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" It is Iraq, where Iran’s Shi’ia armies are already in the field under the command of the sheik of Sadr City, the America-hating cleric Moqtadar al-Sadr. Al-Sadr, it should be noted, is alive and in the field because the appeasers in this country, beginning with the Democratic Party but extending into the Bush State Department, stymied the first battle of Fallujah when al-Sadr was trapped and could have been killed and his militia destroyed. The Bush administration had to delay the attack until after Kerry’s defeat in the November 2004 elections in order to avoid the political complications that would have attended the battle in the midst of an election campaign."

I admire Horowitz very much, but I think he is wrong about Mookie's involvement in the battle of Fallujah. Mookie's thugs took over Najf and had to be extricated from the cemetery around the mosque. Fallujah was manned by Sunni extremists.

His general complaint that we should have done more about Mookie is good, but I think he is wrong on this point.

Yes, he is mixing up Al-Sadr with what happened in Fallujah, but they were distinct events -- though if IIRC it all went down about the same time, April 2004??, when the Sunni terrorists in Fallujah were going nuts and Mookie tried to take advantage of the situation by pushing in Najaf, etc. I think, IIRC, that Horowitz is wrong to conflate Fallujah with what Mookie was up to, but still correct in the overall point that it was political correctness that caused us to restrain our forces in both situations. One thing we still don't know (or at least I don't) is what the internal discussions were like between the interim Iraqi leaders and US officers and officials in-country, i.e., maybe a lot of the restrain came from Iraqi leaders who said they would break with the USA if we came down hard on Fallujah and Mookie, etc. That's not to say we shouldn't have done it, but we may not be talking only about our domestic left causing the restraint........