I restrained myself from writing about the latest tsunami of "We Are Losing The War" opinion out of Iraq over Christmas, but now, let's deal with this.

There have been pundits saying we are losing in Iraq virtually since we got there. First it was considered impossible for us to defeat Saddam's vaunted army of murderers and thugs, which took all of about three weeks to disprove.

Then it was impossible for us to help the Iraqi people create a provisional government and arrange for a countrywide, democratic vote after they had endured decades of rule by a cruel and merciless dictator. That took a bit longer, but nonetheless was successful.

Then there couldn't possibly be a successful election for a national parliament. There was. And now, there is no way the factions in Iraq can ever join in a common purpose, nor can we ever win against the insurgents.

To which I say Bull S**t!

Don't these geniuses every get tired of being right all the time?

It amazes me how the World Terrorist Media and its local subsidiary, the American Terrorist Media, can so blithely ignore the realities of Iraq, and focus solely on what they want to happen, so they can engineer their desired outcome.

What do the WTM and ATM think is going to happen if we take their lead and fold up shop in Iraq? Well for starters, the Middle East and Far East, which are relatively quiet despite all the efforts from Syria and Iran to stir things up in Lebanon and Israel, go straight to hell in a hand basket.

The terrorists are emboldened, the fence sitters who were silently pulling for our side decide to support the terrorists because they know what will happen to them if they don't, and people who were our allies get slaughtered, just like the four million or so Cambodians, South Vietnamese and Laotians a generation ago.

Then the Islamo-fascists really gear up for world war, and start taking out country after country either by threat or force. We find ourselves fighting for our very existence, with only limited help.

Great Britain will join in, as will "new" Europe, Poland for starters, and the numerous republics which are free because we helped them cast off the Russians. But "old" Europe which has pretty much already given in to the Muslim extremists will sit it out. (Remember the Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen movie Red Dawn?)

Appeasement got us World War II in 1939, but obviously Old Europe didn't learn anything from that little fiasco. They aren't there for us now, so why would they help when the going really gets tough?

In the long run, the US will finally elect some Congressional leaders with both backbone and gonads who will unleash the full power of all our weaponry on the countries attacking us, and we will emerge victorious, albeit exhausted and terribly weakened.

Then China, Russia and a handful of their allies who have been secretly working for a return of communism all along will step up to fill the void. As they have done for so many years in so many places, the communists will gain early support from the weary populaces through preaching an end to religion, the rise of secularism, the dominance of the state, and an equal share of the world's wealth.

They will be aided and abetted by the WTM and the ATM, both of which are dominated by gullible and easily duped philosophers who have spent entire lifetimes ignoring the mass slaughters that have ensued wherever communism triumphs, to say nothing of elimination of personal freedoms including freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

That will last for about a nanosecond before the weary populaces find out that it was all talk and just a vehicle to get another band of cutthroats to the top of the pile. Then the brave among them will stand up and speak out, only to be shot, imprisoned, sent to labor camps and otherwise silenced.

The WTM and ATM will morph into latter-day versions of TASS and PRAVDA, will discover way too late that they were working for murderers who were conning them all along, have no intention of following through on their promises, and now that the media rulers are no longer needed, they too are expendable.

That is not a threat. It is an uncannily accurate prediction of future events.

Yet if you read the news today, you will see a rising chorus of voices claiming we are losing in Iraq, starting with Colin Powell, and going on from there.

So, once again, we must resort to the basics. First let us define losing. Since virtually all the WTM reporting out of Iraq is based on our limited military operations and the slaughter of civilians by Islamic factions in the small portion of the country called Baghdad, it follows that we are losing militarily, hence the oft-repeated phrase we are "losing the war."

For us to lose militarily, we must be getting our asses handed to us time and time again, across the length and breadth of Iraq. Our troops must be on the run, holed up in medieval-like sanctuaries, afraid to venture out, and totally ineffective.

Somewhere there have to be entire divisions and armies that have been defeated on the field of battle, and commanders who are ready to, or who already have, given up their men, their swords and their flags. The terrorists must be holding most of the territory, and they must be holding tens of thousands of coalition prisoners of war.

Funny. I haven't seen any of that happen. Not once, not anywhere.

It would help if we had some casualty figures to give us some kind of idea how our guys are really doing over there. But, just as happened in Vietnam, the WTM and ATM only report on American casualties, so it is impossible to judge the impact we are having on terrorists.

In Vietnam, the all-knowing, all-powerful media decided that since the American troops weren't in the habit of piling up dead communists to showcase for the evening news, the military obviously was lying about its successes on the battlefield. Yet when the final stats came out decades after the war was over, the Americans had lost 58,000 troops over 15 years, while the communists had lost 1.4 million, more than twice the number of troops in the North Vietnamese Army at the start of the war.

HMMMM. Think someone was lying to the American public back then? I wonder who? Think someone is lying to the American public now? I wonder who? Why? Please refer to the above paragraphs on China, Russia and communism.

The latest breaking news on the Iraq front is that the military death toll from combat actions there now equals or surpasses the number of Americans killed on 9/11.
The implication behind that statistic apparently is that the war is now too costly, because we have exceeded the concept of one eye for one eye, so we should cut our losses and get out.

Based on that line of thinking, we should have quit fighting Japan after we won at Guadalcanal, and we never should have gotten into it with Germany at all. That doesn't stop the WTM and ATM from harping on the casualty county though.

There also is a lot of noise about the latest poll that shows most Americans don't support the war. Really?

Where do most Americans get their news, thus the basis to form their opinions on the war? Uh-huh. The WTM and ATM. First-rate, totally objective information dissemination there.

And let's not get too gushy over polls. Remember, we don't know who was asked to participate, what they were asked, or what they based their opinion on.

I will be the first to aver that we don't have enough information coming out of Iraq. I have said this before and nothing has changed my mind. I don't know what the overall strategy is, other than killing terrorists until the government stabilizes, which I believe we are doing with considerable success.

President Bush has made a tremendous effort to get out and speak to America. But he needs some help and I don't mean this sporadic, talk-show type help where one voice is always being shouted down by an opposing opinion. I mean, he needs some major league communications help out there to keep the public informed and involved.

As far as the current talk about a change of strategy in Iraq I will make only one point, and I hope President Bush reads or hears about it. We defeated Germany and Japan because we leveled them. We did not hold back, we did not have 'discussions' with Hitler and Tojo, and we put everything we had into beating them.

When we occupied those countries after their surrenders, we made it very clear that we were in charge. There were plenty of Japanese and Germans who resented us and worked against us, but they weren't successful because the general populace knew better than to screw around with us. We had already shown them.

If we are going to do something different in Iraq, it should be on the order of beating the living hell out of any group, faction or armed force that is opposing us. As they say in Poker, Come Big, or Stay At Home.