Winston Churchill once observed that history is written by the victors.  President Obama’s Tuesday night speech on the end of the combat mission in Iraq was an example of history being written by the losers.

There are few examples in recent memory of a political party being as comprehensively wrong as the Democrats were about Iraq, every step of the way.  The Democrats insist their miserable performance on the domestic economy should be measured against phantasmal scenarios of doom – the apocalypse that would have happened if they didn’t blow a trillion bucks on the “stimulus,” which “created or saved” zillions of jobs.  When it comes to military policy, however, they’re happy to believe Saddam Hussein was basically harmless, and would have minded his own business if left alone.  Their court jester, Michael Moore, made a movie depicting Iraq as a kite-flying paradise before the Americans showed up and ruined everything.  Their media allies floated stories, during the early days of the Iraqi occupation, tentatively suggesting things might have been better for the Iraqi people when Saddam ran the show.  After all, he left most of his subjects alive.

Although most Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq, they quickly changed their minds when public opinion soured on the war, and they saw a political opportunity.  This led to the tortured birth of the Idiotic Evil Genius narrative, in which the Democrats claimed George Bush was a simian cowboy moron who diabolically tricked them into supporting his neocon war for oil.  Mainstream Democrat politicians made common cause with the wilder fringes of the nutroots.  Anyone who remembers the melancholy Cirque du Soleil of the Kerry presidential campaign could only laugh at President Obama’s assertion tonight that “Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11.”  In reality, a sizable chunk of the President’s party had no interest in the Afghanistan operation until it became a useful club against Bush’s Iraq policy.  I wonder how the Kos Kidz feel about Barack Obama declaring them completely outside the “political spectrum.”

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Sometimes people say there’s no way America can pull out of its death spiral.  No matter what polls may say about the national mood turning against those pushing us into submission and bankruptcy… no matter what brilliant ideas for national renewal might be advanced… our character has become too flawed.  We’re too easily stampeded, too gullible, and too dependent.  The Left tells us we’re too bigoted and simple-minded to bear the leadership of the free world any longer.  We’ll end up pressed against the corpse of our insolvent government, furiously suckling our last droplets of benefit and subsidy, pausing only to snarl at any foreigner who approaches.

It’s not hard to find evidence against that dismal analysis.  With the official conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the truth about America is riding home with our returning combat veterans.

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“You don’t have to love the war, but you have to love the warrior.” – Private Johnathon Millican

The author of those words was twenty years old when he died. He used a web camera to talk with his wife from Iraq on the morning of his final day. He had been in Iraq for about three months. The quote above comes from his MySpace page.

1^st Lt. Jacob Fritz was a graduate of the United States Military Academy. His younger brother Daniel graduated from West Point a year after his death. He looks like a man who knew how to laugh. “Sometimes, when there’s a whisper in the wind, I feel he’s walking with me,” says his mother Noala. His parents bought 70 acres of farmland across the highway from their place for Jacob to settle on, when his military career was over.

Private First Class Shawn Falter had twelve brothers and sisters. Three of his older brothers preceded him in military service. At his funereal, his older brother Andrew, an Air Force master sergeant, said, “Rest, Shawn. You’ve done your part. Your brothers will take it from here.” Pfc. Falter once gave up his own leave time, so a fellow soldier could return home to be with his wife and children.

Specialist Johnathan Bryan Chism was a month away from coming home for two weeks of rest and recuperation when he died. A few years ago, he was a Boy Scout.

On January 20^th, 2007, these four men were abducted from the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq, during a sophisticated insurgent attack.  The operation was believed to have been coordinated by the Qods Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Within a few hours, they were executed by their captors. Their bodies were left with some abandoned vehicles. Two of them were tossed on the ground, while two were still handcuffed together inside one of the vehicles.

A fifth soldier, Captain Brian S. Freeman, was killed in the initial attack. He was a world-class athlete who won a bronze medal as part of a bobsled team in the 2002 America’s Cup race. Some of the bobsled drivers he trained with went on to compete in the last Olympics. One of them, Steven Holcomb, called Captain Freeman “one of the greatest men I have ever known.”

The architects of the attack that killed Captain Freeman, and the subsequent murders of the other four brave soldiers, are brothers named Qais and Laith Khazali. They were captured in a March 2007 raid in Basra. On New Year’s Eve, we learned that Qais Khazali has been released, apparently as part of a prisoner exchange for British hostage Peter Moore. Laith Khazali was already released six months ago. Peter Moore was kidnapped in May 2007, explicitly to be used as a bargaining chip for the freedom of the Khazali brothers.

The circumstances around Qais Khazali’s release are murky, with the usual denials and clarifications swirling around like a cloud of confetti over Times Square on New Years’ Eve. Multi National Force spokesmen claim this was not a hostage trade, but rather an attempt to comply with “the implementation of the U.S. – Iraq Security Agreement” and support a “reconciliation process.” Some suggest this is all part of an elaborate intelligence operation.

Republican Senators Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl have already sent a letter to the Obama Administration, citing an executive order signed by President Reagan in 1986 that prohibits concessions to terrorist hostage takers. With the New Year holiday behind us, more Republican congressmen will doubtless be right behind Sessions and Kyl with their own hard questions. It’s even possible some Democrats will join them, now that they’re finished with midnight votes to take over the health-care system, and desperately need to fool their constituents into thinking they’re “moderates” who care about national security.

Was that harsh? Prove me wrong, Democrats. Make me eat those words. I’ll gladly slather them in barbecue sauce, and savor ever last consonant.

International conflicts are a messy business. We know that Iran has been supporting the Iraqi insurgency with money, equipment, and personnel. We don’t have the manpower to completely lock down the thousand-mile border between Iran and Iraq. Attacks on Qods Force bases in Iran would swiftly escalate into all-out war. Intelligence is the key weapon in defeating a terrorist insurgency, and it must often be obtained through sins committed in deep shadow. We must also make efforts to respect the sovereign dignity of the Iraqi government we have been nurturing for the past six years. Even with all of these uneasy truths in mind, it’s difficult to see how the release of the men behind the Karbala attack can be justified.

It seems unlikely that the Khazali outrage could have happened without President Obama’s authorization. I’m ready to hear him explain this… and then, considering his reputation as a liar, every thinking American should be ready to fact-check every word he says. I don’t mind admitting I’m a hostile audience. You should be, too. Nothing this President has done since taking office has earned him a shred of trust or faith, especially in the area of national security.

We just watched his utterly incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, stammer her way through a terrorist attack. Her only useful purpose was preparing the infamous Defense Intelligence Estimate that indicted “radicalized right-wing extremists” as potential terrorists, thus transforming an important security document into a piece of scornography to titillate the far Left. No one who takes the defense of America seriously would put an unqualified piece of bureaucratic furniture like Napolitano in charge of Homeland Security… and, a week after a defective set of exploding underwear was the only thing keeping her from standing trial for three hundred counts of negligent homicide, she’s still there. There is still no evidence Barack Obama takes defense issues seriously, or even understands them. His Administration stands by while Navy SEALs are persecuted for allegedly punching a terrorist in the mouth… while the enemy murders handcuffed hostages with head shots.

I can think of a hundred bad reasons Obama would let the murderers of Karbala go. He needs to help us imagine a good one. America’s military men and women pledge their last full measure of their devotion to our defense. We owe it to them to return that devotion.

I humbly devote this space to remembering Private Johnathon Millican, First Lieutenant Jacob Fritz, Private First Class Shawn Falter, Specialist Johnathan Bryan Chism, and Captain Brian S. Freeman, and I encourage you to join me in demanding the full story behind why the filth who orchestrated their murders are walking around free. We won’t get those answers unless we push for them, with the same courage and dedication our fallen heroes gave to their duty. This story will go away, unless you keep it alive. Love the warriors, by making it clear to Washington that their lives are worth more than any politician’s career.

If I may borrow a few words from Private Falter’s brother: Rest, my friends. You’ve done your part. Your countrymen will take it from here.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Last week was a busy one in Washington. The Democrat-controlled Senate spent hundreds of millions in bribes, to buy the votes it needed for cloture on the massively unpopular health-care bill it plans to inject into the beating heart of American democracy and capitalism. Complex parliamentary maneuvers were made. The special concessions needed to win cloture added more complexity to a bill that was already thousands of pages long, including nonsense like declaring Nebraska to be the only state that would receive full Medicaid funding.

All of this effort was undertaken in the service of a bill whose uncertain fate has been delayed by a President suddenly very nervous about the polls. There is a better than even chance that Obamacare will die during its trek through the wasteland that separates the House and Senate, leaving its authors with nothing to show for their efforts but a bloated corpse. If it survives, it will tear our politics and economics apart, producing countless unexpected consequences, and possibly sparking something approaching a revolution among a public increasingly determined to resist an out-of-control Democrat Party.

While all of this was going on, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab was slipping on a set of explosive-laced underwear, apparently provided by al-Qaeda bomb makers, and preparing to board Northwest Flight 253. He walked right past a titanic federal government that views its $3.6 trillion budget as merely the larval stage to something really exciting. We got lucky – his bomb did not detonate, and brave passengers aboard Flight 253 took it from there. This led to the marvelous spectacle of manifestly incompetent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano assuring us this was an example of how “the system works.”

No aspect of this system works. A lot of good people have done outstanding work in Homeland Security and law enforcement, to keep us safe. The system around them is decomposing rapidly.

If Abdul Farouk had been a little better at detonating his underwear, this Christmas weekend would have become a time of horror and heartrending loss, and Janet Napolitano would be sitting at home and sobbing as she watched the search for debris and body parts on CNN, and waited for the first subpoenas to arrive. Ask yourself what would happen to the chief of a private security firm who claimed the survival of hundreds of civilians, through sheer luck, constituted a validation of her “system.” Her company would already be as dead as ValuJet, and her future career as a security officer would involve Segways and food courts.

A few months ago, the Obama Administration tried blaming its endless failures on “distractions.” Legitimate criticism and political opposition is not a distraction. This is what a dangerously distracted government looks like. It should be spending less time trying to wrap itself in a cocoon of tax dollars, to emerge as the collective butterfly of Hugo Chavez’ dreams, and more time fulfilling its vital functions. Too bad some of that $867 billion “stimulus” bill didn’t go for putting more 3D imaging equipment in airports, or hiring more air marshals. I guess none of the Democrats’ big contributors have interests in those areas.

A distracted government does not consist of a President trying to ignore a ringing telephone to personally guide Predator drones into terrorist strongholds. It’s not about a few individuals trying to cram too much into their daily schedules. It’s about massive shifts in personnel, political capital, and funding. Prior to this weekend, the Obama Administration was devoting far more energy to its greedy anticipation of the health-care takeover than to homeland security. The glacial realignment of lifetime career personnel, throughout the complex maze of interconnected Washington bureaus, was already underway in response.

An aggressive, activist government will always be more interested in what it wants to do, than fundamental duties it must perform. Contrary to the paranoid liberal fantasies of the Bush era, there is very little useful power to be gained from exaggerating the importance of domestic security. Health-care reform will give statists direct control over your medicine, body, diet… and, with the kind of audacity that turned the interstate commerce clause into a mandate for limitless federal power, it will eventually give them control of nearly every aspect of your economic existence. Homeland security gives them the power to make you remain seated during the last hour of a flight, and keep your hand lotion in your checked baggage. No contest.

You can measure Obama’s understanding of the terrorist threat by his willingness to name 9/11 conspiracy nut Van Jones as “green jobs czar.” If Glenn Beck hadn’t forced Obama to toss Jones out with the evening trash, they’d probably be having some fascinating conversations about the events aboard Northwest Flight 253 right about now. Jones would doubtless be standing in front of a massive flowchart, made from newspaper clippings and colored string, trying to connect Abdul Farouk to the Bush family. A government serious about protecting its citizens from terrorism has absolutely no room for people like Van Jones. Period.

The continuing threat of terrorism is something Obama’s brand of corrupt deal-making and influence peddling is wholly unprepared to deal with. Unlike Nebraska senator Ben Nelson, jihadists don’t view their “deeply-held principles” as price tags. They are unimpressed by symbolic awards from the Nobel committee, climate-change fraud operations, or gaseous speeches. They see weakness in months of dithering over Afghanistan strategy. They smell opportunity when ideology trumps security, and 9/11 masterminds receive the benefits of American civilian courts. They can read Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures published online. They understand that both ideology and desire make Obama eager to turn away from security issues to focus on his domestic ambitions. Assassins love it when you turn your back on them.

The government wasn’t paying enough attention to Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab to take his visa away, after his father reported him as a terrorist. They let him board an airplane, even though he was on a terrorist watch list. They weren’t listening when he repeatedly defended 9/11 and the Taliban in school. Don’t worry – I’m sure the government will do a better job of managing your health care. After all, it’s what they really care about. Exploding underwear is an annoying distraction.