Today in Ohio President Bush laid out some hard truth for the Democrats and anyone else pushing for retreat in Iraq - it’s a dumb idea. Referencing comments made by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, President Bush said:

“When it takes time for Iraqis to reach agreement, it is not foot-dragging, as one senator described it during Congress’ two-week Easter recess. It is a revolutionary undertaking that requires great courage.”

He also pointed out that the Iraqi accomplished a feat that our Congress often finds quite trying - passing a budget.

Of course, a great deal of political progress has been made in Iraq recently, but the Democrats are “staying the course” in their calls for an immediate and ill-advised retreat claiming they know better than the president, the military, and the intelligence community where the real terrorist threat is coming from - yet-to-be-constructed and entirely secure American military bases surrounding Iraq. At least, that’s where they’d like to relocate our troops - away from killing terrorists and onto bases in already secured areas. Surely a winning strategy.

Meanwhile, President Bush has this question for them,

“If America’s strategic interests are not in Iraq, the convergence point for the twin threats of al-Qaida and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden’s deputy has called the place for the greatest battle, the country at the heart of the most volatile region on earth, then where are they?”

Good question! He also succinctly summed up the positions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Iraq:

“No matter what shortcomings these critics diagnose, their prescription is always the same: retreat,” Bush said.

Maybe Nancy Pelosi, Barack, and Sen. Clinton had better leave the War on Terror to the people that want to win…

…also, Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton do not seem to get it.

By “get it” I mean national security. The public seems, however, to be more in line with reality and, coincidently, so does John McCain. Overwhelmingly in a new survey conducted by Gallup, the American public (let’s call them “voters”) agree with John McCain (and again, reality) when they say how we should deal with the situation in Iraq.

That is, voters want the US and our next president to behave responsibly and in the best interests of America:

 It gets worse for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nearly two out of every three Americans surveyed (65%) believe “the United States has an obligation to establish a reasonable level of stability and security in Iraq before withdrawing all of its troops.” The reason is self-interest. Almost the same number of Americans (63%) believe al Qaeda “would be more likely to use Iraq as a base for its terrorist operations” if the U.S. withdraws.

Mr. Rove goes on to layout how the Dems have painted themselves into a corner of both political and foreign policy lunacy and describes how it will be perilous to their campaigns in November.

Elections are rarely decided over just one issue; to win, candidates don’t need to have a majority of Americans agreeing with them on every big issue. But when it comes to choosing a president, Americans take seriously the candidates’ views and experience on national security. Voters instinctively understand a president’s principal constitutional responsibility is protecting the country.

The Democrats have two candidates with less national security experience and fewer credentials than the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain. And they are compounding these difficulties with positions on Iraq and terrorist surveillance that are shared by a shrinking minority of Americans.

While Barack Obama is out chastising McCain for supporting “Bush’s war”, he seems to be missing some fairly important facts claiming that al-Qaeda was never in Iraq before the war in 2003. That’s all great and everything, except that the facts and the former Iraqi regime disagree. Newly released and translated Iraqi documents reveal a very extensive operation run by Saddam’s regime to recruit, train, and finance terrorism around the world including with the al-Qaeda network and people working within it.

Take these excerpts from a tremendous article found in The Australian:

Newly published Iraqi documents reveal just how extensive Saddam’s involvement with international terrorism was. The summary of these documents, published under the heading Saddam and Terrorism, has been reported across the world and read by almost no one.Its first paragraph reads: “The Iraqi Perspectives Project review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the US.

These documents, researched and translated by the US Institute for Defense Analyses show a major, extensive effort in Saddam’s Iraq to work with terrorist enemies of the US and Israel around the world.

At times these organisations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements.

And yes, al-Qaede is among those he was supporting:

It is reasonable to assume the most sensitive stuff in a paranoid state such as Saddam’s was not written down. George Tenet, the former director of the CIA who became broadly an opponent of the Bush administration, states in his memoir as a matter of plain fact that 200 al-Qa’ida fighters relocated to Iraq with Saddam’s permission. Richard Clarke, who was director of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council on 9/11, and who went on to become a bitter foe of the Bush administration and is advising the Democrats, states as plain fact in his memoir that Saddam had engaged in sponsorship of al-Qa’ida.

200! 200 al-Qaeda terrorists were sheltered in Iraq before the fall of his regime. It only took the Greek 300 soldier to hold of the Persians, and yet Barack Obama thinks that 200 terrorists enjoying the shelter of Saddam (freakin!) Hussein isn’t a big deal!

But don’t worry…no one is hearing a thing about it:

We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.

…

Acknowledging this support, but saying there’s no smoking gun directly to al-Qa’ida itself, means the report is taking an incredibly restrictive and precise view of al-Qa’ida.

But in any event this report is not claiming, as wrongly reported in the wires, that there was no link with al-Qa’ida, merely that it found no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents.

As Reagan said a while back, facts are stubborn things Barack…stubborn.

Another article (with quick bullet-points) detailing the relationships between Saddam’s Iraq and terrorist groups is here.

Let’s all hearken back to about a year ago, and remember what the situation in Iraq was like. The media was reporting dire circumstances, no political progress, and high death tolls on a nearly daily basis. In response, approval for the war effort was low - and the election prospects for people like Sen. John McCain were dim.

Fast forward to the present, and we are experiencing success on multiple fronts in Iraq as deaths of both Americans and Iraqis have plummeted, political progress is being made, and the terrorists and Muqtada al-Sadr are giving up and moving to Iran.

And what of the stories telling the fatal tale of John McCain being the largest proponent of the proven successful surge strategy? Well, let’s go to the polls:

According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans — a slim majority — now believe “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.

The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going “very well” or “fairly well” is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.

As I’ve always said, Americans love to win - and as long as we have leaders like John McCain in America, we will win.

The Bush Doctrine appears to (gasp!) be working. Somewhat shocking news to the liberal media, this represent something that conservatives have been familiar with for a while - that peace comes through strength and freedom.

A good breakdown of the article is here.

Update: Another analysis here.

The Weekley Standard Blog has an awesome piece about Obama’s total lack of understanding about the military structure.

There is a lot about Obama’s story that makes no sense. Let us start with the opening line:

“You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon–supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.”

Well, captains command companies, not rifle platoons. A rifle platoon is normally commanded by a 2nd lieutenant, sometimes (if short handed) by a senior sergeant. So for starters, Obama betrays a woeful ignorance of military organization and the chain of command. Then he remarks that the platoon was under-strength because 15 of its men had been “sent to Iraq.” Sorry, the Army doesn’t work that way. Platoons are organic units, consisting of three rifle squads, a heavy weapons squad, and a headquarters section. You can’t break it up. It is the smallest building block in the infantry that can conduct fire-and-movement tactics.

There is quite a bit more, but I have to include the closing

Overall, I think Obama would be better sticking to his “message of hope”–hope that nobody will ever ask him to make any substantive statements on military affairs, ever again.

Nancy Pelosi has developed quite an amazing ability to stick her foot in her mouth right when it will be the most noticeable. While Nancy Pelosi is saying things like this,

“There haven’t been gains, Wolf,” the speaker replied. “The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure. The troops have succeeded, God bless them. We owe them the greatest debt of gratitude for their sacrifice, their patriotism, and for their courage and to their families as well.” [Emphasis mine]

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda is signing a different tune. In recently released copies of letters intercepted between the leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorists in charge sound the alarm that everything around them is falling apart.

 “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight. The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.”

and this:

“There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the tribes changed course 360 degrees . . . Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters . . . As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less.”

and this:

“The Islamic State of Iraq [al-Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al-Qaeda’s expulsion from Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

Of course, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have never been to keen on things like facts. They tend to get in the way of their agenda…

In a shocking (although sadly not so) article in Sunday’s New York Times, two reporters, Deborah Sontag and Lizatte Alvarez, launched into typical talking points about bloodthirsty soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as maniacal killers.

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The NYT patched together 121 of these stories to paint the picture of rabid young men returning to America as crazed murderers - following the leftist portrait of American soldiers who are either psychopaths to begin with or are made so by the military.

The problem here is that 121 veteran-murderers, although sad, is a tremendously small amount as Ralph Peters explains in a counter-article in the NY Post:

Had the Times’ “journalists” and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would’ve found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.
The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, should crunch the numbers. I’m even willing to spot the Times a few percentage points (either way). But the hard statistics from the Justice Department tell a far different tale from the Times’ anti-military propaganda.
A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that’s not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department’s numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would’ve had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.

I don’t know whether to assume the reporters are simply bad at their jobs because they are lazy and incompetent, or because they ignore basic journalistic standards and impose their leftist propaganda upon their audience, but either way they owe our veterans a very serious apology.

Please tell the NYT editors how you feel by here!

we know that the Democratic candidate is someone America simply can’t trust to handle the delicate world of foreign policy. Whether because they lack the experience, or they’ve simply shown a disregard for American interests and basic facts, the Democrats are not fit to represent the US on the international stage.

This point has been made time and again by the candidates themselves, but HERE’s a post on RedState by “former director of public affairs with the CIA and served as deputy communications director with the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign”, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck - what you might be able to call “someone who knows what they’re talking about”.

So says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

“We will again face the risk of running out of money,” Gates said at a Pentagon news conference. He said the uncertainly of funding requires the Defense Department to make “short-term plans and short-term decisions.”

You see, the Democrats in Washington, D.C. continue to put everything our troops have sacrificed for over the last year at risk by playing political games with the money needed to win the war in Iraq. Instead of fully supporting our troops and their courageous battle (not to mention recognizing the extraordinary turnaround we’ve seen recently in Iraq), the Democrats in Congress continue to pander to the left-wing, anti-war, lose-at-all-costs wing of their party.

As the article puts it:

Paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fits and starts undermines military planning and risks gains made by U.S. troops over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.