Hi, my name is burrian. I spend alot of time arguing with liberals about the wisdom of our war in Iraq. I would like to use this space to reprint one of my better replies to a liberal who I was arguing with by email. Thanks go out to all the FReepers whose research made it possible for me to become educated about such matters.

my liberal friend wrote: it's so funny to me that we used to argue about whether there were WMD's, or Saddam had links to al qaeda, and everything you would spout has been proven wrong.

and then I replied: Thanks for the laugh. It seems to me, nothing the Left ever claimed was right, and everything I ever claimed turned out true.

The Left claimed that Saddam was contained, which clearly he was not. Clearly, the regime of sanctions that were meant to contain him were flawed and dysfunctional.

The Left claimed that inspections alone could reveal the extent of Saddam's weapon's programs, yet clearly they did not. Clearly, Blix and his inspectors never were able to discover all of the banned items that we found in the months after liberating Bagdhad; for example, a nuclear centrifuge, scores of sarin-filled and mustard-gas mortars, biological fermentors capable of producing tons of bio-weapons, caches of deadly bio-weapon strains like botulinum and anthrax, illegal long-range missile programs, massive caches of proscribed explosives and conventional weaponry, suicide-bomb making factories, terrorism and airplane hijacking training camps, large stores of chemical precursors to chemical weapons, nuclear materials like cessium and yellowcake, detailed plans for the production and manufacture of wmd and irrefutable evidence of the high-priority and generous funding being devoted to these programs. Clearly, Saddam's Iraq was literally an entire country that existed for little other purpose than maintaining a high level of WMD activity and the accompanying esionage, bribery, and subterfuge necessary to keep that a secret from the rest of the world.

The Left claimed that the Iraq war would result in major coalition causualties, the low estimate being 10,000 coalition troops dead. Clearly, this figure was absurdly incorrect.

The Left claimed that Iraq had no relationship to the war on terror, yet clearly they dramatically misunderestimated the extent to which Saddam's regime was a cherised lynchpin of resistance to America and a terrorist state in every sense of the word of harboring, supporting, encouraging, promoting, funding, facilitating, and actively collaborating with the same terrorist ilk who threaten and act out terrorism against the West. Clearly, nothing terrifies the leaders of the global Islamo-terrorism movement more than an American success in Iraq. Clearly, no other outcome would be more poisonous to their aspirations than the emergence of a free and democratic Iraq. Clearly, everything is at stake for the terrorists in seeing our project fail in Iraq. A terrorist failure to derail our project in Iraq would clearly be a death knell to their movement.

The Left claimed that the war is a mistake, yet clearly, if our goal is to launch a far-reaching effort to adress the root causes of Islamic-themed terrorism, then working for a success in Iraq is the most logical and potentially transformative effort we could have marshalled given the diplomatic and religious sensitivities that might have precluded other courses of action.

The Left claimed that the war was based, as Barbara Boxer put it, "only on WMD and that was it." Yet, the war resolution passed by the U.S. Senate to which she was referring contains more references to the many other reasons for war with Iraq than just WMD. Clearly, the manner in which the Left has characterized the Iraq war is a straw-man, invented for the purpose of knocking down a crudely simplified war-aim to distract attention from the increasingly obvious errors in the Left's judgement regarding the significance and importance of the Iraq war effort.

From the emergence and vitality of the Zarqawi group and his complicity and deep familiarity with figures of Saddam's Iraq to the Oil-for-Food records and the evidence of bribery of UNSCOM inspectors to the countless other records detailing Saddam's overt flouting of restrictions and high-level efforts to deceive the international community, it was one revelation after another proving that the objections of the Left to the Iraq war were completely misguided and riven with lies and half-truths. And so, they cried "where are the WMD," as a last-ditch effort to distract and confuse people regarding their ever-increasingly disproven contentions.

But it didn't work. Noone takes you seriously anymore. Clearly, the enemy that struck us on 9/11 is the same enemy we fight today in the streets of Iraq. Clearly, to utterly cripple and maim this movement of suicidal killers, we have no choice but to prevail in our worthy endevour to free the middle eastern markets to allow the inflow of the economic forces that will defeat the jihad as they defeated the forces of tyranny in the former Soviet Union. Clearly, the domino effect will be unstoppable when our Iraq plan is seen to its fruition, hence the desperate pace of the terrorist resistance to Iraqi elections. Clearly, nothing frightens the tyrannical forces within Saudi Arabia more than the prospect of our success in Iraq, hence the fever-pitch of their propagandists in America like CAIR and Joe Wilson and their cronies in the State Department and CIA.

Despite every proven lie and falsehood put forth by the Left, Bush is poised to succeed in exactly what it was that he set out to do: to repel and defeat the forces of global Islamic terror by counteracting their appeal with the transformative power of liberty set forth by aggressively flexing the power of the American military, to neuter their capability and potential for massive terror by interdicting and capturing the players and actors within that movement, by reinforcing the flagging international push to limit the spread of dangerous technologies, and to pre-empt the collusion of the multi-folded array of anti-American forces whose combined talent as an 'axis-of-evil' would have created an insurmountable and potentially cataclysmic result for the free nations whose continued prosperity is inextricably linked to an ever-expanding global 'march of freedom.' The deadly status quo has been upended and instead of inviting disaster with a vacuum of leadership by withdrawing from international engagments, Bush has reversed the trend and reinvigorated our commitment to defending and promoting the Western interests of human freedom even when other more decadent Western nations refuse to muster the will and seem content to implode and collapse, sacrificing their freedoms rather than fighting to defend them.

- burrian