Terror Takes a Stand

[kg_veteran]

TERROR TAKES A STAND

By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


October 27, 2004 -- SOLDIERS don't beg. But an old friend of mine who's still in uniform came close the other day. He badly wanted me to write another column before Election Day stressing that our troops are winning in Iraq.

He's an Army veteran of three wars. Now he's working to help Iraq become a democratic model for the Middle East. And he's worried.

Not about terrorists or insurgents. He's afraid John Kerry will be elected president.

"Kerry's rhetoric is giving the bad guys a thread to hang on," he wrote. "They're hoping we lose our nerve. They're more concerned with the U.S. elections than with the Iraqi ones."

My pal has been involved in every phase of our Iraq operations — dating back to Desert Storm. And he's convinced that the terrorists have risked everything to create as much carnage as they can before Nov. 2. Our troops are killing them left and right. The terrorists are desperate. They can't sustain this tempo of attacks much longer.

But Sen. Kerry insists that we're losing — giving our enemies hope that we'll pull out. No matter what else John Kerry may say, the terrorists only hear his criticisms of our president and our war.

Let's review what's actually happening in Iraq.

The terrorist stronghold of Fallujah is increasingly isolated. Night after night, precision weapons and raids by special-operations forces kill international terrorist leaders. Terrified, the local troublemakers are trying to play the negotiations card. They know the U.S. Marines are coming back. And this time the Leathernecks won't be stopped short. Allah's butchers are praying that they can bring down our president before terror's citadel falls.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people have been revolted by the terrorists' barbarities. They may not want U.S. troops in their streets forever, but they do not want to be ruled by fanatical murderers. Kidnapping aid workers and lopping off heads on videotape horrifies decent Muslims. The slaughter of 50 unarmed Iraqi recruits did not win hearts and minds.

Every day, Iraqis are more engaged in defending their own country. Elections are still on track. The suicide bombings continue, but they haven't deterred Iraq's new government. Nor have they been able to stop the Coalition and Iraq's expanding forces from cleaning out one terrorist rat's nest after another.

Muqtada al-Sadr is quiet as a mouse. Najaf is being rebuilt. Two-thirds of Iraq's provinces are quiet. We never see any headlines about our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq — because they're building a successful modern society in the Middle East. Good-news stories aren't welcome in our undeniably pro-Democratic media.

Even the French are uncharacteristically subdued. The serpents of the Seine thought they'd seduced the terrorists with a few anti-American apples. Instead, they've found that they can't even free two kidnapped French journalists.

After their own recent terrorist debacle, the Russians repented their criticism of the Bush administration. The Spanish, too, discovered that appeasement doesn't work any better for them than for the French — an Islamist plot to blow up justice-ministry buildings was recently uncovered. And there's more to come.

Terror's appetite is only whetted by weakness.

Of course, the United Nations is still doing everything it can to undercut President Bush. Embarrassed by Oil-for-Food corruption revelations, the U.N. would like to get back to the good old days of the Clinton administration, which winked at outright U.N. criminality.

The terrorists are pulling out all the stops to shed blood in Iraq this week. While the media makes every mortar round sound like the end of the world, the encouraging news is that the terrorists haven't been able to do more. They can harass convoys and murder civilians — but they haven't budged our troops or the new Iraqi government.

Of course, the terrorists aren't suddenly going to quit if President Bush wins at the polls — but his re-election would be a terrible psychological blow to them. They know how high the stakes are in Iraq.

The struggle isn't just about the fate of one country, but about the future of the entire Middle East. If freedom and the rule of law get even a 51 percent victory in Iraq, it's the beginning of the end for the terrorists and the vicious regimes that bred them.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rapidly using up the human capital they've accumulated over decades. The casualties in Iraq are overwhelmingly on the terrorist side. Extremist leaders have paid a particularly heavy price. But they won't stop fighting because they can't. The terrorists have to win in Iraq. They have to defeat America.

The astonishing thing is that so many of our fellow Americans don't get it. The terrorists aren't committing their shrinking reserves because the outcome's a trivial matter. They recognize the magnitude of what we're helping the Iraqi people achieve.

This is the big one. The fate of a civilization hangs in the balance. And all we hear from one presidential contender is that it's the "wrong war, at the wrong time."

It is. For the terrorists.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."