Yeah, the moving of the goalposts has been the only constant in this debate. Frustrating, but like you said, since we can't win the debate, we must just go ahead and win the campaign.

I couldn't help but notice that when Peters was passing out the credit for hanging tough he left out President Bush. No one could have hung tougher!

....Attacks of every kind are down by at least half - in some cases by more than three-quarters. A wounded country's struggling back to health. And our mortal enemies, al Qaeda's terrorists, have suffered a defeat from which they may never fully recover: They've lost street cred.

It continues to amaze me that there are still people who trust statistics given out by the same people who, only a few years ago, were telling us that they KNEW that Saddam had thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons ready to use, KNEW that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attack, and KNEW that Saddam was on the verge of having nuclear weapons - the ones who assured us that, if we didn't invade this misbegotten little country immediately, the "smoking gun" would be a "mushroom cloud."

According to the United States Department of Defense, 822 Americans were killed in 2006. The total for 2007, with five weeks still to go is now 875 and counting.

The official Iraqi government tally of civilian deaths shows that in the first ten months of 2006, 13,291 Iraqi civilians were confirmed killed, while in that same period this year, the number is 16,637. In fact, if you total up all of last year, it is still lower than the current death count for this year, with five weeks still to go.

Our mortal enemies in the real al Qaeda are growing ever more powerful in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we botched our chance to capture and kill them at the end of 2001 because Bush was too eager to invade Iraq instead. The group that calls itself al Qaeda Between the Two Rivers (al Qaeda of Iraq) is mostly homegrown Sunni religious fundamentalists augmented with some foreign fighters mostly from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan and a few other countries. To the knowledge of the U.S. intelligence, no actual member of bin Laden's group has yet been identified as being in Iraq. Its like we put a bin Laden mask on a strawman and beat the stuffing out of it, and now claim we beat bin Laden. In fact, even the U.S. intelligence community pretty much agrees he is more influential and more powerful than ever.

BTW, I was in the WTC on 9/11, coming up the escalator from the underground PATH station, when the first plane hit. I was helping establish emergency communications even before the dust had settled from the collapse of the North Tower (I am a trained emergency communications responder and licensed amateur radio operator with decades of experience working with the Office of Emergency Management and running the New Jersey Red Cross's emergency net). I spent the next month as a volunteer first responder on the pile, helping in the rescue and then recovery phases. I went to over a score of funerals and memorials for friends and associates killed by bin Laden and his fanatics over the next few weeks. So, you would only be deluding yourself if you use the usual technique of trying to write me off as some pro-terrorist leftie.

Consider that the United States does not count Sunni/Sunni or Shi'ite/Shi'ite killings in its official death count. By the end of summer this year, the ethnic cleansing in Iraq was virtually completed, so killings between Sunni and Shi'ite groups did fall off as both sides turned their attention to power struggles within their sects. If it weren't for the fact that the Shi'ites have driven the Sunnis almost entirely out of Baghdad, this year would be a lot worse. In 2002, Baghdad was 65% Sunni. It is now 85% Shi'ite, with the Sunnis ghettoized in several neighborhoods, defended against the Shi'ite Iraqi security forces waiting to finish off the job by American troops. The minute they are gone, its goodbye Sunnis.

The various Sunni tribal warlords of Anbar and Diyala provinces took advantage of American money and arms to get rid of an annoying rival in the local al Qaeda gang, but the latest Zogby poll still shows that hatred of Americans is higher in both of these provinces than anywhere else in Iraq. Almost 100% want the Americans to leave (after we arm them for future civil war with the Shi'ites), and almost as high a percentage think it is acceptable to kill Americans. Like Reagan arming and training the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen (including bin Laden and al Qaeda) to fight the USSR and not realizing that they hated us almost as much as the Russians, Bush doesn't understand that the people taking our aid today will again be our enemies tomorrow.

If by health, you mean an Iraq now totally Balkanized, still ruled (to whatever extent the US can protect him) by a pro-Iranian member of the Shi'ite fundamentalist group al-Dawa, with tribal warlords brandishing their American-supplied weapons and beginning to turn their attention away from the distraction of al Qaeda and toward their warlord rivals, and a Kurdish pseudo-state on the verge of a war with Turkey in the north, then I'd hate to see ill health.

BTW, Nouri al-Malilki was the commander of the guerilla wing of al-Dawa in the early '80s, hiding out first in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini's wing, and then in Syria. In 1984, during his stint as the party's guerilla commander, a terrorist party of 17 Iraqi Dawa members snuck into Kuwait and bombed the U.S. Embassy. Chances are very good that al-Maliki was the one who gave the order. A fine dinner companion for Bush...

So, we have northern Iraq on the verge of going to war with Turkey and Iran over its sheltering Kurdish terrorists who are operating in both countries. We have a Sunni area where the tribal warlords are arming their people at our expense for what, if we are lucky, will just be a power struggle among themselves for control of the western provinces (they already assassinated the first self-appointed candidate for ruler of all Sunnis just weeks after he was feted at the White House). We have Baghdad and the nine southern provinces solidly in the hands of pro-Iranian Shi'ites, who have already signed military, economic, and mutual protection treaties with the Iranians. Lebanon is now under threat of going completely under Hezbollah's control. Pakistan (which really does have nuclear weapons and missiles) is falling into chaos as the Taliban and al Qaeda expand their influence. Afghanistan is in worse shape now than it was in 2001. The Saudis are terrified that the U.S. will attack Iran, inflaming the Saudis' own Shi'ite minority who live in the most oil-rich area of the country. Egypt's moderate voice is nowhere to be heard, as is Jordan's. Syria is still alive and kicking, with a representative at the Annapolis talks, invited by the same administration that denounce Pelosi for talking to them (a week after a Republican delegation had been in Damascus).

Yeah. All in all, I'd have to say that what is happening now is worse than even the most anti-Bush, anti-war critics in 2002 predicted.

So, convince yourselves for the 20th time that THIS is finally the turning point. But, remember that the war's supporters have been claiming victory is around the corner every couple of months since Bush first announced we had won, and have yet to be right.

And, remember also that the violence in Iraq has always been erratic and somewhat cyclical, rising for some months and then fading away for a while as everybody regroups and plans the next round. A graph of Iraqi violence looks like a sine wave, with each year's median being higher than the previous one, not a descending trendline.

I do not want terrorists to flourish in this world, nor do I want to see American soldiers sacrificed in a misguided attempt to fight the wrong enemy in the wrong place at the wrong time because some ideologues stubbornly follow their map even when it and the terrain continue to differ.

Bush had a chance to end this all in 2001 by sending a message to the world that attacking America inevitably brings swift and sure retaliation. Bush lost interest in bin Laden in early 2002, when he was planning his Iraq adventure, and ended up giving every potential terrorist the opposite message. You CAN attack America. You CAN kill our citizens in our own cities. You CAN get away with it and prosper. They get that message every day they see us bogged down in Iraq while al Qaeda and the Taliban expand their power in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and bin Laden continues to do Bush-like photo-ops taunting us over six years after he slaughtered almost 3,000 of our people.

You take the cake...