Must Reads

Benador assoc. has some great articles up by Victor Davis Hanson and Amir Taheri, three very enlightening ones, on the battle in Iraq in the greater GWOT and so does the OPJ with a fantastic article by Joe Lieberman.
Following are excerts:

"It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority."--J.L.

November 29, 2005 -- "IN the circles opposed to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, one word is making the rounds these days: timetable. Having failed to stop the war that liberated Iraq, and with their hopes of an insurgent triumph dashed, they are now focusing on one issue: the withdrawal of the U.S.-led Coalition forces.
The truth, however, is that a timetable has been in place from the first day of the war that ended the Ba'athist tyranny in 2003. In that timetable, the Coalition's military presence in Iraq is linked, as it should be, to the program for the nation's political reconstruction.
In other words, the Coalition forces are in Iraq to accomplish a precise political task, and not to provide the United States or any other foreign power with a forward base in the Middle East.
The goal was to take power away from a small clique led by Saddam Hussein and hand it back to the people of Iraq. The idea was not to impose democracy on Iraq, as some anti-liberation circles claim. The idea was to remove impediments to democratization. "--A.T.

""The president misled us." "Still no WMDs." "If I had only known then what I do now…"
This is the intellectual level of Democratic wartime criticism about the Bush administration as we near the third Iraqi election — the one that will finally give faces to the first truly elected parliamentary government in the Arab world. So what is behind this crying game at home — when we are so close to achieving our goals abroad?
Bad polls and far-worse casualties. With over 2,000 American dead in Iraq, the politicians think their own brilliant three-week war was ruined by George Bush's 32-month failed reconstruction.
But the Democratic establishment's anger is even more complicated than that since it is not yet quite sure of the mood of the fickle American people."--V.D.H.

I recommend reading all three by Taheri, one is a duplicate, and definately Hanson's, they give pause for thought over what the MSM is telling us, a very good thing.

Oh and a bit of news I heard today from none other than the senate minority leader Harry Reid, he told a Nevada paper that OBL was killed in the Pakistan earthquake. I had figured he was probably dead because we had not heard from the 'media hog' for many months. I guarantee, if he was alive, he would be all over Al-Jazeera pushing the AQ agenda of world domination through terror and Sharia law.