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I was reading all the doom and gloom reports in the magazines today. I was in the bookstore and in front of me were piles of doom and gloom books.

I'm not sure where this desperate urge to cut and run comes from. Have we suffered huge casualties? No; we lost more people in single battles in Vietnam and World War II than we have in three plus years of fighting the Iraq war. Have we spent massive amounts of money? Well, yes, but any kind of fight against the terrorists would cost us.

Stories like this need more exposure so people understand that we're fighting for the future of a people. These people have traditionally been buffetted to and fro by the winds of foreign invasions and conquest. They have had it bad, really bad, through history.

Some of them like us and some hate us but somehow they also look up to us for strong leadership.

I think the only way we can have a Middle East that can have peace with us and its neighbors is to see this story through. People unhappy with the war don't understand how awful things were before it, and how awful things would be if we left.

George W Bush and his staff are accused of going in without having full knowledge that's needed to understand the situation and fix problems.

But people like Robert Fisk, with decades of experience in the region and huge amounts of knowledge about how it works have been paralyzed against it. Was the only solution to keep Saddam in power? That seems to be what Fisk and his friends want, but at the same time they know he's an evil tyrant.

I'm glad we got rid of the tyrant. I wish things had gone more smoothly. But this is the middle east, and we're muddling through. I doubt that anyone else, knowledge or no, would have done much better.

Most of the people complaining would have kept the tyrant around. And that's why I hate the left. As al-Alusi said, at least we have a start, and hope. In the Saddam era, that was not the case.

D