The Left has always had an erratic relationship with the truth. And in a week that witnessed the launch of a despicable smear campaign against America’s top commander in Iraq, the Left’s reactions to General Petraeus’s progress report on Iraq highlight the ever-deepening gulf that separates the anti-war Left from the rest of America.

The Left’s rhetorical attacks began even before General Petraeus reported to Congress that U.S. forces have made “substantial progress” in Iraq. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid called Petraeus a liar, saying, “He [Petraeus] has made a number of statements over the years that have not proved to be factual.” Senator Dianne Feinstein
questioned whether or not Gen. Petraeus could offer an unbiased account, and Senator Dick Durbin accused Petraeus, whom each of the aforementioned senators voted to confirm just seven months ago, of “carefully manipulating the statistics” to convince the public “that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.”

These statements were mild compared to those of MoveOn.org, which bought a full-page ad in the New York Times personally attacking the general with the infantile and now infamous headline: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” It went on to accuse the general of “cooking the books for the White House.”

Let’s be clear: MoveOn.org has every right to place an ad in a newspaper opposing the war and challenging America’s military leaders. It does not, however, serve our public discourse to make slanderous and libelous claims against our military leaders. Here’s a man who has devoted his entire adult life to defending his country with valor and distinction, serving in our Armed Forces for more than 35 years, including commanding the 101st Airborne Division. Yet his honesty and integrity are being dragged through the mud by politicians and a radical leftwing group that has the audacity to call him a liar and accuse him of betraying our country.

Though reprehensible, MoveOn.org’s vicious personal attacks are nothing new for the fringe Left, which has turned character assassination into political performance art. What’s been far worse has been the silence of Democratic Party leaders. While some Democratic congressmen denounced the ad as “offensive,” “vicious” and “inappropriate,” a resolution to condemn the ad was tabled by Senate Democrats on Wednesday. And not one of the leading Democratic candidates for president rebuked MoveOn.org, proving once again how beholden Democrats have become to their anti-war fringe, the party’s primary source of passion and money.

But while the anti-war Left makes all the noise, the silent majority embr aces a more reasoned approach. According to a newly released CBS / New York Times poll, when asked whom they most trusted to resolve the war in Iraq, “68 percent expressed most trust in military commanders,” while 21% of the public chose the Congress. Numerous other polls confirm that while a majority of Americans want the troops brought home, most oppose doing so abruptly. And a just-released Zogby poll finds more than twice as many Americans (41 percent) want the military to stay focused on Iraq than think capturing Osama bin Laden should take priority (19 percent).

It is this forgotten majority of Americans that’s represented by a diverse new coalition of over 40 conservative leaders who have come together to remind public policy makers and fellow citizens what’s at stake in Iraq. The Forgotten American Coalition, of which I am chairman, released an open letter to the American people this week, entitled , “The Tragic Consequences of A U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq.” In the letter we urge our fellow Americans to view the Iraq War in the broader context of Islamo-fascism’s war on America and Western Civilization.

We remind the public of the tragic consequences of a premature withdrawal, including the destabilization of the Middle East, the endangerment of Israel-America’s only reliable ally in the region-and the emboldenment and empowerment of Iran and Syria, two legs of the axis of evil. As the letter states, “9-11 was in part precipitated by the perception of American weakness and lack of determination. An Iraq withdrawal before our mission is accomplished will convince the terrorists and their state-sponsors that we indeed are the proverbial paper tiger.”

What’s most striking about the Forgotten American Coalition is the involvement of dozens of religious and family values leaders. Historically, values orga nizations have been reluctant to engage in foreign policy. But six years into a struggle that has reshaped
understandings of the relationship between war and duty, our unique coalition reaffirms a fundamental insight: Victory is a values issue. We believe defeat at the hands of an ideology that worships death would be immoral.

Values voters increasingly believe that a hasty U.S. withdrawal would guarantee that those Iraqis who supported our presence would be subjected to vicious reprisals by fanatics who have repeatedly demonstrated their ruthlessness. And they ask themselves: If a premature drawdown would produce, as Senator McCain said in his opening statement before the Armed Services Committee Hearing with General Petraeus “chaos, wider war and genocide,” how can we remain quiet?

Values voters also recognize that the battle against Islamic extremism, with Iraq as its central front, and their decad es-long battle against materialism and cultural relativism are in fact two fronts in the same war for our survival. More and more social and religious conservatives believe America’s moral deterioration has made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and that it is only through a renewed commitment to faith, family and freedom that victory can be achieved. In a very real sense, victory in Iraq is inextricably linked not only with victory in the larger war on terror but also with our ability to protect our cherished values at home.

The social conservative movement has been built upon hope-hope that we can restore protection to innocent unborn children, hope that we can preserve marriage between a man and a woman and the hope that ultimately, at a time of war, the defeatism of America’s leftist elites.

Computers, the Internet, E-mail, cellular phones-these are a few of the electronic advances that have made information and communication technology one of the fastest-growing industries in the world over the last generation. They are also some of the technologies terrorists have employed to plan and carryout, with brutal efficiency, terrorist attacks against America and across the globe.

A generation ago, in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In the shadow of the Nixon-era abuses, FISA was designed to regulate domestic national security surveillance by putting a layer of judicial review between the intelligence community and its targets. Under FISA, the president could monitor private communications only if he could first convince a FISA court that there was probable
cause to believe that a target of surveillance was an “agent of a foreign power,” and thus outside the purview of Americans’ Fourth Amendment guarantee of freedom from unreasonable government searches. To some, FISA struck an appropriate, if imperfect, balance between protecting Americans’ lives and their civil liberties.

Things have changed since 1978. FISA was enacted in the days before foreign-to-foreign communications passed through the United States. Today, a majority of international calls are routed through fiber-optic connections in the U.S. This means that under the antiquated FISA rules international calls that simply pass through an American phone network became domestic U.S. calls and subject to the byzantine FISA court approval process.

In the aftermath of September 11th, the 1978 intelligence program proved inadequate against the new threats posed by an unconventional and fast-moving enemy. Facing the realities of a post-September 11th world, President Bush-whose most solemn duty is to ensure the protection of the American people-created a new program for monitoring our enemies. The Terrorist Surveillance Program authorized the National Security Agency to monitor electronic communication of anyone who from within this country was communicating with suspected terrorists around the globe.

A year ago, a federal judge ruled that the Terrorist Surveillance Program is unconstitutional and thus illegal, and last January the administration agreed to place it under the supervision of the secret court that authorizes wiretaps under FISA. This meant that NSA was obliged to navigate the cumbersome process of obtaining warrants (which are about 60-pages long) to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ phone conversations, E-mail messages and other electronic communications, which impeded the program’s speed and agility and created a huge backlog of FISA applications that impaired intelligence collection. According to Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence, operating under
the outdated law meant intelligence professionals were “significantly burdened in capturing overseas communications of foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside the United States.”

This is the backdrop against which Congress passed the Protect America Act. In a letter to his Senate colleagues, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that the bill is necessary to “close critical gaps in the intelligence community’s ability to provide warning of threats to the country.” President Bush signed the legislation last Sunday.

Notably, after much wrangling, 41 House Democrats and 16 Senate Democrats-perhaps concerned about the perception of Congress leaving for a month-long recess without addressing this grave national security issue-crossed the aisle t o vote for the legislation.

The new law indeed provides the federal government greater flexibility in focusing on foreign suspects overseas, as foreign-to-foreign intercepts will no longer require a warrant. It also gives the administration more power to compel telecommunications companies to cooperate with the government in conducting lawful communication
intelligence activities and provides a robust process of judicial review for companies that wish to challenge these directives. It also protects from liability third parties that provide the government with information necessary to accomplish the acquisition of foreign
intelligence information.

Republican lawmakers did make several concessions to Democrats, however. Under the new statute, if a U.S. resident becomes the chief target of surveillance, the government would first have to obtain a warrant from the special FISA court. And , new wiretaps must be approved by both the director of national intelligence and the attorney general, not just the attorney general, as was the case under the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Passage of the new FISA reform bill should be seen not just as a victory for President Bush but for all Americans, as its principle effect is to strengthen the president’s ability to carry out his constitutionally-mandated duty of protecting Americans from external
threats. While the Left howls that the new law tramples civil liberties, for most Americans the recent debates over the issue of terrorist surveillance have underscored a different reality: that the Bush administration’s greatest achievement-zero terrorist attacks in
nearly six years-has partially been the result of the executive branch’s ability to monitor international communications aggressively for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence.

Though a valuable first step, the new FISA statute is merely a stopgap measure that addresses the most immediate deficiencies in our intelligence gathering programs. The new law expires in just six months, and Congress must work to enact additional reforms-like meaningful liability protection to telecom companies that cooperated with NSA’s wiretapping program after 9/11.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have signaled their intention to take up more reforms as soon as Congress reconvenes in September. The question will be: At a time when the National Intelligence Estimate has said the country is in a “heightened threat environment,” will enough liberals be able to set aside their disdain for President Bush, and their goal of stripping from him as much executive power as possible, to do what is right?