You Were The Target

In Iraq yesterday a roadside bomb killed 14 Marines. Two days earlier, six Marines from the same outfit were ambushed and killed. Yet those Marines were not the terrorists' primary target.

You were.

Our enemies know the Marines won't quit. But they hope you will.

The terrorists realize now that they can't defeat our military. Instead, they hope to achieve what the North Vietnamese did: To blur the reality on the ground and convince the American public that we're losing.

Those Marines were tactical targets of opportunity. You're the strategic target. The terrorists hope that our media will create an atmosphere of failure — and that you'll give in to a sense of defeat.

The Marines are looking for a few good men (and women). The terrorists are looking for headlines.

The Marines who died on the Euphrates River battleground were closing down crucial smuggling routes from Syria. Recent operations have made life ever more difficult for the terrorists. Our enemies are fighting fiercely because they're cornered.

They certainly want to kill Marines. But that doesn't require video cameras. The rush to document and publicize their occasional successes makes it clear that the terrorists are fighting, above all, a media campaign. It's their only hope.

And there are many in the media who are certainly looking like they want to help the terrorists win. From their use of language (freedom fighters? insurgents? Minutemen?!), to their one-sided negative reporting, the media reports the conflict as though the US has already lost, and that it is only up to the media to convince Americans that this war is lost - that President Bush has lost - then we will be safe.

That notion, that we would be safer out of Iraq is pure bunk. The US was under assault by terrorists before President Bush took office, and will continue to be under assault. Only now, we're actually taking the fight into the heart of the Middle East - killing terrorists by the score before they can do damage in US cities.

And then, there are those politicians who put their political fortunes ahead of US national security, and our very wellbeing. They silently (and in some cases, not so silently) cheer for the success of the terrorists because that would score them the political victories that they have lacked for the better part of the last decade.