Edward I. Koch
Saturday, Sept. 20, 2003

The greatest offender at the moment may be Howard Dean, whom the polls show is presently the front-runner among the eight major Democratic candidates. Dean’s campaign is wooing the ultra-left of the Democratic Party, which constitutes about 25 percent of enrolled Democrats. Ultra-left-wingers are an even higher percentage of those who vote in state primaries.

Recently, Dean – in an effort to attract even more support from the radical left – resorted to blaming Israel for the breakdown in the Road Map peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Dean said Israel should have continued to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority until the PA carried out its commitment under the Road Map to disarm and destroy the infrastructure of Hamas and other terror organizations, which then-Prime Minister Abu Abbas said he would not do for fear of causing a civil war.

Dean stated that he didn't “believe stopping the terror has to be a prerequisite for talking,” and he exhorted the U.S. to be “even-handed” in its relations with Israel and the PA. Implicitly, Dean was urging the U.S. to downgrade its strategic partnership with Israel.

After he was denounced by 34 Democratic members of Congress, Dean recanted and would now have us believe his shocking words are not indicative of his true sentiments. Baloney. He said what the radicals on the left wanted to hear. Dean's rapid change of position can't conceal the truth: He is not to be trusted.

A number of other Democratic contenders, who voted for both the resolution authorizing war against Iraq and the Patriot Act, which empowered the attorney general to take certain actions against suspected terrorists, are now repudiating their support. They now claim they were misled by President George W. Bush.

Ridiculous. The war against Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from using chemical and biological weapons and developing nuclear weapons, or providing any or all of these weapons to terrorist groups.

In 1991, after Gulf War I, Iraq admitted to possessing chemical and biological weapons and attempting to develop a nuclear capability. It baldly stated that all its weapons of mass destruction were destroyed, but it declined to provide evidence of that destruction to U.N. inspection teams. Our current president and his Cabinet believe these weapons are either still concealed in Iraq or were spirited out of the country before the recent Iraqi surrender.

Former British Prime Minister John Major agrees. He recently said that just as Saddam Hussein flew all of Iraq’s military planes out of Iraq to Iran after he lost the war in 1991, he could have done the same with the chemical and biological agents. They could have been loaded into a few suitcases - enough to kill millions - or hidden elsewhere in Iraq.

Democratic candidates John Kerry, Bob Graham, Dick Gephardt and some of the others are doing themselves and the U.S. a great disservice by attacking the president’s integrity and his policy on Iraq. Those undeserved criticisms are only pumping up resistance in Iraq by terrorists and supporters of Saddam Hussein.

These critics would like us to believe that we are in a quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam when in fact we won the war in an unexpectedly very short period of time with minimal casualties. While some resistance continues, the effort to return Iraq to normalcy and self-rule is well under way and has progressed faster than was the case in Germany following World War II.

The president should be commended for our successes to date. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who would have been blamed for any acts of terror following 9/11 and for not doing enough to root out al-Qaeda terrorist cells in the U.S. and elsewhere, deserves credit that there have been no attacks to date. Planned terrorist plots in the U.S. have been foiled.

Ashcroft is stridently attacked almost daily by Democratic Party leaders and heads of some civil libertarian organizations for supporting an extension of the Patriot Act needed, he believes, to safeguard our national security. If terror attacks do occur, and in all likelihood they will, they will be the first to condemn him for failing to protect the country.

These critics fail to grasp that America is at war with terrorism, a war that will continue for some time to come. We should not be lulled into a false sense of domestic security.

I was sickened last week to see, on the second anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero, protesters holding a banner reading “The Bush Regime engineered 9/11.” It is an outrage that Americans, for political reasons, while we are at war with Islamic fanatics who would kill as many of us as possible, would stoop so low and accuse their president of being responsible for the deaths of more than 2,600 people in the World Trade Towers.

I believe Americans of every political persuasion will join together to repudiate those whose lack of intellectual integrity causes them to soil themselves and put our nation at risk in an effort to satisfy their ambition for higher office.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2004 Elections
Saddam Hussein/Iraq

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