Wishing for Defeat in Iraq....

IMAGINE if, in the presidential election of 1944, the candidate opposing FDR had insisted that we were losing the Second World War and that, if elected, he would begin to withdraw American troops from Europe and the Pacific. We would have called it treason. And we would have been right.

How many people out there are hoping to "prove" that they are right about the war in Iraq, that the US should never have bothered. John Kerry, today, is one of those people and its improbable that he'll make it better, as Ralph Peters writes, only worse.

Even if I detested everything about President Bush, I'd vote for him just to rub it in the faces of the Germans, the French and all of the tyrants rooting for the Iraqi people to slip back into despotism. We Americans choose our own presidents, and we don't take orders from Europeans or from any of Kerry's other Swiss boarding-school pals.

In an election year, our engagement in Iraq is a legitimate topic for sober debate. But Kerry isn't serious. All he does is to declare defeat. He certainly doesn't want to be al Qaeda's candidate, but he's made himself into their man through his irresponsibility.

There is only one direction to take and no other way holds even the littlest bit of credibility and that is to stand should-to-shoulder and finish what has been begun. We can figure out later where, if at all, we went wrong. But to do that now only makes the possibility of finishing the job, more costly and less likely. Or is that some of us want to say that they were right all along.