Last week's Al Qaeda attack on the Iraqi parliament building was a fresh reminder of what awaits the Iraqi government and its civilian population if we pull out and let the terrorists take over, seizing the rich oil fields that will give them renewed resources to threaten us with biological, chemical and perhaps nuclear weapons.
All of this makes the Democrats' arguments of the past about the nature of the terrorist threat seem even more ridiculous now than it seemed back then. Last year, and well into this year, Democratic leaders argued that we should be focusing on only one country -- Afghanistan. That is where the real terrorist threat is, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry have said, not in Iraq, which they dismissed as a civil war and hardly a serious front in the battle against Al Qaeda.
But it turns out that Iraq is now a central breeding ground for Al Qaeda, as are the neighboring countries of Iran and Syria, which has been arming, training and financing the terrorists.
Last week, the U.S. command in Iraq said Iraqi militia fighters were being trained in Iran in the manufacture of armor-piercing roadside bombs (EFPs, or explosively formed penetrators) to kill American soldiers.
In a briefing in Baghdad last week, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told of the Iranian role in the latest attacks on our forces: "We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them."
But while Caldwell was revealing how Iran was helping the terrorists in Iraq, House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid were on Capitol Hill saying they had no problem with lawmakers traveling to Iran and talking with their leaders.
Such is the mind-set of the present Democratic leadership in the midst of the global spread of terrorism that threatens all of us, now more than ever. |