On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be sworn in as America’s 44th president.  It will be a poignant moment as America’s first black president takes the oath of office facing the Lincoln Memorial and with his hand on the same Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration in 1861.

Much has been made of Obama’s decision to use Abe’s Bible, as well as Obama’s ambition to model his presidency after that of Lincoln, America’s first Republican president and historically one of its most beloved.

I hope President Obama succeeds, and in two ways in particular.  I hope Obama follows Lincoln’s example in steadfastly fighting a difficult but winnable war.  And I hope Obama emulates Lincoln in recognizing that all America’s citizens are entitled to the constitutional right to life.

During the Civil War, President Lincoln made many decisions that were criticized harshly by the press, Democrats and even the U.S. Supreme Court as affronts to civil liberties.  Shortly after the war started, Lincoln declared martial law and authorized military tribunals.  He unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, the constitutional right to appear before a judge before being imprisoned.  Overall, as many as 15,000 people were arrested without a prompt trial.

Lincoln also increased the size of the Army and Navy, hiked military spending and instituted a blockade, all without congressional approval.

Lincoln wasn’t the only president to take bold and prompt action in a time of war.  Consider the other president Obama hopes to emulate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  FDR authorized the FBI to investigate suspected fascists and communists in America.  And in 1940 he signed the Smith Act into law, which required resident aliens to register with the federal government.  Roosevelt also signed executive order 9066, which authorized the relocation of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry to protect military bases and manufacturing plants from possible sabotage.  Two thirds of those relocated were American citizens.  We now recognize that this was a human rights mistake, but at least everyone understood that Roosevelt was putting national security first.

When it was discovered that eight Nazis had made their way to the U.S. to blow up power plants in 1942, all eight were captured, tried and convicted by a military court.  Two of the men received 30-year sentences while the other six were executed by electrocution.  And it was all done within two months of them entering the country.

Like other wartime presidents, President Bush has been criticized by political opponents, scolded by the courts and demonized in the media for real and perceived infringements on personal freedom.  But then again, the Bush Administration’s tactics, such as surveillance of suspected terrorists, helped produce its greatest achievement:  keeping America safe from terrorist attacks in the years since 9-11.

Many Americans doubt whether Obama recognizes that his first job as president is to keep Americans safe from terrorists, not to appease his party’s leftwing base.  Recent events have not been reassuring.  The Obama transition team leaked this week that the president-elect intends to issue an executive order shortly after Inauguration Day ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay.  But Obama has not yet explained what he would do with the over 200 suspected terrorists if GITMO were closed, not to mention other enemy combatants held in military prisons across the world.

Last year, when the liberal majority on the Supreme Court granted certain constitutional rights to foreign terrorists, Justice Antonin Scalia warned, “America is at war with radical Islamists. …today’s opinion … will make the war harder on us.  It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Justice Scalia’s commonsense warning was prophetic.
The Pentagon announced this week that 61 former GITMO prisoners released in recent months have rejoined their holy warrior colleagues on battlefields around the world, where they are doing their very best to kill our sons and daughters serving in the U.S. military.  While presidents must walk a fine line between protecting civil liberties and safeguarding our nation’s citizens, in times of war and crisis, the nation needs a strong chief executive.

Obama should also emulate Lincoln in the 16th president’s recognition of the value of all human life.  Abraham Lincoln was elected president four years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision, which affirmed slavery and defined slaves as property, not citizens.  Lincoln was a strong, prudent, opponent of slavery and often voiced his concern that Dred Scott would lead to a Supreme Court ban on state abolition of slavery.

Just as slavery was an assault on human dignity, the slaughter of millions of unborn children is an assault on the most basic human right, the right to life.

Obama’s inauguration will take place just two days before the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that claimed to find a constitutional right to destroy the life of an unborn child. Unlike Lincoln, Barack Obama does not believe in the right to life and citizenship for all Americans.  Obama’s pro-abortion record is well known.  He has promised that the first thing he’ll do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a law that would overturn the few existing state and federal restrictions on abortion.  Researchers estimate that FOCA would generate at least 125,000 more abortions a year in a nation already devastated by 4,000 a day.

With its Roe decision, the court again wrongly declared that some Americans are not entitled to the constitutional right to life and that they can be destroyed at the discretion of others.  Sadly, that evil philosophy of death will be given new life under President Obama, unless he embraces Lincoln in affirming the equality of all human life.

Barack Obama has indicated he will look to Abraham Lincoln as a role model for principled leadership in a time of war and instability.   Let’s hope he has the audacity to do just that.

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?

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.