In addition, we have witnessed adolescent debates about the lack of end-game planning. And the revolt of retired U.S. generals demanding the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And, in a long reach back to the Vietnam years, an enterprise to undercut Allied battlefield success via television - in the living rooms of America - and through the asinine antics of a defeatist pacifism personified by the likes of Cindy Sheehan.
Terrorism and sectarian horror will persist in Iraq and around the world. The dialecticians of terror are demanding it. In the words of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the Spanish-Syrian al-Qaidist author of the 1,600-page Call for a Global Islamic Resistance - in which he appeals for the use of nuclear and chemical weapons against infidels: "Let the American people - those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations' wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others - be contaminated with radiation. We apologize for the radioactive fallout." Further, the late al-Zarqawi spawned at least 60 known terror groups in Iraq alone. And wannabe martyrs continue to infiltrate Iraq from Syria and Iran.
But Pakistanis captured Nasar in October, al-Zarqawi is dead and Saddam in jail. Afghans are taking control of their own destiny, and Iraqis seem to be following that path. Gen. Abizaid may be right, that the allied effort is not coming unglued. A hapless America is not hopelessly in a hopeless place.
Persistence may be paying off - if the severest critics among us will but let it. And persistence, as the rarely verbal Calvin Coolidge reminded, is the essential ingredient for success:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent cannot: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius cannot: Unrewarded genius is almost a cliche. Education cannot: The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are invincible. The phrase 'press on' has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race."
Especially so, when that "problem" is liberty - the ultimate cause.
Oh: And now, let's off Osama.