— Sadly, the war in Iraq appears to be lost. The Democrats, like terriers shaking a rat (Iraq) using a plan of funding war for three months — salami tactics — causing the Army command to recognize that the Congress, not the President, is effectively in charge, have achieved their goal: implementing withdrawal.

The Democrats will be responsible for affecting army morale. No one will want to lead the last charge and be responsible for or themselves suffer the last death or be taken prisoner before the order to stand down is issued. When and if — God forbid — the war and the acts of terrorism now faced daily in Iraq follow our retreat across the ocean to our homeland shores, the Democratic leaders who forced the withdrawal will be held responsible. While they will reject responsibility for the deaths and destruction that occur here in our homeland, the American public will remember the dire predictions of what would follow giving up the fight, and switch their support and recall the valiant efforts of George W. Bush to save us from those consequences and honor him in larger numbers than those who mistakenly now loathe his very name.

The Democratic Party will reap the political whirlwind, notwithstanding that President Bush and his advisors, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, failed in a host of ways in the conduct of the war through incompetence. Our army easily won the war, but then lost the occupation. While President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld failed in their leadership and strategy and bear the responsibility for those failures, they did recognize the true and long term danger of international Islamic terrorism, unlike the Democrats, and sought, albeit inadequately, to stop it in the center of the hostile Islamist world — Iraq.

The two men most responsible for actions causing the debacle other than President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were CIA director George Tenet and former administrator of the U.S.-led occupation, Paul Bremer — Tenet for his totally incompetent operation of the CIA, e.g., foolish and inaccurate reporting on what was taking place in Iraq with respect to WMD and the dangers to the U.S., and Bremer, for his disbanding of the Iraqi army of more than 500,000 soldiers which had been toughened in an eight-year war with Iran from 1980 to 1988 and was capable of policing the country and preventing the now ongoing insurrection and terrorism. To see these two men honored by President Bush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom was shocking. They both deserved major reprimands and removal from their posts, rather than medals. Their effrontery has no bounds evidenced when each produced a book seeking to absolve themselves of blame. Both have since been hooted off the stage by the reading public.

---