Whenever retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."

Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Hussein Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.

And today's reality is that Al Qaeda is nearing final collapse, Iran has failed in its bid to take over Iraq, and the democratically elected government is gaining in popularity.

What don't the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of Al Qaeda? Moslems turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What's the problem here?

The answer's simple:

Forty years ago I found out what it's like to do business with Germans.  The lessons learned, I've discovered since, can apply to dealing with businessfolk in general who don't play fair.

During my stay as a director in a Belgian steel mill I was in direct competition with the biggest steel mills of Germany. I was the first to export our special steels to Germany, something like selling sand to the Arabs.

When I started travelling to Germany I found a closed market from the heavy steel industry down to the smallest distributor. They had one price list and the biggest buyers, the German coal mines, still had to buy rigidly from the local distributor. The mines bought thousands and thousands of tons per week and the local distributor got rich while asleep. It was an ironclad market, completely locked up. When I visited the distributors they laughed me out of town.

So I went to the German coal mines and the German ship yards with impossibly low prices. What I expected happened, those consumers called their distributors, who called the big steel mills. Within a couple of weeks I was called out of the blue by a "Herr General Direktor Wolff" who from very high in his steel blue sky ordered me to cease my foolish interference in the German market or else!

I told him politely that I was going into the German steel market no matter what...

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they've adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

As corrosive as the Saudis have been for our system, they're far worse for Moslems.

The crucial point you have to grasp is that the Saudis don't give a downtown damn about Moslems - flesh-and-blood men, women or children. They only care about Islam. They'd sacrifice tens of millions of Moslems to further their perversion of the faith.

I've visited over a dozen Moslem countries and many more that have significant Moslem minorities. In every case, I've found the Saudis funding evil.

From Thailand to the United States, the Saudi goal is to prevent Moslems from integrating into their host societies. In poor countries, such as Kenya, they pay families to pull their children out of state schools and send them to madrassahs - where they learn to recite the Koran, but no career skills.

The Saudis don't mind if Moslems live in poverty and squalor - as long as Moslems don't identify with the societies around them. They want strict religious and cultural apartheid.

This is a personal story of what it's like doing business in Europe - specifically a part of Europe called Wallonia, or French-speaking Belgium.

In 1976 Occidental Oil constructed the Claymore Alpha gas production platform for the North Sea.

The platform had a total steel component of more than 600,000 tons. The modus operandi was to construct the platforms with prefabricated modules of 500 tons weight max each and put them together module by module. Since the North Sea only allows a good weather gap of 1 to 2 months each year in summer time, the costs and time delays were staggering.

A Dutch maritime engineer-pioneer, Pieter Heerema, had the fantastic idea to start constructing with 5,000 ton modules, ten times as big as before. He was the first to use an old tanker, welding compartments in it, and with the help of sensors and computer steering pump with massive pumps seawater in or out of the different compartments to counterbalance  the heavy loads.

But he had a very big problem.  I made the mistake of trying to solve it in Belgium.

Speaking last February of the man she knows better than anyone else, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."

She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him.

As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect that their government will butt out of their souls.

I have recently returned to the United States from Egypt where I was on a fact-finding mission to see what life is like for non-Moslems who live under Islam.

What I saw was a dire situation of oppression and discrimination that many in America and the West have all but ignored. A place with rampant police brutality and corruption, where non-Moslems are second-class citizens at best, who are brutally victimized on a daily basis.

All this in a nation which is a popular U.S. tourist spot, and has been the recipient of American aid in excess of $28 billion in the last three decades. I wanted to learn what life would be like if our enemies and their allies got their way.

What I saw was an example of the harsh life in store for future American generations in Islamic-dominated regions of the U.S. if we do not work to bring attention to the issue of Islamic oppression now at this critical time in American history.