Key anti-al-Qaida sheik slain in Iraq

The anti-war crowd, meanwhile, which includes leaders of the Democratic Party, continues to voice the theme of defeat and to press for American withdrawal from Iraq.

To discuss the success of the surge, and the mentality of those who yearn for our failure in Iraq, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests are:

Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, the co-author with Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely of Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror. He is a retired Air Force Fighter Pilot who has been a Fox News Military Analyst for the last four and a half years and continues to appear regularly on Fox. He returned from his second visit to Iraq in December, 2005.

Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at link href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/">the Foundation for the Defense of Democracieslink href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/">. He prosecuted the Blind Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995.

and

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were executed at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come word-for-word out of Pacepa's book link href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895267462/102-2740221-8059325?v=glance&n=283155">Red Horizons, republished in 27 countries. Pacepa’s new book, link href="http://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Kill-Harvey-Kennedy-Assassination/dp/1566637619/ref=sr_1_2/103-6260968-8101453?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183013830&sr=8-2">Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, is due out in November.

FP: Andy McCarthy, Mike Pacepa and Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, let’s begin with you.

Tell us your thoughts about the recent developments in Iraq and what you find significant in Gen. Petraeus’ testimony.

McInerney: The surge is working. However, there is still a long way to go but it means that Gen Paetraeus’s Counter Insurgency Strategy is viable and in the long term can bring victory.

Victory means that we can have a stable Iraq with a moderate government but not necessarily a Jefferson Democracy. Before I go further I am delighted to be on this panel with such esteemed colleagues and look forward to the discussion.

The most important recent developments have been the enormous damage done to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as well as the Sunni Sheiks in Al Anbar Province moving over to the Coalition side.

Ramadi, a former AQI stronghold, is no longer a contested Provincial Capital (35 daily attacks in Feb to less than 1 on average). In my wildest dreams I would not have predicted such a dramatic drop.

We control almost 60% of Baghdad now and are moving very successfully in other contested areas. In Mosul, Iraqi soldiers recently killed the AQI emir of Mosul known as Safi and two others. Last week we killed one of the most senior AQI leaders al Badri who was the mastermind behind 2006 Samarra mosque bombing that ignited the sectarian violence.

In May and June 26 AQI leaders were killed which means that the local intelligence and tips are very accurate. There has been a substantial drop in sectarian murders and attacks in Baghdad since January and record numbers arms of caches discovered.

Our Provincial Reconstruction Teams are making significant progress but much needs to be done in job creation and economic development. The Maliki Government is not doing its job in my opinion for the people. Now I do not want to sound too optimistic as we still have a very long and hard fight in front of us as I previously mentioned. But we are now using the correct operational strategy with the exception of Iran. We are now facing an Iranian surge to counter our efforts and we still have not taken the corrective actions to counter their surge but more about this later.

Pacepa: I fully agree with Lt. Gen. McInerney’s view that we can win the war in Iraq. But for that to happen we should remove the war from the hands of the politicians who are now using it to promote themselves. War is a matter of life and death. It cannot be approved today and disapproved tomorrow.

The Democratic leaders of the Congress are using the war in Iraq to win elections, not to defeat America’s enemy. Monday, when Gen. Petraeus appeared in front of the U.S. Congress, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton opened the hearing by saying that Petraeus is “almost certainly the right man for the job in Iraq, but he's the right person three years too late.” Democratic representative Robert Wexler pronounced this year's troop increase a failure. And Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Chris Dodd, who was not present at the hearing, issued a statement saying that "the fact that there are questions about General Petraeus' report is not surprising given that it was brought to you by this White House. In contrast, independent report after report indicates that the whack-a-mole strategy has made this the bloodiest summer of the war."

We should put the war in Iraq where it belongs. It is not the President’s war. It is not the Pentagon’s war. It is America’s war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. Americans are patriotic. Millions of them have started their lives from scratch?as I did?for the privilege of becoming citizens of this great country and no one wants to see America lose again. The Vietnam War was one humiliation too many.

We also need a political strategy to unite America, not to divide it. A strategy that will make the Iraqi people trust America and motivate them to do what the Germans and the Japanese did after World War II: break with the tyrannical past, and rebuild their country to fit into the modern word.

FP: But Lt. Gen. Pacepa, what kind of political strategy are you talking about exactly? For argument’s sake, let me ask this: is it not a bit complicated to enter into the Islamic-Arab and to get people to “break” with a tyrannical past when large segments of the culture and religion want absolutely nothing to do with democracy or freedom and also completely reject and despise modernity? This is a very big challenge. What are your thoughts on this? Moreover, expand a bit on your own reading of the war at the moment.

Pacepa: The Cold War was also complicated, but we won it. “It takes a lot of fire and heat to make a piece of steel,” President Reagan used to say during the years he was forging his steely measures that helped America defeat the impenetrable Soviet empire and win the Cold War. Reagan started by defining the “Evil Empire,” and by masterfully uniting the Free World in a joint front against it. Having done that, Reagan confronted the tyrants in the Kremlin from all imaginable directions: increased the U.S. arms production; depressed the value of Soviet oil export; backed anti-Soviet insurgencies; financed anti-communist publications in the West; created various NATO-oriented cultural organizations secretly backed by the CIA. According to Peter Schweitzer, who authored Reagan’s War, these initiatives “were costing Moscow some $45 billion a year?a crippling sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings.” [1] Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko summed it all up: “Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he has teeth of iron.”

The current stage of our war in Iraq is quite similar to the old Cold War. Both were ignited by murderous tyrants, both were aimed at crushing freedom, and both were intended to expand totalitarianism around the world. Thus, the strategy for wining the war in Iraq should be based, in my view, on the strategy that helped us win the Cold War. That means: create political unity at home, and persuade the rest of the Free World to support us; maintain strong military pressure on the enemy; undermine its economic and financial power; compromise its unity through intelligence means; and unleash crushing ideological offensives to ruin the tyrants’ credibility with their own people.

My reading of the war at the moment? I agree with Lt. Gen. McInerney that we are, finally, on the right track. The surprising trip to Iraq made by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner validates my view. “It is of symbolic significance,” a French official told Time, “but you often open the door to concrete chance by first taking symbolic positions.” [2] Germany also abandoned the Moscow-Berlin-Paris Axis built by President Putin in 2003 to prevent the U.S. from overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and it is now moving behind us.

Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons and its increased support given to al-Qaeda terrorists who are operating in Iraq are also playing on our side. Germany, France and other EU nations are considering providing forces to support US-sponsored militaristic actions against Iran’s government, according to Sir Malcolm Leslie Rifkind, the patron of the British Tory Reform Group.

FP: Fair enough, my friend. There are certainly many lessons we can draw from our victory in the Cold War to our fight against radical Islam. What worries me, however, is that there are certain fundamental differences between Islamic jihadists and communists. One of them is that communists were and are interested in self-preservation – Muslim fanatics are not. Many of the tactics of jihadists are also different from what we knew in the Cold War. A religion is involved in this one, and the means of terror are something far different. People who were stuck under communist tyranny wanted to be liberated. What is of concern is that many Muslims who crave Sharia want nothing to do with democracy and modernity – and yearn for gender apartheid and obedience to a supreme deity and tot a totalitarian state.

Andrew McCarthy, go ahead sir.

McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie?and let me add that it is a privilege to be in such august company.

Given the stage of our discussion as you throw it to me, it’s timely that I’ve just read a post by our friend and my FDD colleague Cliff May (at The Corner on NRO) called “Analogy as Anasthesia.” Cliff was reacting to a Washington Post op-ed by Philip Gordon which also urged the Cold War as a useful model for how we should fight the war against jihadism. The fact that Lt. Gen. Pacepa and Philip Gordon agree, as I do, on the bottom line that the Cold War is a good analogy but appear to disagree about exactly what the analogy instructs makes Cliff’s point: Analogies are of much more utility in thinking about the broad strokes than the details.

Analogies tie together things that are similar, not the same. Here the similarities are, as Lt. Gen. Pacepa points out, that this is a long-term, complex struggle and it needs a multi-faceted political, military, law-enforcement, intelligence and ideological response. But the differences are very important. That doesn’t make Lt. Gen. Pacepa wrong, I think he’s right. But it underscores the challenges we face. We do need a coherent ideological response to jihadism, but that requires getting past our ingrained reluctance to scrutinize Islam and recognize the role it undoubtedly plays in galvanizing our enemies. The fact that it is hard to imagine doing that does not make it any less necessary.

Similarly, we do need national unity?to move into the main topic of our discussion, the surge demonstrates that, given the right troop deployments and rules of engagement, we can win in Iraq; but even as our spectacular military makes progress there, we are losing the war at home, where the enemy and its sympathizers have made great inroads in the media, the academy, the commentariat and even the courts (which have turned the concept of due process into an offensive weapon to be used by captured jihadists). Again, the fact that national unity is hard to envision at this point does not make having it any less necessary.

I couldn’t agree more with Lt. Gen. Pacepa’s assessment that this is America’s war?all of us as a nation. That’s why one of the most depressing things I read this year was the opinion of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, purporting to invalidate the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program. (I wrote about it here; she was later reversed.) It wasn’t so much the very poorly reasoned ruling as that her opinion, transparently, was an anti-war polemic, referring to the conflict as “the War on Terror of this administration”?not of the American people, but of President George W. Bush. Judge Taylor is a Carter appointee, and she was speaking, I’m afraid, for a depressingly large and energized plurality of Americans. I wish I could say I saw that situation changing, but I don’t, and it’s very hard to fight a long ideological war, where constancy and coherence are so important, with such deep opposition?pouring out not from a fringe but from our elites.

Not surprisingly, I agree with Tom’s assessment of our military progress?and am heartened by it because he is so much more competent than I am to evaluate it. I am concerned, though, that we have spent too much time conflating (a) the political disposition of Iraq, and democracy in particular, with American interest in Iraq, and (b) victory in Iraq with victory in the war on terror. In many ways, I think it’s welcome that the surge is bringing these problems to a head. It forces us to confront the fact that democratizing an Islamic society is a very subordinate goal as far as our national security is concerned?we should never make it our controlling aim. It also shows that this is, as Michael Ledeen has maintained for years, a regional (if not a global) war, Iran’s dark hand has been behind it all along, and it makes very little strategic or tactical sense to view Iraq and Afghanistan as the whole war which we need to draw down from rather than two theaters in a larger struggle in which our work is far from done. Indeed, while I've found Gen. Petraeus' congressional testimony very impressive, I've been struck (as I discuss in this NRO piece) by the dissonance between, on the one hand, his candid presentation of the blatant and increasing belligerence Iran is exhibiting in Iraq (particularly against our forces) and, on the other, the State Department's mulish insistence that we are on a trajectory toward and Iraq at peace with its neighbors.

FP: Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, your turn sir. Kindly respond to the themes being discussed. I would also like you to touch on Hillary Clinton and other Democrats recently admitting that the surge is working but at the same time still wanting us to leave Iraq prematurely. This very much exposes them for who they are and what they desire, doesn’t it?

McInerney: Not surprisingly I agree with both Gen. Pacepa’s and Andrew comments in general but would like to flesh out their thoughts further.

We do need to unify America and it will not be easy. However to assist, I would change the name of the GWOT to the Global War Against Radical Islam (GWARI) so people know why we fight and who we fight.

I would emphasize that we are not fighting a religion but an ideology as evil as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Gen. Pacepa’s eloquent description of how we defeated Communism should be duplicated in spades. We have been sadly lacking in this regard especially communicating to the American people why we fight. Unfortunately the President misjudged his election victory in 2004 and thought America knew why we fight and stopped responding to his critics as well as getting other leaders to assist. Bush Lied People Died became a false reality equal to Joseph Goebbels’ Big Lie. Fortunately President Reagan had a unified country during the Cold War but he was also a Great Communicator. However we take the cards we are dealt and must continue to counter Judge Taylor’s ridiculous rulings before it is too late.

Now I do not believe the Surge will continue to be moderately successful until we institute a covert campaign against Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). I will call this a Tit for Tat strategy. Simply stated for every explosively formed penetrator (EFP) that goes off in Iraq one goes off in Iran against IRGC military, political and economic targets. This coupled with a very aggressive embargo on international funds and the slow leak on drying up refined petrol from the United Arab Emirates will enable the Iranian people to take their country back.

On the political front remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) from the State Department’s terrorist list which will deeply disturb the Mullahs and continue to build a coalition of the willing designed to stop this Shiite Crescent from spreading across the Arabian Peninsula.

The surge is not only about defeating Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other dissidents against a moderate Iraq but defeating Iran’s surge to dominate the Arabian Peninsula. We do get confused when we have Sunni, Shiite Sectarian violence mixed with indiscriminate AQI bombings but remember the threat is Radical Islam in different uniforms.

Finally, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders have gotten so far left that they must continue to raise the bar for success which I believe has identified them as wanting defeat as an outcome. Consequences are never discussed and there is a great danger that they have overplayed their hand. Jack Murtha's description of the Haditha incident has been disproven after it went through a lengthy legal process. This will come home to roost at some time in the future I believe. We clearly are having problems getting the political process in Iraq and the region moving as effectively as we got NATO to move during the Cold War but we must put greater effort. France’s symbolic gesture has important potential but we must hurry. Unfortunately I don’t think Maliki has it in him but that is a discussion for later.

Pacepa: It is a privilege for me to participate to such an in-depth discussion. Let me start with Andy McCarthy’s analogies. They are right on the money. The Cold War and the Iraq War are far from being identical. But they are similar. In both wars our enemies were armed with Kalashnikovs and Katyusha rockets. And in both wars our enemies were indoctrinated by Moscow to hate Americans. In 1972, Yury Andropov, the first KGB chairman to be enthroned in the Kremlin, tasked the Soviet bloc intelligence community to transform Palestinian anti-Semitism into an armed anti-American doctrine throughout the whole Islamic world. A billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than a million could,” he told me. Our task was to portray the U.S. as a Zionist country dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony. The KGB chairman explained that Islamic cultures would be uniquely receptive to our goals. They had a taste for nationalism, jingoism and victimology. Their oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against “Zionist America” would flow naturally from their religious fervor.

Sounds familiar?

We do not have an instrument to measure the results of intelligence influence operations. But over the course of thirty-some years the Soviet bloc community spread millions of Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a tsarist Russian forgery that had become the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy) in the Islamic world. It also sent thousands of influence agents to the same area, tasked to portray the U.S. as a country intent on subjugating the world to Jewish interests. It is safe to presume that this combined effort must have played a role in generating the hatred for America that is now screamed forth across the Islamic world.

This brings me to Lt. Gen. McInerney’s conclusion that we should address Radical Islam as an evil ideology, not as a religion. He is utterly right. It is extremely encouraging that our military surge is working. But the rockets that ended the Cold War had been fired by Radio Free Europe, not by American military forces.

Now down to Jamie’s question about Hillary Clinton and the other Democrats who voted for the War in Iraq before condemning it and who now admit that link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D77E4144-9433-4517-B1B4-05F9D6BAA345">the surge is working but still want to abandon Iraq to al-Qaeda terrorists. In my view, they are political lilliputians, and should be treated as such. They do not deserve to lead our country. For them, America is a “dispensable nation.” For the rest of us, America is the economic and the military leader of the world. The number of people trying to become Americans has never been higher. The new leaders of France, Germany and Great Britain are looking to America for leadership. They know their countries cannot alone establish an international or even a regional balance of power. They also know they cannot manage a confrontation with al-Qaeda, Russia, China or even Iran without U.S. help.

Josef Joffe, the chief editor of Germany’s weekly Die Zeit, took his time to explain, in a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, what would happen once the last Blackhawk took off from Baghdad International: “Iran advances to No.1, completing its nuclear program undeterred. … Syria reclaims Lebanon, which it has always labeled as part of the ‘Great Syria.’ Hezbollach and Hamas, both founded and equipped by Tehran, resume their war against Israel. Russia, extruded from the Middle East by adroit Kissingerian diplomacy in the 1970s, rebuilds its anti-Western alliances. In Iraq war escalates, unleashing even more torrents of refugees and provoking outside intervention, if not partition.”

Joffe summed it all up: “Withdrawal cannot serve America’s interests on the day after tomorrow. Friends and foes will ask: If this superpower doesn’t care about the world’s central and most dangerous stage?what will it care about?” [1]

No wonder Joffe will be teaching foreign policy at Stanford University this fall.

FP: Thanks, Lt. Gen Pacepa. Before we move forward, could you kindly elaborate a bit on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that you just mentioned? They are now popping up all around the world, arousing new anti-American sentiments. “Death to American ZOG” signs were recently carried by demonstrators in France and Germany. The abbreviation “ZOG,” from Zionist Occupation Government, has now become an anti-American symbol both for leftist Europeans and for radical Islamists.

Can you shed some light on this phenomenon?

Pacepa: With pleasure, Jamie. It is indeed a subject of great current concern. The general perception is that Germany was the cradle of contemporary anti-Semitism. But before we had the word Holocaust we had the Russian word pogrom, meaning massacre. An official Russian dictionary of 1939 defines pogrom as the government-organized mass slaughter of some element of the population as a group, such as the Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia. [2] Russia’s first major pogrom against the Jews took place on April 15, 1881, in the Ukrainian town of Yelisavetgrad.

Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy.

The Protocols was compiled by the tsarist political police, the Okhrana, to compromise Russia’s Jewish minister of finance, Sergey Witte, who wanted to modernize the country. The author of the Protocols was an Okhrana disinformation expert, Petr Ivanovich Rachovsky, who was assigned to France at that time and had been inspired by the enormous wave of anti-Semitism aroused by the Dreyfus controversy.[3] Rachovsky lifted most of his text from an obscure, 1864 French satire called Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), written by Maurice Joly and accusing Emperor Napoleon III of plotting to seize all the powers in French society. Rachovsky had essentially done nothing more than substitute the words the world for France and the Jews for Napoleon III.

To disguise its hand, the Okhrana claimed the Protocols to be the minutes of the first Zionist Congress (held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897), at which the Jews had allegedly plotted to take over the world.

The Protocols are one of the most resilient pieces of disinformation in history. In 1921, the Times of London published a devastating exposure of the forgery by printing extracts from the Protocols side-by-side with the passages from the Joly book that had been plagiarized. [4] That did not stop the Protocols from becoming the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy as expressed in Mein Kampf, written in 1923. In fact, Nazi Germany later translated the Protocols into many languages and flooded the world with them to support its allegation that there was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination, and to demonstrate that the persecution of Jews was a necessary self-defense for Germany.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the Protocols began infecting Russia itself. The state-controlled Orthodox Church, alleging Jewish plans to overthrow Christianity in Russia, started printing the Protocols and selling them to the population. In October 1998 Albert Makashov, a retired Soviet general and member of the Duma, called for the “extermination of all Jews in Russia,” after insinuating that they were being paid by American Zionism. [5] On November 4, 1998, the Duma officially endorsed Makashov’s statement by voting (121-107) to defeat a parliamentary motion censuring his hate-filled statement. [6] On August 3, 2001, a letter from ninety-eight U.S. Senators expressing concern about the rise of anti-Semitism in the Russian Federation was sent to President Putin.

McCarthy: General Pacepa’s fascinating account of the Protocols, is proof positive of something I think we are all getting at: the ideological battle that must supplement the surge and other military battles if we are to be successful.

Let’s stipulate that the Soviet regime was reprehensible. Regardless, what Gen. Pacepa demonstrates here is that it understood the ideological battle more than we do. It was ruthlessly practical and brooked no such bunkum as political correctness to blind it to the pathologies of Islamic societies. It understood that because of Islam’s doctrinal and historical animus against Judaism, there would be receptiveness at a very visceral level to a fraud like the Protocols?and that even when proven untrue, the fraud would endure because (a) many Muslims want it to be true, and (b) there is rampant illiteracy and intellectual narrowness in much of the Islamic world (where it is thought sufficient to study the Qur’an to the exclusion of all else). Regrettably, it doesn’t much matter there what the Times of London says.

Unlike the Soviets, we take an “everything is beautiful” view of Islam?to the point even of issuing to every captive at Gitmo a copy of the Qur’an, notwithstanding that the terrorists to whom we are distributing that book believe it commands the murder of Americans. But there is a big difference between holding, as we do, that people have freedom of conscience (i.e., that you can believe anything you wish to believe), and holding, as we most certainly should not, that beliefs are none of our business if you hang a “religion” sign on them.

What Tom suggested before is absolutely true: we are facing an ideology that is every bit as dangerous as the ideologies we confronted and defeated in the 20^th Century. Unfortunately, however, this particular ideology is different from Nazism or Communism in that it springs from a religious doctrine. We had not the slightest compunction about analyzing and refuting Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, or the other theoretical treatises on which our former totalitarian enemies based their systems. There is a reluctance, though, to examine the tenets of radical Islam because, like it or not, they are a literal reflection of Islamic doctrine. So we instead tell ourselves that terrorists must be perverting Muslim doctrine … while at the same time we hope for an Islamic reformation. But why would a reformation be necessary if there wasn’t a problem in the first place?

So I agree that we must acknowledge the true enemy and the broader nature of the war, especially where Iran is concerned. But it is equally necessary to understand, as the Soviets understood (and capitalized on), what animates this enemy. I am frankly not hopeful that we are capable of this. Islam rejects some of the central tenets of Western democracies: freedom of conscience, freedom of choice, equality under the law, etc. Yet, as we’ve tried to build new societies in Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve maintained the centrality of Islam and Sharia in their new constitutions. That is a very powerful indication that we are not willing to deal with the nexus between Islam and terror.

McInerney: Gen. Pacepa and Andrew have clearly laid out some of our most important challenges in the psychological and ideological campaigns we face and how we counter these false hoods that have persisted for so many years as the Protocols demonstrates.

Again it is critical that we identify the threat as it is: Radical Islam -- an ideology not a religion. Unfortunately no governments describe it for what it is but call it terror.

Give me a break. We are confusing ourselves and now the new UK Government Home Secretary doesn’t even call the recent terrorists caught in Scotland terrorists but criminals. We must break through this nonsense if we are to win.

The Global War Against Radical Islam (GWARI) can only be won if Americans and our allies understand the threat and the consequences of our failure by leaving Iraq to Radical Islam where we have seen recent coalition success. The Surge is working militarily and even some significant success politically where we have seen Sunni tribes switch to supporting Coalition Forces in al Anbar and elsewhere without leadership from the Maliki Government. This realization that Radical Islam (AQI) is not for these Sunni tribes is huge and must not be trivialized. It is an important grass root step in the overall process of modernity catching on in the region.

Andrew rightly points out the nexus between Islam and terror (radical Islam as we must call it) must be recognized but there is a glimmer of hope. There is also a glimmer of hope that America is starting to see victory is not only possible but necessary. Unfortunately the likes of Senator John Warner are not reinforcing this and most Democrats are still wedded to defeat. However the consequences of a Shiia Radical Islam driven by Iran are starting to sink in the region and the potential of a coalition of the willing is increasing. President Bush must pull out all his resources to convince America and our allies of the consequences of the Middle East falling to Radical Islam. Gen Petraeus has ample evidence to give the President and the Congress if they will remove the political calculus and listen to his report. If they don’t I believe we are revisiting July 1939 and the dreadful results of WWII will be duplicated in far greater scale.

Pacepa: I fully agree with Andy McCarthy and Lt. Gen. McInerney: the war is President Bush’s to win. And it seems he intends to do just that. “We’re kicking ass” in Iraq, he now tells his Australian hosts. They applauded. So did the leaders of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. They all know that only American intelligence and military forces could protect their countries from today’s curse of international terrorism.

The Democratic leaders of the U.S. Congress are another matter. They are insinuating that President Bush and his military forces?not the terrorists?are America’s enemies. All but one Democratic contender for the White House originally voted to authorize the war, and all but one has now recanted that vote. None of them has moved a finger to help our troops win the war, but all allege that we have lost it, and all are disgracefully demanding we forget terrorism and bring our troops home.

The new congressional leaders are now also dumping on Gen. Petraeus, who is dedicated to winning the war in Iraq, by presenting him as “a mouthpiece for President Bush” that cannot be trusted. “The Bush report?” Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin snorted, when asked about the upcoming report from the commander in Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also mocked the General’s upcoming briefing as “the Bush report.” [9]

The Democratic effort to denigrate Gen. Petraeus continued on Monday, when he appeared before the U.S. Congress to present his report. "The administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand... I don't buy it," said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, before the four-star general even started his report. [10]

What is wrong with Bush’s report? Our Constitution states that America’s military forces have only ONE commander-in-chief: the president of the United States. The head of state is also invariably commander-in-chief in the British Commonwealth and in most other relevant countries. In England, it is the sovereign. In Ireland, the president. In France, the president of the Republic also holds the official title of “Chef des Armées.” In Italy, the president of the Republic is not only “the commander of the armed forces” but also “chairman of the Supreme Defense Council.” In Germany, the chancellor is “commander of armed forces in time of war.” NATO is also run by commanders-in-chief, not by committees.

No war in history has been run by committees?much less by a 535-member committee. America’s founders gave the U.S. Congress the power to declare war, but not to conduct wars.

During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to fight Nazism and the Holocaust, but the country remained sturdily united around their commander-in-chief. America held national elections during that war, but no one running for office even thought about harming the country’s unity in a quest for personal victory. Afterwards, instead of abandoning its vanquished enemies, America, remained bonded to her commander-in-chief, rebuilt Western Europe and Japan as strong democracies, and transformed the United States into the leader of the Free World.

Last month Frontpagemag.com had over 14 million page views. That means a lot of readers. Let’s ask them to help America return to her old traditions. Let’s unite the country around her commander-in-chief, and take the time to transform Iraq into an ally. Otherwise it will be chaos: al-Qaeda will fill the vacuum left by our troops, the terrorist government of Iran will dominate the Islamic World, and Americans will soon be paying $9 per gallon of fuel.

McCarthy: The bunkum about “the Bush report” is even worse than Gen. Pacepa suggests. The pertinent legislation actually calls for a report from the president. Initially, Gen. Petreaus was not going to be brought to testify since what congress had called for was the president’s own assessment. Democrats, however, screamed for Petraeus, and the White House agreed to make him available. Having gotten what they wanted, the Left then changed course and claimed this brilliant, honorable, patriotic commander?a man who is manifestly nobody’s tool and nobody’s fool?was simply mouthing the gospel according to Bush. It is certainly fair to disagree with General Petraeus in good faith; it is preposterous to regard him as the puppet on the end of anyone’s string.

As I write this, the anniversary of 9/11 looms and I’ve just watched General Petraeus testify. How sad to see how much we have forgotten, how insouciant we’ve become about the real threats that we face, and how even the administration fighting the war has minitiarized it to the stabilization (or, idealistically, the democratization) of Iraq.

There are catalysts here that can continue to be ignored but won’t be denied unless they are defeated. Radical Islam is an ideology but it is also a religion. We call it “radical” because it comforts us to think of is as an aberration, but it is in fact an interpretation of Islam that is centuries old and adhered to today by tens of millions who share the goals of its most infamous acolytes even if they don’t have it in themselves to cross the line from belief to terrorist activism. Iran, in addition, is not going away. General Petraeus elucidated in his testimony what has long been known to careful analysts: the mullahs are getting bolder globally even as we portray the war as something fought in Iraq and Afghanistan (Iran being hyper-active in both theaters).

As we reach the anniversary of 9/11, many perceptive Americans ask if it will take another 9/11 before we are willing, clear-eyed, to appreciate what we are up against. Alas, it is a good question.

FP: Andy McCarthy, Mike Pacepa and Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.

Notes:

[1] Dave Eberhart, NewMax.com, June 10, 2004.

[2] Bruce Crumley, “ France ‘Turns the Page’ on Iraq,” TIME, August 20, 2007.

[3] Josef Joffe, “If Iraq Falls,” The Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2007, p. 11.

[4] POGROM. Government-organized, reactionary-chauvinistic uprising of the ruling classes, mass slaughter as a group of some element of the population, accompanied by murders, destruction and the plundering of properties. [Example:] Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia. Tolkovyy Slovar Russkogo Yazyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language), ed. B.M. Volin and D.N. Ushakov (Moscow: State Publishing House of Foreign and National Dictionaries, Moscow, 1939), Vol. III, p. 352.

[5] In 1894, French captain Alfred Dreyfus, a wealthy Alsatian Jew, was falsely sentenced for espionage by an anti-Semitic court and deported to Devil’s Island. Émile Zola, a leading supporter of Dreyfus, promptly published J’accuse, reproving the judges for their anti-Semitism. Zola was tried for libel but escaped to England. The violent partisanship over this case dominated French life for more than a decade.

[6] Philip Grave, “The Protocols: A Literary Forgery,” The Times, London, August 16, 17 and 18, 1921.

[7] “Duma Deputy calls for the Extermination of all Jews in Russia,” November 10, 1998, published at www.fsumonitor.com.

[8] Jean Mackenzie, “Anti-Semitism is resurfacing in Russia,” Boston Globe, November 8, 1998.

[9] S.A. Miller, “Dems already discount war report,” The Washington Times, September 6, 2007.

[10] Arshad Mohamed and Susan Cornwell, “Petraeus hearings starts with Democratic criticism,” Reuters, September 10, 2007, 1:11 PM