Between the proverbial rock and a hard place stands the leadership of today’s Democratic Party. Though you wouldn’t know it from mainstream media coverage, much of the Democratic base, though war-weary, supports the troops and is uneasy about an over-hasty withdrawal from Iraq. But a vocal, small, and increasingly influential anti-war Left revels in maligning the troops and unabashedly rooting for U.S. defeat in Iraq.

For months, Democrats have been trying to pacify both constituencies.

Consider Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who insists he supports the troops and understands that “America’s security must come first,” but is also leading congressional efforts to force President Bush to withdraw prematurely from Iraq. Reid has for months declared the current mission “lost,” and has called the Iraq war the “worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.”

Reid’s is an untenable position. While a person can criticize the war and still support the troops, Reid surely understands that as majority leader his public actions and remarks have served to undercut troop morale and embolden an enemy galvanized by such blatant signs of defeatism by America’s political elite.

The ridiculousness of Reid’s contradictory positions (which anti-Iraq war columnist Joel Stein has called “one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have taken”) underscores the power struggle within the Democratic Party between the fringe anti-war Left and mainstream Democrats.

Two recent incidents help illustrate that struggle’s manifestations.

Two weeks ago, Democratic leaders tried to attach an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that would have mandated sending terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the United States. The amendment was eventually pulled and replaced with a Republican amendment that did the exact opposite, prohibiting sending terrorists to the United States. That amendment passed overwhelmingly, and, revealingly, every Democrat sponsor of the original amendment to shut down GITMO ended up voting for the alternative.

Such apparent capriciousness was the by-product of a keen insight: despite the cries of the anti-war activists about alleged, inhospitable conditions for terrorist prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, most Americans are more concerned about having terrorists living next door.

Here’s another example. Last year, U.S. Airways removed six Imams from a flight due to passenger complaints about their very erratic and unusual behavior. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a lawsuit against U.S. Airways, seeking unspecified monetary damages for false arrest, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other alleged offenses. But CAIR went even further, actually naming several of the airline passengers who reported concerns about the imams’ behavior as defendants in the case.

In response, conservatives in the House of Representatives introduced legislation to protect “John Doe” citizens who report suspicious behavior from frivolous lawsuits. In March, House Republicans forced a vote on the bill, and it was approved, 304-121.

But, last week, liberal Democrats, in negotiations with their Senate counterparts, stripped the legislation out of the final Homeland Security bill. An attempt in the Senate to attach the “John Doe” protections to an education bill failed to overcome a Democrat filibuster.

So Democrats voted for the bill on the House floor, but then waited until the dead of summer, at the end of the week, to strip it out in a conference committee when they thought no one was paying attention.

Why would they do that? Democrats know this bill is overwhelmingly popular with the American people. It received strong majority support in both the House (304 votes) and Senate (57 votes). Yet, Democrats were set to cave in to the extreme elements of their party. (Fortunately, the conservative media was paying attention, and after a flurry of bad press, liberals in Congress finally acquiesced to Republican demands to include the “John Doe” provision.)

The anti-war movement began four years ago as smug anti-Bushism, but the movement has evolved. It is now animated by something far more nefarious: the obscene belief that America and Israel are the source of all that ails the Middle East and that Americans, not the Islamofascists, are the enemy.

One need only visit leftwing websites like MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos to understand how much the extreme Left desires America’s defeat in Iraq and beyond. Recent revelations that scurrilous stories in The New Republic and The Nation portraying our soldiers in a very negative light may have been fabricated can be seen as the effects of the Left’s uncontrollable desire to think the worst of its fellow citizens.

But you will rarely hear criticism of the anti-war Left by today’s Democrats. That’s because, as Time magazine’s Joe Klein has written, “a fierce bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed…” Appeasement of the anti-war fringe was behind the Democrats’ fruitless legislative session last week, held through the night even though everyone knew Democrats didn’t have enough votes to pass an amendment calling for the draw down of troops starting in four months. But Reid and the Democrats needed to show their Leftwing that they were trying.

Despite all their kowtowing to the Left, Reid et. al. are keenly aware that most Democrats who believe Iraq is a mess also understand, as a fresh study from the liberal Brookings Institution states, that a precipitous withdrawal could bring “a humanitarian nightmare” in which “we should expect hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die.” Many responsible Democrats, though they want our troops to come home, also refuse to believe the worst about the troops and do not support bringing terrorist suspects to the U.S. or penalizing concerned citizens for reporting suspicious behavior.

Today’s Democrats are trying to appease two distinct constituencies, which may explain Congress’s all-time low approval numbers. But, with 2008 looming, they will have to decide whether to stand for victory against Islamofascism and take their lumps from the extreme Leftwing or whether to align with the anti-American bullies who hope for their own country’s destruction. For most Americans, that would not be a tough choice.

“And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the
reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup
which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral
health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in
the olden time.”

–Winston Churchill, at the House of Commons following Prime Minister Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Pact, handing over most of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938.

Winston Churchill understood the cost of a principled stand. As a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the build up to WWII, Churchill suffered nearly a decade of political isolation. Yet, the prevailing political wisdom was hopelessly naïve, and Churchill, who would l ater lead Europe to victory over fascism, remained singularly focused on awakening war-weary Britain to the gathering storm of terror about to be unleashed.

Churchill came to mind this week as a number of Republicans joined the chorus proclaiming that we have lost in Iraq and must “redeploy” our troops. The timing of the defections was curious, coming as military conditions on the ground are improving and only two months ahead of General Petreaus’s much-anticipated Iraq progress report.

The defections seem absurd until one realizes that seven of the 11 GOP senators who changed their minds about the surge are up for reelection in 2008, and a number may face tough primary challenges. Perhaps the timing of these seven senators can be explained as their placing personal political fortunes ahead of, as Churchill urged, “taking a stand for freedom.”

Not so, insists New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, who earlier this week declared: “I have carefully studied the Iraq situation and believe we cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress to move its country forward.” But has Domenici, or any of the other “endangered Republicans,” talked to military experts familiar with conditions on the ground and asked them what would happen if we withdrew now?

If not, they should talk to Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division in Baghdad. Last weekend, when news of more politicians retreating in Washington reached him in Iraq, Lynch said, “Those surge forces are giving us the capability we have now to take the fight to the enemy. If those surge forces go away, that capability goes away.” And if the surge were cut off, then, according to Maj. Gen. Lynch, “You’d find the enemy regaining ground, re-establishing the sanctuary, building more IEDs, carrying those IEDs in Baghdad and the violence would escalate. It would be a mess. ”

Domenici et. al. may also want to talk to Iraq’s foreign minister, who warns that a precipitous American withdrawal could lead to a full-scale civil war, the collapse of the government and spillover conflicts across the region.

And in case these senators had any question about what’s at stake in Iraq, last week, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, released another video tape, in which he described the war in Iraq as “a centerpiece of [Al Qaeda's] anti-American fight” with the ultimate goal of establishing “a caliphate of Islamic rule across the region.”

What’s more, while political progress within the Iraqi government has been slow, the military situation appears promising. After only a month at full strength, the troop surge is already working better than expected. There’s been a dramatic decline in the number of sectarian deaths in the last month and a decrease in Shiite death squad activity in Baghdad.

At the same time, Al Qaeda’s grip on Iraq may be slipping as some Sunni tribal leaders have turned against the terrorists, a point which even the liberal media have grudgingly conceded. Consider this quote from a Sunday story in the New York Times: “Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.” It seems strange that the New York Times can perceives progress where some Republican Senators can not.

Instead of giving the surge a chance, some Republican senators have declared their intention to support legislation that would implement the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations, which call for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq by March 2008, forced negotiations with our enemies, including Iran and Syria, and broad amnesty for insurgents, among other odious provisions.

Amidst such myopic defeatism, a hopeful note from the front: troop morale remains high. In a recent interview with author Ralph Peters, General David Petraeus, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, discussed the source of the troops’ resiliency: “They know they’re engaged in a critical endeavor, one that’s ‘larger than self.’”

Like Winston Churchill, thousands of our men and women in combat understand that, when taking a stand for freedom, principle must precede politics, even, or especially, when it is unpopular. Would that our politicians saw things the same way.

Following Pope Benedict’s remarks on the relationship between faith and violence, a quiet conversation emerged. It highlighted a central question as the West increasingly attempts to engage the Muslim world: Is Islam especially prone to violence? So far, much of the conversation has focused on the violent reactions of some Muslims to the pope’s previous comments. But, there’s disturbing proof that a far deeper culture of violence pervades much of the Islamic world.

In a recent survey on global conflict, Monty Marshall and Ted Burr of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management found that of the 24 major armed conflicts taking place worldwide in 2005, more than half (13) involved Muslim governments or paramilitary groups on one or both sides of the fighting. What’s more, among six countries with “emerging armed conflicts,” four are predominantly Muslim and another, Thailand, involves a Muslim separatist movement.

Messrs. Marshall and Burr also rated 161 countries according to their capacity to avoid outbreaks of armed conflicts. Whereas 63 percent of non-Muslim countries were categorized as “enjoy[ing] the strongest prospects for successful management of new challenges,” just 18 percent of the 50 Muslim nations included were similarly designated. In addition, Muslim nations (those with at least 40 percent Muslim population) were two-and-a-half times more likely than non-Muslim nations to be considered “at the greatest risk of neglecting or mismanaging emerging societal crises such that these conflicts escalate to serious violence and/or government instability.”

This evaluation reveals the glaring reality that violence is a fact of life in many Muslim nations. But is Islam itself the impetus? Consider that a recent Pentagon intelligence analysis found that most Muslim terrorists say they are motivated by the Koran’s violent commands. The September 11 hijackers and London transit bombers made martyrdom videos in which they recited the Koran while talking of “sacrificing life for Allah.” British authorities also recovered martyrdom videotapes in the foiled transatlantic sky terror plot. Shamil Basayev, architect of the 2004 Beslan school massacre in Chechnya, referred to himself as “Allah’s slave.” Meanwhile, Genocidal Sudanese dictator Gen. Omar Bashir recently swore “three times in the name of Allah” that he would never allow international troops to enter Darfur. And the list goes on.

While Western liberals often insist that foreign occupation is at the root of Islamic violence, they conveniently ignore the fact that when the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, and the World Trade Center was on two separate bloody occasions, no such occupation was taking place.

We simply cannot overlook extremist interpretations of religion as a significant part of the problem when terrorists yell, “God is great!” as they decapitate their victims or blow themselves up in a crowded market.

But the Muslim world’s support of faith-based violence is not limited to governments and their non-state proxies. Consider a June Pew Global Attitudes poll that showed a majority of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt and Nigeria, as well as roughly a third in France, Spain and Great Britain, felt violence against civilians can be justified in order to defend Islam. Worse, a July 2005 poll found 22 percent of British Muslims said last summer’s rush-hour bombings of London’s metro system, which killed 52 people, were justified because of Britain’s support for the war on terror. This included 31 percent of young British Muslims.

Some Muslims’ appetite for destruction is not surprising given the ability of prominent Muslim leaders to foment hatred of the West. Following Pope Benedict’s September comments, Imams across the Middle East and North Africa issued fatwas for his death. Similar threats were made in advance of the pope’s visit to Turkey. Meanwhile in France, the Interior Ministry has announced that Muslims are waging an undeclared “intifada” against police, with attacks injuring an average of 14 officers a day. There are bright spots, of course. Several thousand Muslims in Kismayo, Somalia recently publicly protested the arrival of an al Qaeda-backed Islamic militia. But while experts assure us only a small percentage (perhaps 10 percent) of Muslims are willing to participate in terror, with 1.2 billion Muslims globally, that’s more than 100 million jihadists.

The most revealing aspect of the Islamic world’s reaction to Pope Benedict’s September remarks was that what enraged many of those who reacted violently was not the suggestion that Islam is violent, but rather the implied criticism of that violence. The West must recognize these violent outbursts for what they are: calculated acts of outrage meant not to refute but to intimidate non-Muslims into not speaking up at all. Last month, when a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church in Mosul, Iraq was captured, his church complied with kidnappers’ demands to post signs denouncing the pope’s comments on Islam. The police found the priest’s decapitated body days later.

On the initial day of his highly anticipated visit to Turkey, Pope Benedict urged religious leaders to “utterly refuse to sanction” any form of violence in the name of faith. Sadly, with so many in the Islamic world agreeing that Westerners must “convert or die,” all signs point to more violence ahead.