Iraq: The horror of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow

It’s politically incorrect to say that the Democrats are unpatriotic (“peace is patriotic!”) but I’m filled with a mixture of shame and anger when I hear them denigrate American actions in Iraq as a fool’s errand. They bemoan American high-handedness and ask about the weapons of mass destruction while completely ignoring stories like this:

Until justice is done and Saddam Hussein is dead, Sadri Adab Diwan will carry with him the handwritten accusation that condemned his little sister to death.
The sister, Hanaa, a high school student, "is conducting backward religious activity inside the school," a security agent wrote in black ink in October 1980, a time of widespread persecution of Shiite Muslims. "Please open a secret investigation."
Soon afterward, Hanaa, a devout girl of 17, was arrested. She never returned home.
It was only six months ago, after locating her yellowing case file in a government office, that her family finally learned why she had been taken. Hanaa, an informer reported, gave a Koran to a classmate.
"The case of this girl, this pure-hearted girl, has been living with me for 20 years," said Mr. Diwan, who was the eldest of 10 children of whom Hanaa was the youngest. "If I catch Saddam, I won't kill him. That won't be enough. I'll suck his blood. And if he escapes, I'll follow him to the ends of the earth."

And this:

Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein's government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children.

Yet with every death in Iraq, you hear the echoes of Somalia, the whispered urging to cut and run. Depreciate, defund, and decry. David Brooks in today’s NYT frames the mindset we need in this new “fallen world”:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.
The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East.
The murderers of Um Haydar cannot be permitted to beat the United States of America.

America lost 3,000 citizens in the biggest sucker-punch in history. Now we have to fight on our feet and serve notice that there will be no more running away. The hope is the first democratic Arab state with human rights for all; the alternative is unthinkable.