David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have written the book the Dems deserve: Party of Defeat. In an excellent review at NRO, Andy McArthy observes that it was the Clinton/Gore administration who made regime change in Iraq official American policy. But after the invasion, the Dems flipped: So why the treacherous flip-flop? In an ad horrendum indictment that piles fact onto sordid fact, Messrs. Horowitz and Johnson convincingly demonstrate that the modern Democrat leadership is singularly dedicated to delegitimizing and thus destroying the Bush presidency. Having calculated this political strategy, they are heedless of the fact that their tireless opposition, distortion, and propaganda can only lead to the defeat of the United States in what the authors aptly call the war with Islamofascism. In fact, many in the hard Left desire just that outcome. With both Bush and the America that he symbolizes as their targets, no betrayal is off the table. David Horowitz, of course, is among the most gifted and consequential writers in the conservative movement — particularly insightful when diagnosing the Left’s bare-knuckles, will-to-power arsenal because he came of age in the radical orb. Ben Johnson is the managing editor of the feisty Frontpage Magazine, which is published online daily by Horowitz’s Freedom Center. In Party of Defeat, they recount “unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress.” Describing and documenting the thrall in which the radical Left now holds the Democratic Party, the authors forcefully argue that the resulting “house divided” may lack the unity of national purpose necessary to defeat the perilous threat of jihadism. The descent of a great political party — one whose determined patriotism was critical to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — has been as predictable as it is disheartening. Many of today’s prominent Leftists were, in the sixties and seventies, heavily influenced by Soviet practices. The authors note that Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet intelligence official to defect to the West, has explained that “[s]owing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks” of his office. A president cannot rally the public to any great national cause if he becomes the object of distrust and ridicule. Propaganda campaigns toward that end were a Soviet priority. And so it has been with President Bush. The authors recount that as the 2000 election controversy raged in Florida, Jesse Jackson thundered, “We will delegitimize Bush, discredit him, do whatever it takes but never accept him.” In short, the president’s ascendancy was bastardized from the start, long before 9/11 and Bush’s vigorous response to it gave vent to all the Left’s Vietnam-ized predispositions against the use of American power to further American purposes.

Fouad Ajami, professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University, reminds us today in the WSJ "Why We Went to Iraq": Why We Went to Iraq By FOUAD AJAMI June 4, 2008 Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came." . . . (After 9/11) [t]he nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power. We don't need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror. Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them. Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the "charities" that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq. We should give the "theorists" of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration. There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that there are indeed wars of "necessity." A case can always be made that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky ways of peace and of daily life. "Wars are not self-starting," the noted philosopher Michael Walzer wrote in his seminal book, "Just and Unjust Wars." "They may 'break out,' like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims." Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq's disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind. With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith. It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to "sell" the war.

(Michael Ramirez Cartoons at IBD Editorials)

Yesterday Dith Pran, survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia, died at 65. He is pictured here in 1989 during a return trip to Cambodia where he saw the remains of some of the Khmer Rouge's victims. This picture, and Mr. Pran's personal story, shows what happens when Good withdraws from battling Evil. If we leave Iraq too soon, al Qaeda will re-emerge and there will be more killing fields: Iraq: Al-Qaeda Killing Field Found Near Farming Village ZAHAMM, IRAQ -- Villagers digging in an abandoned pomegranate orchard in the Diyala River Valley have unearthed the remains of at least 52 people murdered by Al-Qaeda in Iraq during ...

Overcoming evil with good: Adult convert, Magdi Allam, an Italian journalist and Muslim by birth is baptized by Pope Benedict on Easter Eve. George Weigel shared his thoughts on Allam and Allah with Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO: Kathryn Jean Lopez: What’s the most important message about the war we’re in coming out of Magdi Allam’s conversion from Islam to Catholicism? George Weigel: The war against jihadism is, among many other things, a war in defense of religious freedom, the first of human rights. That war is, at bottom, a war of ideas — of different ideas about the human person and different ideas of human obligation. Magdi Allam has courageously defended ...

Given the report earlier this week regarding Christ's role in bringing down the Soviet Empire, this is an especially poignant Easter reflection at NRO: Christos Anesti When He rose, empires fell. National Review Online March 22, 2008 I wonder if the people sitting in churches this week understand how very much Jesus of Nazareth’s last week of life was driven by clashes pertaining to wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny. Probably not. Theologians generally don't study history. Historians usually don’t study theology, and neither study economics. Here’s what happened: For over half of a millennium, Israel had been passed from empire to empire. Each new world power treated Jerusalem as a cash cow, diverting its wealth into imperial coffers in order to finance imperial ambitions. First there was Assyria, then Babylon, Persia, and Macedonia. Then finally Rome was given its turn. It was at this time that Jesus of Nazareth came into the world. Rome didn’t care much about places like Nazareth; it was much more interested in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a company town, and the company was The Temple. The Temple was the Herod family business, and it had been created for one reason and one reason only — to squeeze enough money out of the region for Herod and his dynasty to buy their way back into favor with Caesar Augustus. Rome needed money to buy off the urban mob, and Herod needed Rome to keep down the Palestinian rabble. And so when the people came to Jerusalem to make their offerings to God, they were met at each step in the process of religious devotion with another checkpoint at which tolls were extracted. The journey to Jerusalem often meant crossing a Roman checkpoint — ka-ching! Since the trip was long and hard on the animals, it was better to travel light and buy the sacrifices in Jerusalem — ka-ching! You can’t use pagan Roman coins for that sort of thing, of course, so off to the money-changers — ka-ching again. Tithes, offerings, sacrifices, festivals, Rome got her cut — ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. In fact, that’s the only reason there even was a temple or a King Herod. Rome would have long ago plundered it and killed him, except you don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If the temple was the bridge between heaven and earth, Herod was the troll who lived under the bridge. Every pilgrim was forced to pay the toll. That’s what kept Herod in power: no ka-ching, no king. Ordinary Jews hated the regime, and the anger was boiling over, but Herod didn’t care what they thought; he had Rome on his side. Into this world steps the young son of a Galilean entrepreneur.

What a remarkable 5 years. God bless the men and women of the American military who gave the ultimate sacrifice to set a people free. Greater love hath no man than this . . . . From the Wall Street Journal: America and Iraq The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board March 20, 2008 Five years after U.S. and coalition forces began rolling into Iraq on their way to Baghdad, it's easy to lament the war's mistakes. The Bush Administration underestimated the war's cost -- in treasure, and most painfully in lives. The CIA and every other Western intelligence agency was wrong about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. failed to anticipate the insurgency and was almost fatally late in implementing a counterinsurgency. ...

That question is answered in a powerful new book: Soldier's words from Iraq can inspire us all By Gracie Bonds Staples The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Bart Newman knew he might not come back to his wife and little girl. He remembered the journal his wife, Julie, had given him the day he pulled out of Fort Bragg, N.C., headed for war in Baghdad. "Record some thoughts while in Iraq," she scribbled inside the cover. "Some day, I suppose we will look back on this year and wonder how we made it." She quoted a favorite Bible passage: "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are washing away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal." She ended with, "I love you and count the days until we are together again." Newman had volunteered for this war. He knew the danger involved but had looked forward to military service since his senior year in high school, when he was awarded an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy. Two weeks before he was scheduled to report, Newman was medically discharged because of childhood asthma. He headed to the University of Georgia instead. The Woodward Academy grad excelled at UGA. He served as president of the student government association, was a founding father of the Georgia Delta chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon and a member of two SEC Championship tennis teams. He was in his second year of law school when the World Trade Center collapsed on the day we simply refer to now as 9/11. When the army started recruiting, Bart Newman saw a chance to do what he always wanted. The army disqualified him too, but this time he wouldn't take no for an answer. He sought a waiver and got it. It was the summer of 2003. America had been in Iraq four months. On February 3, 2005, Bart Newman headed for Baghdad.

Flemming Rose rightly points out that we are not only fighting a global war on terror, but we are in a global struggle for free speech. Mr. Rose is culture editor for the Jyllands-Posten which published the cartoon that depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. The cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, is now under the threat of death and three men were arrested this week for trying to kill him. Kind of makes the point of the cartoon, doesn't it? These jihadists are caricatures of themselves. But they are caricatures with the means to kill. There is one answer: continue to defeat them in the battle of ideas and on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Free Speech and Radical Islam By FLEMMING ROSE February 15, 2008; Page A14 At a lunch last year celebrating his 25th anniversary with Jyllands-Posten, Kurt Westergaard told an anecdote. During World War II Pablo Picasso met a German officer in southern France, and they got into a conversation. When the German officer figured out whom he was talking to he said: "Oh, you are the one who created Guernica?" referring to the famous painting of the German bombing of a Basque town by that name in 1937. Picasso paused for a second, and replied, "No, it wasn't me, it was you." For the past three months Mr. Westergaard and his wife have been on the run. Mr. Westergaard did the most famous of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 -- the one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was a satirical comment on the fact that some Muslims are committing terrorist acts in the name of Islam and the prophet. Tragically, Mr. Westergaard's fate has proven the point of his cartoon: In the early hours of Tuesday morning Danish police arrested three men who allegedly had been plotting to kill him. In the past few days 17 Danish newspapers have published Mr. Westergaard's cartoon, which is as truthful as Picasso's painting. My colleagues at Jyllands-Posten and I understand that the cartoon may be offensive to some people, but sometimes the truth can be very offensive. As George Orwell put it in the suppressed preface to "Animal Farm": "If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Sadly, the plot to kill Mr. Westergaard is not an isolated story, but part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world.

. . . has shown the kind of compassion the American military has shown in Iraq: Marines launch rescue effort to save Hadithah girl Multi-National Force – West PAO CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq – Marines operating in Al Anbar Province airlifted a young Hadithah girl in desperate need of a life-saving surgery, and her mother to the Jordanian border Jan. 22. They were met there by a team of medical professionals who will escort them to Nashville, Tenn., for open-heart surgery. Amina Al’a Thabit, a three-year-old who suffers from a congenital heart defect, was discovered by Marines assigned to 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, which is now part of Regimental Combat Team 5, patrolling the area as ...