Junto Boys

THE SURGE IS DEAD - LONG LIVE THE SURGE

Ralph Peters understands that the point of war is to kill as many of your enemy as possible and demoralize the ones left alive.

We dropped 20 tons of bombs on 40 terrorist targets yesterday, including safe houses, weapons caches and IED factories. In a late-afternoon exchange with The Post, Gen. David Petraeus characterized our current ops as "executing aggressively, pursuing tenaciously."

The headlines at home? "Nine American Soldiers Killed." No mention of progress or a fleeing enemy on the front pages. Just dead soldiers.

Harry Reid and friends so wanted failure that they declared it so before it even began. Now, a great silence. Where is big mouth Murtha lately?

Determined to elect a Democrat president, the "mainstream" media simply won't accept our success. "Impartial" journalists find a dark cloud in every silver lining in Iraq. And the would-be candidates themselves continue to insist that we should abandon Iraq immediately - as if time had stood still for the past year - while hoping desperately for a catastrophe in Baghdad before November.

They assail Bush for sending troops off to die. But what a far greater offense to hope that they do, for your political gain.

Oh, and the left turned out to be dead wrong, as usual. We hadn't created an unlimited supply of terrorists. In fact, the supply turned out to be very finite, to al Qaeda's chagrin. And killing them worked. (One of the great untold stories of 2007 was the number of al Qaeda corpses.) And our former enemies have been killing them for us.

And who doesn't like a dig at the Times?

And a final note: The [New York] Post had over a week's advance warning of Operation Phantom Phoenix, but didn't publish it. We don't share our nation's secrets with our enemies.

The candidates and most of the media are trying to remove Iraq and national defense as an issue because they so utterly fail on it. There is one main reason (among lots of others, but one main one) to keep that party out of office, and I hope that one reason resonates again by election day.