GADDAFI'S TURN

Cal Thomas, on Libya's unilateral disarmament:

This policy success should be a lesson to the United Nations, "peace activists" and others who have criticized the Bush strategy of preemption and the "failure" (so far) to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - even though Saddam Hussein used them in the past. Dictators lie and deceive. This lesson should have been learned in the last century. Applying moral equivalency in negotiations with dictators is like taking a used car salesman at his word without inspecting the vehicle.

The fruits of the war to topple Saddam Hussein are becoming apparent. Even Democrats are starting to acknowledge the significance of Libya's announcement. Ashton B. Carter, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, said that the Iraq war was a turning point in convincing Kadafi to relinquish his weapons. One senior Bush administration official told reporters last Friday night (Dec. 19) that Libya had progressed "much further" in its nuclear program than the United States had suspected, including acquisition of centrifuges that could be used to produce highly enriched uranium.

So let's tally up the score. The terrorists/Islamicists scored a few successes in the 90s, right up to 9-11. But now that we've decided to fight back, we've toppled two terrorist-sponsoring dictatorships and sent al Qaeda on the run and without the camps it needs to train more terrorists. The more of its terrorists we kill or capture, the thinner its ranks get, and without the capability to train more recruits we're fighting a war of attrition that we're all but guaranteed to win. Al Qaeda now spends its time between running from cave to cave and sending its own troops to Iraq, where they will fall down the terrorist drain we have set up there for them--in a fight between a ragtag army of ill-trained zealots and the 4th ID, I'll put my money on the 4th ID. We have set up a blockade around another rogue terrorist-sponsoring state (North Korea, which continues to support the Japanese Red Army, among others) developing weapons of mass destruction, and that blockade combined with warfare against the first two terrorist states has combined to force yet another terrorist state, Libya, to halt its WMD development and renounce terrorism. Meanwhile, Iran, a terrorist-sponsoring state developing WMDs, is pretty much encircled with states that now either lean our way or are our allies. And the fence-sitting states of the Gulf region, Qatar, Yemen, etc, now openly back us to the hilt. That's all in the span of two years.

We haven't won yet, but we are winning, and mostly because the Bush administration didn't listen to the naysayers, root causers and fifth columnists. Gaddafi's turn to the West is proof.