Listen to what Hassan Nasrallah, “spiritual” leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, told his followers in a radio address on August 1, 2003: “The resistance movement [against the U.S. in Iraq] may not be able to remove the U.S. from Iraq within a year, but it will be able to remove Bush, Rumsfeld and Condolezza Rice, together with their Zionist friends, from the White House.” That shocking acknowledgement was all but totally ignored by the mainstream press in the United States, although nearly every newspaper and network quoted some of Nasrallah’s anti-American rhetoric in the same radio address.

Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry is fond of bragging that many world leaders want him to be president. Although he has never named which ones, I have no doubt he is correct. I could name a few for him. Saddam Hussein, for one (remember, he’s not dead yet), and Osama bin Laden for another. Add Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the list as well as Arafat, Kim Jong Il, Chirac, Castro and Kofi Annan.

Why would these prominent anti-American world figures prefer to see Bush out of office? Because as long as he is in office and has the American people behind him, he is a threat to their abuse of power. Democrats, on the other hand, have pledged to turn America’s sovereignty and national security over to the United Nations and promised never more to commit troops to America’s defense or the liberation of oppressed peoples without a permission slip from that august (and very undemocratic, pro-terrorist) body. Dare we trust America‘s security to an international organization that has proven itself unable to distinguish between terrorism and self-defense.

Dare we trust the leadership of the United States to a party that has lost its ability to distinguish between the goodness of a man like President Bush and the evil of men such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? Dare we trust the presidency of the United States to a man who believes the French, the Russians, the Chinese and the Germans should have veto power over America’s sovereign right to self-defense?

Already, America’s disunity has been costly beyond imagination. Already, lives of American and coalition servicemen and women have been snuffed out in Iraq and Afghanistan by insurgents who would have been less inclined to persist in the face of a rock-solid American unity. Already, hundreds of innocent civilians have been murdered by terrorists emboldened and encouraged by the prospect that a few more months of blood letting would shake America’s resolve. Already, opportunities have been lost to pressure other rogue nations such as Iraq and Syria into making reforms and abandoning support for terrorists, transformations that may have come about without the use of military force if the leaders of those countries knew for a certainty that we were prepared to use force once again if necessary.

If only a solid majority of Americans had stood firmly behind the president in his effort to battle terrorism and tyranny in the world, that campaign would have made far more progress than it has. Those who hate us read our newspapers, watch our television broadcasts, and listen to our political debates, and they are emboldened by the knowledge that nearly half of all Americans seem to hate America as much as they do for the dastardly deed of trying to spread those evil institutions of freedom and democracy. With a U.S. election just around the corner, insurgents and terrorist alike hold out hope that November 2 will be the beginning of the end for American meddling in the Middle East.

Had the insurgents in Iraq known that resistance would be futile, many (though certainly not all) would not have joined the resistance. Many Iraqis who are glad to be liberated from Saddam are still afraid to do so. They live in fear of being terrorist targets today, and they fear the bloodbath that would certainly follow a premature U.S. pullout. Many of them would have been more openly supportive of the U.S. presence and, more importantly, of a new democratic Iraq if they were confident of America‘s resolve. More Iraqis would have been willing to come forward with intelligence information that would reduce both Coalition and Iraqi casualties and hasten the defeat of any remaining insurgents.

Iraqis who already distrusted America have had their distrust reinforced by hearing so many Americans expressing distrust for their own country and their own leader. How different it would have been if the consistent, unified message from America had been, “We are here to liberate and to rebuild. We are not here in quest of empire.” Instead, what they heard constantly from Democratic politicians and the American media was talk of American imperialism and a president who had no regard for human rights.

Those lies cost lives, both American and Iraqi!

Let’s look for a moment at how different the situation would be elsewhere in the Middle East today if the terrorists and tyrants who dominate that part of the world knew for a certainty that America would never back down, never let up from its quest to root out terrorism and spread freedom around the globe.

Remember what Lybia’s Moammar Khadafi did when he saw Saddam Hussein captured in a rat hole? No doubt he thought, “that could have been me.” He volunteered to give up his WMDs and invited inspectors in to verify. He was already leaning that way, seeing the handwriting on the wall, but Saddam’s capture seems to have been the clincher. (Today, seeing America’s disunity and the prospect that Bush might not be elected to a second term after all, he’s probably kicking himself for being so hasty.)

What happened in Lybia may have happened, as well, in Syria and even in Iran. It is possible that those countries would have given up weapons of mass destruction and cracked down on terrorism within their borders without the need for military action. If they knew for a certainty that failure to comply voluntarily would bring forced compliance, having seen the results in both Afghanistan and Iraq, there is a good chance that diplomacy may have prevailed as it did in Lybia.

If not, then yes, it may have been necessary to make an example of yet one more brutal, dictatorial, terrorist-supporting regime and liberate yet another nation. But beyond that, it’s unlikely anyone would mess with the U.S. They would know we mean business. And the people of those countries who have spent years living under ruthless dictators would gain confidence that when the United States came to their aid it would be, in fact, to liberate and not to dominate and they could rely on America to stay the course.

President Bush genuinely believes, and with good reason, that a stable, free Iraq that is no longer supporting terrorists and financing suicide bombings against Israel would facilitate a settlement of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is, indeed, possible that if there were not such disunity in America, with so many in politics and in the media making heroes out of suicide bombers, the Middle East peace process could have progressed much further along the road map than it has and Palestine could be well on its way to becoming a free and independent state living in peace with Israel. The challenges there are great, of course. But when Americans make common cause with terrorists only exacerbates the problem. Terrorism against Israel is not the solution to Palestine’s problems, and those who encourage it do a disservice to the Palestinian people.

Then there is Saudi Arabia. Critics of President Bush correctly point out that Saudi Arabia is largely responsible for the radical anti-American sentiment in much of the Arab world. Saudi money supports terrorist organizations. Saudi Wahabi schools throughout the Arab world, and even in the United States, have indoctrinated millions with a corrupt, radical conception of Islam that engenders a murderous hatred against anyone who they consider to be infidels, and in particular against all Christians, Jews and Americans.

Bush critics say the president gives Saudi Arabia a pass because of oil connections. That is far from the truth. President Bush and his advisors are well aware of the problems in Saudi Arabia and they are engaged in diplomatic efforts to resolve them. Some progress is being made. I marvel when I hear some Democrats and so-called “progressives” (what a misnomer!) say Iraq was “the wrong war” and suggest that America should have invaded Saudi Arabia. War is supposed to be a last resort, remember? One major difference between Saudi Arabia and Iraq is that the Saudi royal family, while they are certainly despots, do not mistreat their people the way Saddam and his cronies did in Iraq or the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan. There is not the compelling, urgent humanitarian reason for removing the Saudis from power that there was for bringing down Saddam.

But democracy and freedom are infectious. Once they take hold anywhere in the region and the myth that democracy is not suited to the Arab people is no longer sustainable, the people of Saudi Arabia as well as other countries in the region will begin pressing for greater freedom and more voice in government.

That is the grand vision of George W. Bush -- and, I might add -- of many millions of like-minded Americans. Some may dismiss it as naive or unrealistic. I do not agree, but I could respect such a view. Call Bush a Quixotic figure in quest of the impossible dream if you like. But it is unconscionable to label this man as evil and self-serving whose dream, like that of Ronald Reagan, is to hasten the day when “every man, woman and child on this earth has as a birthright the full blessings of liberty.” A more compassionate quest than this I cannot imagine, and however remote its realization may seem to some, it is a quest that every American ought to applaud and support.

Only when Americans stand united in defeating terrorists and in furthering the cause of freedom around the world can we be confident of our own future as a free nation. If we fail to do so, we not only abandon others to continued oppression; we abandon ourselves and our own posterity to the vengeance of those who despise us for being free.

Bush haters seem to be much better at engaging in criticism than taking it. They get very defensive if someone has the audacity to contradict them. “I have every right express my opinion, and you have no right to tell me I’m wrong.” In their view, only liberals have a right to free speech and just to disagree with them is to deprive them of that right.

My response is this: They are wrong, and in America, they have a right to be wrong.

My concern is that too many people may take what they say at face value without taking the trouble to examine the facts and think for themselves. I believe that regardless of political persuasion, the vast majority of Americans would be solidly with President Bush on Iraq, the war on terror and other foreign policy issues if they truly understood what is at stake. There never was a time when a show of American unity and unshakable resolve was more important. Never in the history of the United States has there been more at stake in an election than there will be on November 2, 2004. At stake, my dear fellow Americans, are our freedom, our sovereignty, and our way of life.

America’s divisiveness, our national ambivalence, our capricious foreign policy that the whole world knows can flip-flop at the whim of a handful of “swing” voters has already been costly. It has cost lives. It has damaged America’s credibility abroad. It has seriously undermining the effectiveness of the war on terror.

Opportunities have been squandered. Thanks to the anti-American rhetoric of liberal politicians and a liberal media, the crusade against terrorism and tyranny will now be more difficult and prolonged than it would otherwise have been. But it is a war we must wage and must win. We must begin with a Bush victory in November -- not because he is a Republican but because he is a great leader and a man of vision and because his Democratic opponents, contrary to their campaign pretense, are itching to sell American sovereignty down the river.

But keeping President Bush in office (and keeping John Kerry out) is just the beginning. We need at least a two-thirds majority in congress, be they Republican or Democrat, that stand solidly with the president on national affairs. And we need an informed and energized electorate that consistently and overwhelmingly votes for a strong pro-democracy, pro-freedom, anti-terrorism, anti-tyranny foreign policy at every election so that every nation and every world leader will have no misgivings about where America stands. With unity and resolve, we can truly achieve what Ronald Reagan envisioned: A world in which “every man, woman and child on this earth has as a birthright the full blessings of liberty.”