I just read an amazing piece by Victor Davis Hanson over at NRO. He brings a refreshing renewal of perspective on the situation in the Middle East and the war on terror:

Western feminists, homosexual-rights advocates, and liberal reformists have never in any definitive way expressed appreciation for the Afghan revolution now ongoing in the lives of 26 million formerly captive people. They never will. Instead, Westerners simply now assume that there was never any controversy, but rather a general consensus that Afghanistan is a "good thing" — as if the Taliban went into voluntarily exile due to occasional censure from The New York Review of Books.

I think it would cause some people on the left physical pain to call a military endeavor a success. He continues:

But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur — from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-'em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.

This is something key that the left fails to realize. They still think of the war on terror in the same light as they saw the "wars" that Clinton waged. They claim we have gone in guns blazing trying to remake the world when nothing could be farther from the truth. It was the complete overhaul of foreign policy, as opposed to just blowing things up at random or only hunting down the few people responsible, that has yielded the unprecedented successes we've had. I have to wonder what light historically this period of time will be viewed under. I would like to think that like the Reagan years the world will see that we are right, and that this was the most prudent way to proceed. But who knows.