THE LEFTIST ENEMIES OF ORDINARY IRAQIS

Excerpt:

Last October, driven by deep curiosity, the lure of a generous paycheck and by a desire to be where historic events were unfolding, I left my comfortable life and took a job in Iraq. With a group of Iraqi and American construction specialists, I helped manage renovations and new construction for 17 Iraqi police stations in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad....

After six months of difficult work, all 17 police stations had been completed, on time and within budget. That was accomplished in what has been called one of the most dangerous places on earth. The main reason the police station project succeeded was that most of the Americans and Iraqis assigned to it learned to trust and respect each other, to cooperate, and to focus on a common goal, seeing it through completion. Without the mutual trust and respect, the project would have failed.

So it is with the effort to stabilize Iraq - without trust and respect between coalition and Iraqi security forces and ordinary Iraqis, no amount of weaponry or diplomacy will succeed in bringing peace there. And nothing can accelerate that process more than a firm commitment from the US that it will stand side-by-side with the Iraqi security forces, and with ordinary Iraqis, until peace and stability is at hand - no matter how long that takes to achieve.

Unfortunately, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Democratic Party, the leftist media and the nation's cultural elite as a whole have done little to help build trust between America and Iraq. Indeed, they have done exactly the opposite, filling the airwaves and the front pages of US newspapers with endless negative messages: the experiment to bring democracy to Iraq is a total failure; US soldiers are psychopaths and murderers; President Bush is a greater threat to the world than those who torture and murder innocent Iraqis; the US presence in Iraq is the problem, not part of the solution, to ending the 30 years of brutality that Iraqis endured under the boot of Saddam; the game is over - al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups have won and the Iraqis and Americans have lost.

Who can say that the morale of ordinary Iraqis and American soldiers was not damaged when one of the most powerful men in America, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, stood in front of the world and declared, "I believe. that this war is lost." Who can expect them to ignore the defeatist postures of men and women like John Kerry, Richard Durbin, Edward Kennedy, John Murtha, Jack Reed, John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi? Who can forget the media deification of people like Cindy Sheehan and groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R and Code Pink, who are far more concerned with pushing a radical social and political agenda than they are with bringing peace and stability to Iraq?

Iraqis watch us, and they listen to us. What they hear from some of our politicians, political activists and cultural elites has made many of them reluctant to work with the Americans in bringing security to their country. Many Iraqis are afraid of what they are hearing from the Democratic Party leadership and their media shills - that America will abandon them. And as long as they are afraid, they will be reluctant to seize the initiative in their towns and villages and chase out those who are murdering their families.

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