As many times as those who support the struggle in Iraq have tried to explain its place in the context of the larger War on Terror, reason and facts have failed to make an impression on Liberals. Unfortunately, as many of us have found, one cannot hope to convince using logic people whose worldview is based on emotion. Perhaps drawing an analogy might do the trick.
Iraq, it seems, was like the plug in the kitchen sink.
Most bachelors eventually come face to face with the dreaded kitchen sink. It's not something you plan on. After a period of living alone, you come to the realisation that no one is going to complain if the dishes are not washed immediately... so, you don't. You put them in the sink, but never really make the time to wash them, somehow. *
You start to feel a little guilty about not washing them, usually about the time your last dish hits the sink and you start using paper plates. So you run some hot water into the sink, and pour in some dish soap. Got to let them soak a little, right? Only...they keep on soaking, the suds disperse, and eventually the water drains, leaving the dishes looking even dirtier than ever. So you run some more water, and pour in some more soap. To let them soak.
After a while, the water doesn't drain out as fast as it once did. The sink doesn't look all that bad, though, especially if you throw in some fresh soap from time to time. The surface of the water looks calm, and as long as you can't see more than shadowy shapes beneath the filmy, sudsy surface, you don't have to deal with them. One of these days, of course, you will...but not right this minute. It's such a big job now, after all, and there's other things that have to get done.
One day, when you least expect it, you get hit by the reality of your kitchen sink. Maybe you spot a cockroach. Perhaps your girlfriend comes over to watch television and eat Chinese takeout, but screams and runs out after going into your kitchen. You might find a note from your landlord threatening to call the Health Department, after he came in to test the smoke alarms while you were at work. Sure, you can always kill the bugs, take the girlfriend out to dinner from now on, and bribe the landlord. But that's not going to make the problem go away. There's no more procrastinating... you have to clean the sink.
So you buy some of those thick Playtex gloves, scrub pads and a bottle of industrial-strength anti-bacterial dish soap. You consider a gas mask... but how bad can it really be? Answer: really bad. The first thing you have to do is reach all the way to the bottom of that mess and pull the foul, slimy, crud-encrusted plug out of the drain. Until you do so, all that filthy water is going to stay right where it is. Only then can you run the water as hot as it gets, pour in the soap, and start scrubbing... holding your breath for as long as you can before turning your head to breathe. You could swear you've never eaten anything purple and green... so how'd it get on your dishes? That gas mask sure looks like a good idea now, doesn't it?
The Middle East became something like that sink full of dirty dishes -- ignored for years, as long as it looked calm on the surface. Yet beneath the water, out of sight, filth was growing and disease was brewing. We spotted not one, but nineteen cockroaches on 9/11. The Left just wanted to clean the single most visible plate -- Afghanistan -- and stop, but that would have done nothing to fix the problem. Iraq was the plug holding the water in place -- Saddam acted as a block to Iran's ambitions, while enabling many of the worst terrorists and terror groups in the Middle East. His removal has caused movement in the region at last -- as Iran gets aggressive, at least some Arabic countries are finding that they fear Persian domination more than they hate the West. The work is dirty and foul at first, as the dishwater drains, but necessary to cleaning the area. Just look at all the dead terrorists swirling around Iraq's drain... something the "mainstream" media never talks about.
Neither cleaning the sink nor cleaning the Middle East are the kind of job you can stop in the middle, either, just because they're so hard. If you give up, problems will only start to pile up all over again. The up side is that once you're done, you're unlikely to ever let things get so bad again. But only if you finish.
* If you're reading this, Mom: it's fiction. Really.
