The Redhunter

I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My administration, the Congress, and the United Nations saw the threat -- and after 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take. The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.

Al Qaeda and other extremists from across the world have come to Iraq to stop the rise of a free society in the heart of the Middle East. They have joined the remnants of Saddam's regime and other armed groups to foment sectarian violence and drive us out. Our enemies in Iraq are tough and they are committed -- but so are Iraqi and coalition forces. We're adapting to stay ahead of the enemy, and we are carrying out a clear plan to ensure that a democratic Iraq succeeds.

Mark Steyn

In the end, very little changed. The so-called “9/11 Democrats” are almost as invisible a presence as the “moderate Muslim,” and, insofar as one can tell, are most likely outnumbered by members of the Scowcroftian unrealpolitik Right still wedded to stability uber alles. In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant. The Europeans’ fetishization of the Palestinians — whereby the more depraved the suicide bombers are the more brutalized they must have been by the Israelis — has, in effect, been globalized.

David Pryce Jones

What 9/11 proves is the resentment that a sizable proportion of the Muslim world feels against the West. No doubt this resentment is a complex compound of hate and love, envy and rejection, shame and pride, and outsiders can probably never quite get the measure of it. Nevertheless the resentment drives Muslims in quite significant numbers to kill Westerners even if that means laying down their own lives.
...

Throughout the 20th century, Arab and Muslim countries could have utilized science to build nation-states with education and health systems that would have made them the equals of the West, and also made resentment redundant. Instead, the search for the missing power and glory brought wars and civil wars, generating failure, and with it much more of that overpowering sense of resentment. There is nothing any non-Muslim can do about it. Liberation of the spirit, rationality, has to come from within.

Christopher Hitchens

I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.

StrategyPage - Who's Winning?

On September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks, there were seven countries designated as state sponsors of terror by the State Department: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was not recognized by the United States government, and thus Afghanistan was not formally listed by the State Department. This makes for a total of eight countries that sponsored terrorism.

Five years later, three of these governments that sponsored terrorism are now off the board. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq were taken down in military campaigns. In December, 2003, Libya proceeded to abandon its support for terrorism and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. This represents 37.5 percent of the governments sponsoring terrorism as of September 11, 2001. The biggest loss al-Qaeda suffered were the training camps in Afghanistan. This reduced their ability to get well-trained terrorists to replace those lost in murder-suicide attacks or those who were captured or killed. In Afghanistan and Iraq, five elections have been held, despite al Qaeda's best efforts to disrupt them. Now, al Qaeda faces two emerging democracies in the Middle East that are growing stronger.

Ralph Peters

THE biggest story since 9/11 is that there hasn't been an other 9/11. According to our hysterical media culture, everything's always going wrong. The truth is that we've gotten the big things right
...

Islamist fanatics have not been able to stage a single additional attack on our homeland. For all its growing pains, our homeland-security effort worked. In this long war with religion-poisoned madmen, the most important proof of success is what doesn't happen - and we haven't been struck again. Wail as loudly as they can, the president's critics can't change that self-evident truth.
...

Al Qaeda is badly crippled. While the terror organization and its affiliates remain a deadly threat, al Qaeda is no longer the powerful, unchallenged outfit it was in the years of Clinton-era cowardice. Instead of holding court, Osama bin Laden's a fugitive. Almost all of his deputies are dead or imprisoned. The rest are hunted men.
...

Iraq has become al Qaeda's Vietnam. No end of lies have been broadcast about our liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan "creating more terrorists." The terrorists were already there, recruited during the decades we looked away. Our arrival on their turf just brought them out of the woodwork.

As for Iraq, Osama & Co. realized full well how high we'd raised the stakes. They had to fight to prevent the emergence of a Middle Eastern democracy. As a result, they've thrown in their reserves - who've been slaughtered by our soldiers and Marines.