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The determined opposition of the left-liberal intelligentsia to the War on Terror, which due to its cultural hegemony has sadly seeped into the consciousness of the English-speaking peoples, has somehow led to a situation in which perhaps a majority of the electorates of every constituent nation (except doughty Australia) is willing to consider "defeat as an option" in Iraq. Of course, if we allow the notion to be bruited abroad that the only wars the English-speaking peoples could ever fight are those that have had a priori approval of NBC, CBS, CNN, the BBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, Guardian, and Independent, then their World Hegemon status might as well just be turned over to China right now, all wrapped up with big red satin bows decorating it.

Furthermore, defeat in the War on Terror means that the Iraqis and Afghans who are presently putting their trust in the English-speaking peoples will be massacred. They will therefore join a long line of people, including the South Vietnamese, Kurds, and Iraqi Marsh Arabs who were first encouraged by the West, only to be left to their own defenses afterwards. Americans need only visit Degas's monumental painting "The Execution of Maximilian" in New York's Museum of Modern Art to see the fate awaiting premier al-Maliki and his colleagues once the West withdraws its troops -- as Napoleon III withdrew his from the protection of the hapless Emperor of Mexico -- and they try to struggle on against the revolutionaries. The U.S. Congress has let down so many of America's friends and clients since the humiliating scenes on the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975. We must not see any repeat of that.

ALTHOUGH EACH INDIVIDUAL DEATH of Coalition servicemen in the War on Terror is a tragedy for their loved ones, the numbers must be seen in an overall military, historical, and demographic context. At the time of writing, the United States has lost just 3,555 killed and Great Britain has lost 153. In 2006, the United States topped 300 million in total population, so the numbers killed fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda represent 0.1 percent of her population. Put another way, as many U.S. Marines died taking the single Japanese-held island of Tarawa in three weeks than U.S. soldiers in all the services have died in more than four years fighting in the Middle East, against fanatics who loathe America just as much as any kamikaze pilot.

Once one strips away the friendly fire incidents and other accidents, the number of British servicemen dying per year since 2003 has not been wildly out of kilter with the annual numbers of those murdered by the IRA. Furthermore, 153 killed represents the death toll of a very quiet weekend during the Western Front in the Great War. If one takes into account the vast numbers of U.S. servicemen who have served in Iraq over the past four years, multiplying the number of men by the number of missions they have undertaken, the death toll is astonishing low and a tribute to the troops' professionalism and their officers' leadership. This is not something any politician can point out, but by historical terms the Bush administration has overthrown a tyrant and installed a democracy at relatively low cost in American lives. Furthermore, there have been no terrorist outrages on the American homeland in the nearly six years since 9/11, something few would have foreseen that terrible day.

Similarly, once one dismisses with contumely the absurd figures bandied about by people such as the (anti-war) editor of the Lancet as to the number of Iraqis killed, the likely number of fewer than 150,000 pales into near-insignificance beside the death tolls of at least a dozen post-1945 conflicts in Africa and Asia, where over one million people have perished. In world history, context is all. Only by putting our losses -- heart-wrenchingly sad though each individual one of course is -- into a proper overall historical perspective, can one appreciate that this war is simply not "another Vietnam," where total U.S. losses exceeded 58,000 killed, or another Korea.

(Of course Iraq is not "another Vietnam" for any number of other reasons also, including type of terrain, status of enemy, support from Great Powers, and possibility of final negotiated settlement. The Viet Cong were supported by the majority of the North Vietnamese in a way that is simply not the case with the Iraqis and the jihadists today. Were Hanoi capable of unleashing a dirty bomb in downtown Manhattan, it is doubtful it would have done so; with al Qaeda there can be no question that it would. The similarity between the conflicts instead lies with us, not our enemy, specifically in the U.S. Congress's willingness to quit the struggle once the network evening news programs started doling out a nightly diet of negative stories about the conflict.)

TO HAVE PURSUED a War on Terror in which the English-speaking peoples' most outspoken foe -- and Terrorism's most active friend -- was allowed to walk free would have been a political, military, and diplomatic absurdity. There was a superb case to be made for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that mentioned neither the United Nations Resolutions, nor Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor even his despicable human rights record, and it is a shame that in the cacophony over WMDs it was not considered more thoroughly, for it is one that is largely immune from left-liberal criticism.

Saddam was responsible for many attempts to shoot down RAF and USAF planes over the no-fly zones; he profited from the Oil-for-Food scandal while Iraqi children starved to death; he paid $25,000 to the families of each Palestinian suicide-murderer; he threatened his peaceful pro-Western Arab neighbors; he summarily expelled UN weapons inspectors in 1998; the Iraqi Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate President George Bush Sr. and the emir of Kuwait with a powerful car bomb in 1993. Furthermore, Iraq sheltered the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (which had killed U.S. soldiers and civilians), the Palestine Liberation Front, Abu Abbas (who murdered the U.S. citizen Leon Klinghoffer on the cruise ship Achille Lauro), the Abu Nidal organization (responsible for the deaths or wounding of 900 people in 20 countries), Abdul Rahman Yassin (who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), and several others. Nor did the future look bright post-Saddam; he had two vicious, sadistic, sons, one of whom -- Uday -- was a rapist and mass murderer.

Yet due to the incessant, strident, and often unjustified criticism from the left-liberal media, today only some 20 percent of the English-speaking peoples support their governments' actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. (One wonders who these fabulously stalwart one-in-five actually are who are so impervious to the endless left-liberal bias? Perhaps there is a sturdy irreducible minimum number of people who believe in attacking enemies rather than appeasing them, whomsoever those enemies may be, come what may? If so, the future hope of the English-speaking peoples lies with them, American Spectator readers to the forefront one imagines.)

It is in the off-mainstream media, especially blogs -- and of course on Fox News -- that one hears of the many and multifarious victories that go virtually unreported elsewhere, but which in earlier wars would have been trumpeted to the skies. A skirmish between British paratroopers and the Taliban in Helmand province in Afghanistan in September 2006 that left nearly 200 Taliban fighters dead at the cost of two Britons wounded, was reported in a British newspaper under the headline "Two Paras Wounded in Clash With Resurgent Taliban." Nor is that an isolated incident of media bias. Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson nor Churchill nor Roosevelt could have won a war faced with that species of headline-writing. It seems to be politically incorrect to record the large numbers of enemy fighters who tend to die when they tangle with our forces in Helmand, whereas the death of a single British infantry soldier there makes the front page of national newspapers here. The numbers of enemy fighters killed -- often ten times our troops' numbers or (as in the above case) sometimes many more -- are virtually never reported to the English-speaking peoples, who thus understandably feel themselves starved of good news.

SOME OF THE CONTRADICTIONS of the left-liberal approach have gone all but unnoticed by their opponents on the right, with very unfortunate consequences. The BBC criticism of the death penalty imposed on Saddam sat ill with their arguments that Iraq needed to have full political sovereignty; the mantra that many more troops should have been sent to Iraq in 2003 contradicts contemporaneous complaints about "a heavy boot-print on the ground"; the left-liberal glorification of Colin Powell (in order to compare him favorably with Donald Rumsfeld) clashes with the fact that it was he who produced the vial of white powder at the United Nations Security Council to illustrate WMDs; their criticism of de-Ba'athification contradicts their demands at the time for complete and immediate de-Ba'athification; their claims that the Coalition Authority should have kept the Iraqi army intact contradicts their contemporaneous reports that it had disappeared back to its villages; furthermore, do they really think power should have been handed over more quickly by the Garner and Bremer pro-consular authorities to Iraqis (such as Ahmed Chalabi) whom they later denounced as corrupt? Above all, their complaints about the squabbling and in-fighting of the Iraqi parliament completely contradicts their statements that the war was fought for oil, or contracts, or revenge, or imperialism, or anything rather than to impose democracy and destroy a foul dictatorship. Democracy engenders debate (i.e., arguments).

The wars of the English-speaking peoples almost always start out badly, but that should not invalidate them. Today, the rest of the English-speaking peoples have a right to expect leadership from the United States in this great struggle against a bitter, murderous, unappeasable foe of truly dreadful and evil intent. Yet in their midterm elections, Americans effectively cashiered their commander-in-chief after no major defeats on the ground and plenty of (under-reported) victories.

Of course, the 2006 midterms saw a smaller swing against a second-term president than were registered against either Eisenhower or Nixon, yet what solace the hard-pressed but PR-savvy Taliban, Ba'athist, Hamas, Fatah, Hizbollah, and al Qaeda fighters must have taken from the President's loss of both the House and the Senate. The message it sends is obvious; continue this struggle for a little time longer and the Great Satan will withdraw first from Iraq, then Afghanistan, then from the rest of the Middle East, allowing you to massacre its clients and erect a Caliphate, prior to establishing a great nuclear reckoning with it one day in the future. It might not be an accurate prediction of future events, but that is immaterial since it is undoubtedly the encouragement they have gleaned from the pro-withdrawal stances of people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

For all the criticisms of the Bush administration, and some of the most damaging have also come from Republicans such as Sen. John McCain, it ought to be recalled that in no major war of the English-speaking peoples -- by which I exclude operations such as the liberation of Grenada in 1983 -- has everything gone well right from the start. Taken chronologically, a pattern emerges about the way we as a political culture go about the business of warfare that says much about our morality, decency, democracy, and essentially non-militaristic way of life. It is only later on in conflicts that a bitter ruthlessness enters our souls, which is a pre-condition to victory.

If we truly wish for victory in the War on Terror -- which it seems only that splendid 20 percent of us really do -- it will need to be fought in an altogether tougher way, one from which the liberal consciences of people like Nancy Pelosi shrink. Yet the alternative, of course, is successive humiliations, retreats, and surrenders at the hands of Islamist Fundamentalist Totalitarian Fascism, which we must surmise from the opinion polls is possibly now the American public's preferred route. Having seen what the Khmer Rouge did to ordinary Cambodians after the Americans withdrew from Indo-China in 1975, is the United States seriously proposing to leave millions of Iraqi democrats to the mercy of the jihadists?

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Foreign Policy, Trade, Nancy Pelosi, Mainstream Media, Business, Islam, Law, Military, Iraq, Russia, United Nations, NATO, Africa, Communism, Fascism, Oil