George W. Bush has proclaimed that we are working to build democracy in Iraq not just for Iraqis, but in order to advance freedom and defeat fanatical Islamist terrorism around the world. Now comes the Pew Global Attitudes Project's recent survey of opinion in six Muslim countries to tell us that progress is being made in achieving that goal.
Minds are being changed, and in the right direction.
Most importantly, support for terrorism in defense of Islam has "declined dramatically," in the Pew report's words, in Muslim countries, except in Jordan (which has a Palestinian majority) and Turkey, where support has remained a low 14 percent. It has fallen in Indonesia (from 27 percent to 15 percent since 2002), Pakistan (from 41 percent to 25 percent since 2004) and Morocco (from 40 percent to 13 percent since 2004), and among Muslims in Lebanon (from 73 percent to 26 percent since 2002).
Change is happening in the Middle East. It's sad that just as this kind of profound transformation is taking place, Americans appear to be losing interest.
Do we have a too short an attention span? Are we no longer a people who can stay the course and do what needs to be done?
The 4th anniversary of September 11th is almost upon us. No matter what the naysayers proclaim; no matter how gloomy the antiwar protestors; no matter how deep in quagmire territory are the MSM; and no matter what comes in the days ahead--President Bush has defended the homeland and prevented another attack for these last 4 years.
I am not saying that we will not be attacked again. No. In fact, in the days after 9/11 it seemed to me that there was no way we wouldn't be attacked again on our soil.
But we haven't been.
Mark my words. Bush will get no credit for this. The perversity of the Left is such that when we are attacked again (and there is no doubt we will be) he will be loudly blamed for it. We will hear cries that it was his policies that led to it.
This will just be the Left's desperate attempt to maintain the fiction that we were never attacked in the first place. That 9/11 was a terrible "tragedy" and should not be used for "political purposes".
I, for one, am truly grateful that Pearl Harbor was used "for political purposes" and that a mere generation before mine we found it within our national soul to stand up for what was right and fight the evil that threatened to take over and enslave the world.
The resolve of this generation is now questionable. Is it to be exemplified by the courageous men and women who have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq and whose actions have initiated a wave of freedom and democracy movements around the world?
Or will it be exemplified by the unkempt "compassionate" coalition of doom, whose only sacrifice is truth; and whose courage is to bravely run away from any confrontation with the latest incarnation of that evil?
This War on Islamofascism is really the anti-Vietnam. In this war, we are winning the battle of hearts and minds. But it won't matter to the Left because--just as in Vietnam--they are firmly on the side of the enemy; and their only goal is the defeat, destruction and humiliation of the greatest, most prosperous, and most free country in the history of the world.
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