and the president helplessly complies with their calls to arms.

There are a couple problems with this theory, though. First, polls show that, on the whole, Americans approve of the action now that we’re in it, but their support is far from overwhelming. On Capitol Hill and among the Tea Party, the battle lines are similarly muddied, with politicians of Obama’s own party blasting him for intervening while his sworn enemies in the Tea Party are more open to the idea. So if Obama really thought getting involved was a bad move for the United States, there’s certainly enough political cover for him to withstand interventionist condemnation for staying out.

Second, and more importantly, Barack Obama is the President of the United States. The Commander in Chief. It’s ultimately his decision whether or not to commit the US military to action, not the talking heads. It doesn’t matter how many people are screaming for action; if you don’t think it’s in the nation’s best interests, you don’t do it. President George W. Bush caught a lot of flak for calling himself “the decider,” but he was right: if a president lacks the fortitude to make tough decisions based on his own best judgment, then he’s unfit for the office.

Though there’s much to condemn in Barack Obama’s handling our role in Libya so far, there are credible defenses of his core policy. What Leslie Gelb proposes is not one of them. You simply cannot suggest that a president has sent American servicemen into battle against his wishes while maintaining that he deserves to stay in the White House.