Iraq, Five Years Later

Everything I want to say about the Iraq war this week has already been said by the brilliant Army veteran and NYPost reporter Ralph Peters. Please read the entire article (the men serving in Iraq deserve that five minutes of your time), but here's one part that absolutely qualifies as a Natural Truth:

"I cannot help repeating the heartbreaking truth that it didn't have to be this hard, this bloody, or this expensive. This is what happens when war is made by amateurs. Has anyone in Washington learned that lesson?

It's a lesson that the left, as well as the right, needs to take to heart. While the Bush administration deserves every lash it gets, domestic opponents of the war have been hypocritical, dishonest and destructive...

Had President Bill Clinton sent our troops to depose Saddam Hussein, Democrats would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln." [emphasis
added]

There's so much more, so please read the entire column. When you do, one thing should become obvious. The pledge by Sens. Clinton and Obama to immediately abandon the mission in Iraq regardless of conditions on the ground--to undo all the progress we've made by bringing democracy to the heart of the Middle East, progress at the cost of American blood and treasure--is reason enough to keep either of them out of the Oval Office.