Vice President Dick Cheney is set to give a major speech this morning defending the Iraq war at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Washington Times editorializes:

Ever since Mr. Bush’s Veteran’s Day speech rebutting the canard that he lied the country into war, congressional Democrats and parts of the mainstream media have responded by coming up with inventive new ways to show that, even though lawmakers were saying much the same thing as the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capabilities before the war, Mr. Bush must answer for his mistakes, but Democrats deserve in essence a free pass. When the Bush administration tries to defend itself against critics who suggest that the United States should cut and run in Iraq, they accuse the White House of “lashing out” or embarking on some kind of nefarious campaign to attack and discredit critics of the war.

What the administration has yet to do in any kind of systematic way — and we hope Mr. Cheney will begin to do today when he speaks at the American Enterprise Institute — is to directly explain to the American people why we cannot abandon the people of Iraq to the Islamofascists who are murdering them. It is important to explain that there are no easy solutions in Iraq: The idea that we can issue a diplomatic demarche to the democratically elected Iraqi government that we will soon withdraw our troops from Iraq and retain a smaller force nearby is a dangerous illusion. It would send the unmistakable message to the Iraqi people that we are abandoning them and tell Abu Musab Zarqawi et al. that they only need to wait us out.

And what would happen if U.S. forces withdrew, only to return to Iraq after the jihadists seized control of all or part of the country? How would the goals of defeating terror while minimizing American casualties be achieved by forcing our soldiers to go back into Iraq to retake territory that the Islamofascists had captured from an elected Iraqi government?

On a separate front, the citizen group Move America Forward has launched a new ad campaign supporting the troops and their mission. Check ‘em out.

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