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All the below is only from the month of September, which is 22 days old (and I only spent a few minutes compiling):

-> Claming that Zell Miller is a segregationist.

-> Claiming that bloggers are Republican operatives.

-> Charging that the sitting president is guilty of being AWOL from the national guard.

-> Releasing a campaign video accusing the president of, at least in some way, faking part of his military duty.

-> Peace activists threaten and taunt relatives of a veteran killed in Iraq.

-> Forging "boos" in order to malign Bush and his supporters.

-> Claiming that the national guard payroll records for Bush were fraudulent.

-> Calling the president a "sissy".

-> ‘Outing’ supposedly gay congressman (I guess the ‘as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone/consenting two adults argument only applies when convenient).

-> Calling all, not some or one or a few, but ALL of the swift boat veterans for truth liars (or worse).

-> Calling for the assassination of the president & the molestation of his daughters.

-> Claiming that Bush is allowing automatic weapons back on the street (they’ve been banned since the 30s).

-> Spooking college kids with fake claims of an impending draft.

-> Hinting (and not subtlety) that the GOP will keep black people from voting.

-> Forging memos in an attempt to thwart the re-election of the president.

-> Blaming Karl Rove for the forged memos.

-> Then, blaming Roger Stone for the forged memos (eventually, we’ll get to Cap Weinberger).

-> Claiming that the sitting president lied about his service.

-> ‘News’ media officials coordinating with the Kerry campaign (telling me that they didn’t discuss the memos is as plausible as telling me that Andrew Sullivan would have a 4 minute conversation with Bush and not mention gay marriage).

And yet, I keep seeing that the left isn’t going after Bush and the GOP hard enough. The mind’s eye squints at the prospect of what it’ll be like if they decide to play dirty.

September 29, 2004
The Perfect Storm of Hating Bush
by Victor Davis Hanson
This series written for Private Papers will appear in four parts.

Part One
The new candor about killing George Bush

The American Left has become increasingly hysterical since September 11th. The symptoms of a new, disturbing extremism are manifest in a variety of forums that transcend legitimate political opposition to the war or grassroots politicking to vote out an incumbent party. Last year the comedian Rick Hall played to full houses abroad, performing his newest composition, “Let's Get Together And Kill George Bush.” As the Republicans assembled for their August national convention in New York, a pacifist group known as “United For Peace and Justice,” nevertheless announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding, off-Broadway “guerilla comedy” entitled, “I’m Gonna Kill the President.”

The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, just published Checkpoint. It is an extended dialogue about killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Jay, the protagonist of the novel, characterizes the potential targeted President as a “drunken oilman.” Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld are portrayed as “bog creatures” with “grubs scurrying out of their noses.” Such venom filters down. Sue Niederer, the mother of a soldier recently killed in Iraq, recently scoffed in an interview: “I think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer. And just continue shooting him there.”

Currently in Britain there is released a made-for-television movie of the 9-11 mass murdering—but told from the point of view of one of the 19 suicide-murderers, one Ziad Jarrah who took the controls of Flight 93 and crashed the plane and its occupants into a Pennsylvania field, when the brave passengers aborted his effort to incinerate either the U.S. Capitol building or the White House. The show’s producers—British television’s Channel 4—assure that their “whole ambition was to find out what makes these people tick, rather than to be judgmental.” And being non-judgmental is apparently assured when you hire an ex-terrorist, the IRA convicted murderer (later freed on appeal) Ronan Bennett as the drama’s chief writer.

There are always extremists, Left and Right, here and abroad. Yet, what is now different is that the public and unabashed fantasy of liquidating a sitting President, whether in comical or allegorical fashion, does not earn much censure from the mainstream Left. Instead, it seems to understand why some would wish George Bush dead. To the new critics of American conservatism, such public detestation is not an outrage, but seen as valuable and legitimate discourses of dissent against the “dominant paradigm.” Alfred Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker’s book as a cri de coeur—“in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war.”

Michael Moore was seen on television at the recent Democratic convention, prominently seated next to the party’s elder statesmen—like ex-President Jimmy Carter. Democratic legislators were said to have delayed their Congressional votes to have attended the Washington D.C. screening of Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11, a film whose litany of distortions and creative editing puts it into the same genre of propaganda as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of Will.

Moore’s rhetoric is far beyond the pale, and in its vehemence firmly entrenched in the American demagogic tradition of Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, or Jerry Rubin. Americans shuddered when after September 11th Moore lamented that those who perished in the World Trade Center at Ground Zero were primarily Democrats, and thus not all that suitable targets for the sworn enemies of George Bush. Recently, Moore, the self-proclaimed populist and favorite of the “people’s party,” scoffed of Americans that, “They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet,” emphasizing that, “Our stupidity is embarrassing.”

Moore furthermore declared of the insurgents who blew up and beheaded Americans in Iraq, “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Again, what is different about such boilerplate extremism is the near absence of censure from the mainstream Democratic leadership whom Moore embraces. Unlike the John Birchers of the 1950s who were chastised by Republicans or the Yippies of the 1960s who were kept out of the 1968 Chicago Convention, Moore is praised and brought into the fold—witness Wesley Clark’s recent Presidential bid—precisely because of the utility and resonance of his weird pronouncements and political propaganda. Thus the Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe gushed of Fahrenheit 9-11, “I think anyone who goes to see this movie will come out en masse and vote for John Kerry. Clearly the movie makes it clear that George Bush is not fit to be president of this country.”

Yet such rhetoric emboldens rather than embarrasses Moore’s sponsors. If we examine the vocabulary of the stalwarts of the Democratic party—a Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, Al Gore, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, or Terry McAuliffe—then we learn that the current President or Vice President of the United States is at various times to be labeled as “a traitor,” “coward,” “deserter,” or “AWOL.” To Al Gore, Bush uses “digital brownshirts;” for Michael Moore the President is a “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.”

Adjectives like “worst” color their speeches, as in “worst” administration or “worst” decision or “worst” example—often amplified by tacking on “in history.” Bill Moyers says the Bush presidency means “the deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America.” Sometimes a Ted Kennedy assures us that Mr. Bush has simply reopened the Abu Ghraib prison “under new management” to continue the mayhem, torture, and killing of Saddam Hussein. Janet Reno evokes the holocaust at Dachau to warn us of the new Bush Gulag—a term coined from Al Gore. And the ubiquitous Terry McAuliffe rants about the President’s “dictatorial approach;” meanwhile Julian Bond assures the nation that Bush is from the “Taliban wing” of American politics.

Both Left and Right have discovered the paperback pulp market that offers big print invective and crackpot conspiracy theory. But the anti-Bush genre is singular for at least two reasons—the sheer number of titles and authorship by mainstream Democratic journalists, television talking heads, Clintonites, and public figures. Examine a sampling of the often hysterical titles: Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George Bush (John Dean); Big Lies, (Joe Conason); The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (David Corn); Big Bush Lies: The 20 Most Telling Lies of George W. Bush (Jerry Barrett); Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush (John Bonifaz); The I Hate George Bush Reader: Why Dubya is Wrong About Absolutely Everything (Clint Willis); American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Kevin Phillips); Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush’s America (Molly Ivins); Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy (Robert Kennedy Jr.);Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney’s New World Order (Mark Crispin Miller).*

Why does the Left hate Bush so? Some answers tomorrow when “The Perfect Storm” continues in “Part Two: Why the new hysterical hatred?”



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* Cf. also Is Our Children Learning: The Case against George W. Bush (Paul Begala); The Dirty Truth: the Oil and Chemical Dependency of George W. Bush (Rick Abraham); The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (Peter Singer); The Book on Bush: How George W. Bush is (Mis)leading America (Eric Alterman and Mark Green); The Bush Hater’s Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency in the Past 100 years (Jack Huberman); Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them (Al Franken); Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney/Bush Junta (Gore Vidal); Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America (Ariana Huffington); The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Chrstopher Scheer, Robert Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry); Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (Maureen Dowd); Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and The Stifling of Democracy (Lewis Lapham); Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time to Take it Back (Jim Hightower).

©2004 Victor Davis Hanson

Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties
By Scott Wheeler
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 04, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support terrorist attacks against Americans in Somalia. The memo was written nine months before U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed in Mogadishu by forces loyal to a warlord with alleged ties to al Qaeda.

Other memos provide a list of terrorist groups with whom Iraq had relationships and considered available for terror operations against the United States.

Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world's most wanted terrorists. Zarqawi is believed responsible for the kidnapping and beheading of several American civilians in Iraq and claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings in Iraq Sept. 30. Al-Zawahiri is the top lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, allegedly helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the U.S., and is believed to be the voice on an audio tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television Oct. 1, calling for attacks on U.S. and British interests everywhere.

The source of the documents

A senior government official who is not a political appointee provided CNSNews.com with copies of the 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents. The originals, some of which were hand-written and others typed, are in Arabic. CNSNews.com had the papers translated into English by two individuals separately and independent of each other.

There are no hand-writing samples to which the documents can be compared for forensic analysis and authentication. However, three other experts - a former weapons inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), a retired CIA counter-terrorism official with vast experience dealing with Iraq, and a former advisor to then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton on Iraq - were asked to analyze the documents. All said they comport with the format, style and content of other Iraqi documents from that era known to be genuine.

Laurie Mylroie, who authored the book, "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America," and advised Clinton on Iraq during the 1992 presidential campaign, told CNSNews.com that the papers represent "the most complete set of documents relating Iraq to terrorism, including Islamic terrorism" against the U.S.

Mylroie has long maintained that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism against the United States. The documents obtained by CNSNews.com , she said, include "correspondence back and forth between Saddam's office and Iraqi Mukhabarat (intelligence agency). They make sense. This is what one would think Saddam was doing at the time."

Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA official who specialized in counter-terrorism and had extensive experience dealing with Iraq, said that "based on available, unclassified and open source information, the details in these documents are accurate ..."

The former UNSCOM inspector zeroed in on the signatures on the documents and "the names of some of the people who sign off on these things.

"This is fairly typical of that time era. [The Iraqis] were meticulous record keepers," added the former U.N. official, who spoke with CNSNews.com on the condition of anonymity.

The senior government official, who furnished the documents to CNSNews.com, said the papers answer "whether or not Iraq was a state sponsor of Islamic terrorism against the United States. It also answers whether or not Iraq had an ongoing biological warfare project continuing through the period when the UNSCOM inspections ended."

Presidential campaign focused on Iraq

The presidential campaign is currently dominated by debate over whether Saddam procured weapons of mass destruction and/or whether his government sponsored terrorism aimed at Americans before the U.S. invaded Iraq last year. Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry has repeatedly rejected that possibility and criticized President Bush for needlessly invading Iraq.

"[Bush's] two main rationales - weapons of mass destruction and the al Qaeda/September 11 (2001) connection - have been proved false ... by the president's own weapons inspectors ... and by the 9/11 Commission," Kerry told an audience at New York University on Sept. 20.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's probe of the 9/11 intelligence failures also could not produce any definitive links between Saddam's government and 9/11. And United Nations as well as U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq have been unable to find the biological and chemical weapons Saddam was suspected of possessing.

But the documents obtained by CNSNews.com shed new light on the controversy.

They detail the Iraqi regime's purchase of five kilograms of mustard gas on Aug. 21, 2000 and three vials of malignant pustule, another term for anthrax, on Sept. 6, 2000. The purchase order for the mustard gas includes gas masks, filters and rubber gloves. The order for the anthrax includes sterilization and decontamination equipment. (See Saddam's Possession of Mustard Gas)

The documents show that Iraqi intelligence received the mustard gas and anthrax from "Saddam's company," which Tefft said was probably a reference to Saddam General Establishment, "a complex of factories involved with, amongst other things, precision optics, missile, and artillery fabrication."

"Sa'ad's general company" is listed on the Iraqi documents as the supplier of the sterilization and decontamination equipment that accompanied the anthrax vials. Tefft believes this is a reference to the Salah Al-Din State Establishment, also involved in missile construction. (See Saddam's Possession of Anthrax)

The Jaber Ibn Hayan General Company is listed as the supplier of the safety equipment that accompanied the mustard gas order. Tefft described the company as "a 'turn-key' project built by Romania, designed to produce protective CW (conventional warfare) and BW (biological warfare) equipment (gas masks and protective clothing)."

"Iraq had an ongoing biological warfare project continuing through the period when the UNSCOM inspections ended," the senior government official and source of the documents said. "This should cause us to redouble our efforts to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs."

'Hunt the Americans'

The first of the 42 pages of Iraqi documents is dated Jan. 18, 1993, approximately two years after American troops defeated Saddam's army in the first Persian Gulf War. The memo includes Saddam's directive that "the party should move to hunt the Americans who are on Arabian land, especially in Somalia, by using Arabian elements ..."

On Oct. 3, 1993, less than nine months after that Iraqi memo was written, American soldiers were ambushed in Mogadishu, Somalia by forces loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, an alleged associate of Osama bin Laden. Eighteen Americans were killed and 84 wounded during a 17-hour firefight that followed the ambush in which Aidid's followers used civilians as decoys. (See Saddam's Connections to al Qaeda)

An 11-page Iraqi memo, dated Jan. 25, 1993, lists Palestinian, Sudanese and Asian terrorist organizations and the relationships Iraq had with each of them. Of particular importance, Tefft said, are the relationships Iraq had already developed or was in the process of developing with groups and individuals affiliated with al Qaeda, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The U.S. currently is offering rewards of up to $25 million for each man's capture.

The documents describe Al-Jehad wa'l Tajdeed as "a secret Palestinian organization" founded after the first Persian Gulf War that "believes in armed struggle against U.S. and western interests." The leaders of the group, according to the Iraqi memo, were stationed in Jordan in 1993, and when one of those leaders visited Iraq in November 1992, he "showed the readiness of his organization to execute operations against U.S. interests at any time." (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

Tefft believes the Tajdeed group likely included al-Zarqawi, whom Teft described as "our current terrorist nemesis" in Iraq, "a Palestinian on a Jordanian passport who was with al Qaeda and bin Laden in Afghanistan prior to this period (1993)."

Tajdeed, which means Islamic Renewal, currently "has a website that posts Zarqawi's speeches, messages, claims of assassinations and beheading videos," Tefft told CNSNews.com. "The apparent linkages are too close to be accidental" and might "be one of the first operational contacts between an al Qaeda group and Iraq," he added.

Tefft said the documents, all of which the Iraqi Intelligence Service labeled "Top secret, personal and urgent" show several links between Saddam's government and terror groups dedicated not only to targeting America but also U.S. allies like Egypt and Israel.

The same 11-page memo refers to the "re-opening of the relationship" with Al-Jehad al-Islamy, which is described as "the most violent in Egypt," responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The documents go on to describe a Dec. 14, 1990 meeting between Iraqi intelligence officials and a representative of Al-Jehad al-Islamy, that ended in an agreement "to move against [the] Egyptian regime by doing martyr operations on conditions that we should secure the finance, training and equipments." (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

Al-Zawahiri was one of the leaders of Jehad al-Islamy, which is also known as the Egyptian Islamic Group, and participated in the assassination of Sadat, Tefft said. "Iraq's contact with the Egyptian Islamic Group is another operational contact between Iraq and al Qaeda," he added.

One of the Asian groups listed on the Iraqi intelligence memo is J.U.I., also known as the Islamic Clerks Society. The group is currently led by Mawlana Fadhel al-Rahman, whom Tefft said is "an al Qaeda member and co-signed Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) to kill Americans." The Iraqi memo from 1993 states that J.U.I.'s secretary general "has a good relationship with our system since 1981 and he is ready for any mission." Tefft said the memo shows "another direct Iraq link to an al Qaeda group."

Iraq had also maintained a relationship with the Afghani Islamist party since 1989, according to the memo. The "relationship was improved and became directly between the leader, Hekmatyar and Iraq," it states, referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghani warlord who fought against the Soviet Union and current al Qaeda ally, according to Tefft.

Last year, American authorities in Afghanistan ranked Hekmatyar third on their most wanted list, behind only bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Hekmatyar represents "another Iraqi link to an al Qaeda group," Tefft said. (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

The Iraqi intelligence documents also refer to terrorist groups previously believed to have had links with Saddam Hussein. They include the Palestine Liberation Front, a group dedicated to attacking Israel, and according to the Iraqi memo, one with "an office in Baghdad."

The Abu Nidal group, suspected by the CIA of having acted as surrogates for Iraqi terrorist attacks, is also mentioned.

"The movement believes in political violence and assassinations," the 1993 Iraqi memo states in reference to the Abu Nidal organization. "We have relationships with them since 1973. Currently, they have a representative in the country. Monthly helps are given to them -- 20 thousand dinars - in addition to other supports," the memo explains. (See Saddam's Connections to Palestinian Terror Groups)

Iraq not only built and maintained relationships with terrorist groups, the documents show it appears to have trained terrorists as well. Ninety-two individuals from various Middle Eastern countries are listed on the papers.

Many are described as having "finished the course at M14," a reference to an Iraqi intelligence agency, and to having "participated in Umm El-Ma'arek," the Iraqi response to the U.S. invasion in 1991. The author of the list notes that approximately half of the individuals "all got trained inside the 'martyr act camp' that belonged to our directorate."

The former UNSCOM weapons inspector who was asked to analyze the documents believes it's clear that the Iraqis "were training people there in assassination and suicide bombing techniques ... including non-Iraqis."

Bush administration likely unaware of documents' existence

The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has "thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated.

"It is unlikely they even know this exists," the source added.

The government official also explained that the motivation for leaking the documents, "is strictly national security and helping with the war on terrorism by focusing this country's attention on facts and away from political posturing.

"This is too important to let it get caught up in the political process," the source told CNSNews.com.

To protect against the Iraqi intelligence documents being altered or misrepresented elsewhere on the Internet, CNSNews.com has decided to publish only the first of the 42 pages in Arabic, along with the English translation. Portions of some of the other memos in translated form are also being published to accompany this report. Credentialed journalists and counter-terrorism experts seeking to view the 42 pages of Arabic documents or to challenge their authenticity may make arrangements to do so at CNSNews.com headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s, column in the Monday News & Record sneeringly asserted that President Bush must know about a "different Iraq" from the one we ordinary citizens know about.

Well, duh.

What President Bush knows about Iraq comes from the reports of sober professionals, who have the perspective of what's happening in the whole country.

These are people who face the casualty reports, who have to drive in convoys or heavily armored vehicles called "rhinos" to get into and out of the green zone; who go to sleep to the sound of mortar fire almost every night. They are not wearing rose-colored glasses.

A friend of mine who is in Baghdad right now agrees that yes, the insurgents and terrorists are redoubling their efforts -- but that doesn't mean we're losing.

"These people are getting desperate," he says, "because the latest [poll] numbers show that the people are turning against the insurgents, especially as the reconstruction projects have increased significantly."

Politicians who have a vested interest in making the war look like a failure refuse to accept the fact that the vast majority of the Iraqi people recognize (a) that life is better now than it was before we came, (b) that the present government offers their best chance for freedom and democracy and stability, and (c) the insurgents and terrorists are their enemies, not just our enemies.

Of course the polls all say that Iraqis want us to go. Why in the world would they want anything else? Polls in Germany and Japan after World War II would have shown that they wanted U.S. troops out of there ... unless the alternative was Soviet troops ... or chaos.

Iraqis are volunteering for the police and military in large numbers. Again, cynical American politicians claim that this is because they are starving and need the jobs. But that's absurd.

These are patriotic Iraqis who recognize that the way to get full independence is to have an effective military and police force that can keep these insurgents from creating chaos or, even worse, becoming the new dictators of Iraq.

Most of Iraq is at peace. In most areas, the citizens report suspicious activity and do not cooperate with terrorists. For one thing, they've caught on that it's their children who get blown up by terrorist bombs. For another, they recognize that the terrorists are either foreigners who don't care diddly about the Iraqi people, or insurgents from the Sunni triangle, whose desire is to impose their rule on the non-Sunni/non-Arab majority.

Our media naturally cover the explosions and attacks and American deaths. This is not a media conspiracy, it's in the nature of the beast -- reporters go where the action is.

But it can give a very false impression, just as the media did in the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Americans got the impression that we were losing the war. The American public despaired. Yet we won that battle.

The thing to remember is that the enemy can pick when and where to attack our forces. They can concentrate their efforts on points of weakness (and there are always points of relative weakness). So for a moment, they seem to prevail -- the inflict casualties, they may even seize territory.

Think, for instance, of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. It was obvious to everyone that Germany was losing the war -- even to the Germans! But that didn't prevent them from concentrating their forces for one last-ditch offensive against the western allies.

They pushed us back. We "lost" the first days and weeks of that battle. And many American soldiers died or were captured.

But the story didn't end there. What mattered was that we responded, we recovered, and we won the battle -- and the war.

Our soldiers have to be constantly on guard -- but they also know that in most of Iraq, citizens inform on would-be terrorists. In most of Iraq, citizens recognize that we are the ones restoring and creating the infrastructure that will make their lives safe and prosperous. They resent those who blow up that infrastructure, and they have no sympathy with those who are killing American soldiers.

That's the part that is grossly underreported. Yet that is precisely the information that President Bush has in mind when he speaks of the fact (not the opinion) that we are winning this war.

John Kerry is actually being pessimistic when he promises to withdraw in four years.

While nobody can promise anything, the Iraqi police and military are coming along reasonably well in their training, and will be able to assume the bulk of the burden of law enforcement and ground anti-insurgency operations surprisingly soon.

There is a widespread belief that Arab soldiers can't fight -- Israel's victories in so many conflicts created that impression.

But the truth is that no soldiers can achieve victory when led by incompetents. Most Arab armies have promoted generals and officers for political reasons -- not least because a truly competent general would be a threat to the government and would have to be eliminated.

But in the new Iraq, the officers are being promoted on the basis of competence alone. The soldiers therefore are learning to trust them, and then the fervor of men fighting for their homeland comes into play. They know that when they can do the job of keeping their country safe, the Americans will go home.

The irony is this: By helping the Iraqis create the first truly effective military force in the Arab world, we are creating a grave danger for our ally, Israel. Iraqi forces have "helped" attack Israel in the past, but were so incompetently led and so unmotivated that they were swatted away like gnats.

That will not happen again. If Iraq should become involved in an anti-Israeli campaign, it will be with a highly trained, well-equipped, and competently led army that will not easily be swept aside.

Indeed, we will have set Iraq up to be what Saddam only dreamed of being: the militarily dominant leader of the Arab world.

So it becomes all the more urgent that along with our operations in Iraq, we work to settle the situation with the West Bank and Gaza. Israel's hardest days are yet ahead, I fear.

Meanwhile, however, when President Bush sounds optimistic about the war in Iraq and Kerry and his friends sound cynical and pessimistic, remember that (a) Kerry has a vested interest in making things appear as dark as possible and (b) President Bush is accurately reporting the assessments of our excellent and honest military on the ground in Iraq.

A Reason to Back the President?

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A23

Much of what Sen. John Kerry says about Iraq is consistent and reasonable. He voted for the war because, like just about everybody else, he believed that Saddam Hussein was dangerous. He criticizes it now because Hussein turns out not to have had weapons of mass destruction after all, and because the Bush administration's handling of reconstruction has been incompetent. Had everybody known two years ago that Hussein's weapons program had fallen apart, there would have been no convincing argument for war. By insisting in Friday's debate that Hussein presented a "unique threat," President Bush made himself appear blind to reality.

But the question that matters in this election is: What next? Should we fight on in Iraq? Or should we leave as soon as possible -- on the theory that all this nation-building stuff is bound to fail and that winning hearts and minds among allies will boost our security more than battling Iraq's insurgents? And beyond Iraq, what is the role for preemptive war and nation-building in the next phase of the war on terrorism?

On this crucial issue, neither candidate's position is completely clear. My colleague Robert D. Novak insists that a second Bush administration would cut its losses in Iraq, despite everything the president says to the contrary. Meanwhile, Kerry, whose criticism of the Iraq war often suggests that he sees no hope of victory there, nonetheless declares that he's intent on "winning." Even so, the candidates' statements and the mood among advisers on both sides suggest that the electorate faces a stark choice -- such an important choice, indeed, that the election should perhaps depend on it.

Bush offers a military vision, based on the idea that the best defense against terrorism is aggressive offense. He doggedly believes that by doing the "hard work" in Iraq, the United States will eventually create a democracy, transforming Middle Eastern politics. He is determined not to allow hostile global opinion to get in his way. Invoking Ronald Reagan in Friday's debate, he spoke forcefully about how it is more important to be right than to be internationally popular.

Kerry seems to reject most of this. He emphasizes homeland security, faulting Bush for shortchanging it. He stresses the importance of allies, which necessarily implies accepting a check on preemption, however much he denies it. On Iraq, Kerry's "plan" is a smoke screen. He says he would summon more help from allies, though little would be forthcoming. He says he would train Iraqi troops, but Bush is doing this already. If Kerry's plan to share the burden fell apart, would he stay committed anyway? It seems fairly unlikely.

If this is a fair description of the two candidates' positions, which one is preferable? The worry with Bush is that he underestimates how hard the "hard work" is: He sometimes implies that the victory of democracy is inevitable because all people in all places yearn always to be free -- a non sequitur that's belied by large numbers of dictatorships. He has repeatedly failed to commit resources in proportion to the vast tasks that he's taken on: he sent too few troops to Iraq, just as he opposed a more serious peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan.

And yet, on this overarching "what next" question, Bush is right. He is right that the best defense against terrorism is offense: Given the vast variety of targets from which terrorists can choose, the "homeland security" alternative is hopeless. He is right that preemptive war is a necessary option, and that we won't always know all of the facts about the threats we are preempting. And he is right, however unfashionable it may be to say so, that nation-building can be successful.

Consider Afghanistan. In many ways, nation-building there has been mishandled. The early peacekeeping effort was restricted to the capital; the resulting power vacuum allowed regional warlords to dig in; the opium trade has boomed, bolstering criminals who work against the state and corrupting government officials. Despite these errors, however, Afghanistan is at least partly a success. Three years ago, the country featured medieval zealots and large terrorist bases. Today it features an enlightened constitution, 3 million exiles who have felt confident enough to return home and an election that attracted a remarkable turnout, whatever the flaws in administering it.

The same is likely to be true in Iraq, if America shows enough determination. Again, there has been no shortage of errors: too few troops, too much delay in empowering Iraqi leaders, the disaster of Abu Ghraib, the hesitation in rooting out insurgent bases in the Sunni heartland. But most of these errors are being addressed. If the United States remains committed to defeating Iraq's insurgents, the country is likely to progress, Afghan-style, toward some kind of imperfect democracy. And that will represent a clear advance -- both for Iraq and for U.S. security.

The case for Kerry in this election is the one made, inadvertently, by Novak: We have no idea what either candidate would do next, so we should punish Bush for misconstruing the intelligence on Iraq, allowing Abu Ghraib and pretending there's nothing to be sorry about. Given Kerry's preferable policies on economic and social questions, this is a tempting position. But if you are willing to read the tea leaves on how Bush and Kerry would prosecute the next phase in this war, then Bush comes out better. His gut instincts on terrorism are right -- and Kerry, by assailing the president's foreign policy record at every turn, seems to be saying that those instincts are not his own ones.