HOW COME NO ONE'S NOTICED THE IRAQI WAR IS OVER?

FIGHTING IN IRAQ IS NOT THE SAME AS FIGHTING WITH IRAQ

I'm sick to death of hearing Democrats say the President was wrong on Iraq. They complain that we're in a "quagmire," that the President said we'd be welcomed as liberators but now we're "occupiers," that the war was supposed to be a "cake walk," that there were no links to terrorism and no WMDs, and so on and so on and so on.

But the President was right and they're the ones who were wrong. Before this war, the Democrats predicted tens of thousands of casualties, a long and protracted war against an intractable regime, starvation and misery and strife for endless ages as we plundered and pillaged the people of Iraq (you know--just like Vietnam.) They were predicting this before the war began, and as soon as the war was over they started revising history to do their best to make it true.

But it's not.

Let's get one thing straight right now. The Iraqi war is OVER. No one seems to have noticed it, but the war with Iraq initially ended when Saddam fell, and fully and technically ended on June 28, when Iraq officially became an independent nation with which the United States is NOT at WAR.

A war is a condition of enmity between two governments. The government of Iraq is not only friendly to us, it is dependent on our help and goodwill. We are allies, even if not equals.

The war that took place and is now over was against an Iraqi government led by Saddam Hussein. That war took very little time and resulted in the toppling of Saddam (and all his hideous statuary). While the Saddam regime was out and no other Iraqi government was yet in, the Coalition Provisional Government ran things. We were also not at war with the CPG. There is an immense difference between being attacked by rebel forces within a nation and being in a condition of war with the government of that nation.

When we entered Iraq and toppled the government, though the media and the left (and even many on the right) have convenient amnesia on the subject, we WERE welcomed as liberators. Have we so soon forgotten the joyous Iraqis beating statues with their shoes and shouting, "Thank you, Mister Bush!"? Have we no memory of the thousands being helped by the Coalition forces to seek their loved ones in mass graves and the remains of Saddam's horrible prisons? Just because they want us out now doesn't obliterate the fact that they welcomed us as liberators THEN.

I don't recall the President telling us that it was going to be finished in a few weeks. I don't remember being under the impression that resistance fighters would not continue their insurgency. And I do remember that the ravenous murderers that were trained by Saddam Hussein were said to be capable of anything against either Coalition forces or the Iraqi people.

Moreover, there is a direct connection between Iraq and terrorism. You may say, "Sure, NOW there is," but do you really think that if we had invaded France and toppled ITS government that it would suddenly fill up with psychotic kidnapping thugs? Iraq was a haven for terrorists--whether al Qaeda or not shouldn't make any difference. The idea that we shouldn't be in Iraq because our enemies are soulless and bloodthirsty is ridiculous. The fact that they kidnap innocents, behead people, blow up children, and generally (sorry John Kerry) outdo Genghis Khan in their brutality and madness--that very fact should argue FOR utterly destroying them.

That said, I'll concede that we have found no completed weapons of mass destruction. The combined intelligence of the United Nations, the United States, the British, the Russians, and everyone else (including, some reports indicate, Saddam himself) were utterly convincing in their assumption that Saddam had them. Many today still think he did, but hid them somewhere before we got there. We have found the precursors and the makings of such things. We have found the manuals for making them. We have found the computers containing plans and plots and schemes to make and use biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons of various kinds.

What is NOT in question is that Saddam violated the UN resolutions demanding his transparent disarmament. There's a lot of hand-wringing about how we "didn't let the inspectors do their job." But the fact is that it was Saddam and his regime that was preventing the inspectors from doing their job. Remember: they were U.N. INSPECTORS, not DETECTIVES. They were not charged with sneaking around Iraq poking into hidey-holes and guessing at where WMDs might be hiding.

They were supposed to INSPECT the weapons Saddam had and his records of having destroyed the illegal ones. They were supposed to be INVITED to look at these things, not sent on wild goose chases, "minded" 24 hours a day, and controlled by the regime. Perhaps that is why they were so awful at the job. They didn't want to look, because they weren't supposed to have to. So they only looked where they were permitted to, and odds are good that Saddam and his minions just moved things around. How else can you explain their unwillingness to let the inspectors go wherever they wanted to? If they weren't hiding something, why was so much off-limits?

Just because the world's suspicions have so far come up empty doesn't mean Saddam didn't invite invasion. He didn't comply with the UN resolutions, he didn't cooperate for a decade, he didn't even attempt to fulfill the agreement he himself signed following Gulf War One. We had every legal and moral right to go in and force compliance.

And once we got there, we discovered just how battered and abused the Iraqi people really were. One of the problems we now have is that it's not easy to teach people self-sufficiency when they've been dependent on a tyrant all their lives. The Iraqi people knew they wanted freedom; they've just never tried it before, and it's a little tricky at first. Look at how many people STILL sign up to be policemen and national guardsmen and security forces--even when standing outside such an installation is a virtual ticket to eternity by way of car bomb.

We are at war with terrorists. Of that, there is no question. And we have no idea how long that war will go on.

Terrorists have no government. They have no negotiators. They have only ideological drive and murderous intent. Anyone can be a terrorist, while not everyone can be a citizen of whatever nation they happen to pick. The state of terrorism has no borders. It has no diplomats to deal with, no resources to trade, and no value to civilized nations. With this maddeningly stubborn enemy we are in a war for the survival of Western civilization.

But no matter what you hear, never forget: We are NOT at war with Iraq. We HAD a war with Iraq.

And we WON.