On Tuesday, August 14, Al Qaeda terrorists detonated four massive truck bombs in three Iraqi villages, killing at least 250 civilians (perhaps as many as 500) and wounding many more. The bombings were a sign of Al Qaeda's frustration, desperation and fear.

Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of Al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out.

Thus the purpose of these dramatic bombings is that Al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Iraqis were just props: The intended audience was Congress

The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated Al Qaeda.

Sometimes where a thing is said is bigger news than what was said. That happened on Monday, when The New York Times ran a guest op-ed entitled A War We Just Might Win detailing the progress in Iraq. 

Long before the fall of Baghdad, The New York Times was as dogmatically pessimistic about the Bush administration's efforts as it was gushingly supportive of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It even promoted the least-qualified op-ed writer in North America as its point man for its attacks on our military: Frank Rich, whose experience was with ballet slippers, not combat boots.

Frank must feel like a dying swan just now.

What did the column in Monday's Times say? Exactly what TTPer have known for months:

To a military professional, the tactical progress made in Iraq over the last few months is impressive.  To a member of Congress, it's an annoyance.

The herd animals on Capitol Hill -- from both parties -- just can't wait to go over the cliff on Iraq.  And even when the media mention one or two of the successes achieved by our troops, the reports are grudging.

Yet what's happening on the ground, right now, in Baghdad and in Iraq's most-troubled provinces, contributes directly to your security.  In the words of a senior officer known for his careful assessments, al Qaeda's terrorists in Iraq are "on their back foot and we're trying to knock them to their knees."

Do our politicians really want to help al Qaeda regain its balance?

[In celebration of the Fourth of July, To The Point is pleased to provide this transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Lawrence Mead, Professor of Politics at New York University, delivered in Sydney, Australia on July 1^st]

To read the newspapers, one would believe US power was in steep decline. There are prophets of error, the many critics who believe US foreign policy has gone seriously wrong, especially in Iraq.

And there are prophets of weakness, such as Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote even before the end of the Cold War that the US had succumbed to "imperial overstretch". How much more are we overstretched today when we face crises in three or four places across the globe?

I am skeptical about these arguments. The great fact is that the US has become a dominant nation. Even if the US fails in Iraq, there still is no other country that can replace the US in dealing with the world's problems.

We have in fact returned to a world order similar to the late Victorian period, at the end of the 19th century. Then, as now, the world economy was globalizing and English was its lingua franca. Britain was the strongest single country and the US was just becoming a world power.

Today, the US is first and Britain is second, but remarkably little else has changed. It is as if the 20th century, with its calamitous wars and ideological conflict, has faded away. The countries that challenged the Anglos - first Germany, then Russia, then Japan - have all fallen back. The US's challengers, such as China and India, are likely to fall back as well.

The word Iraq seems to derange the minds of almost all who contemplate it. Like other famous vexations in history - Carthage for the Romans, Germany for the French, the Irish for the English (and, of course, the English for the Irish) - Iraq induces in the current American mind the full range of mentalities except reason.

Come September, not only Gen. David Petraeus, but many other designated experts, will deliver their report cards on Iraqi progress - or lack of it. Now, two months out, serious huffing and puffing is already building up inside Washington.

Let me save you the bother of waiting for the September deluge of reports from the four corners of our government. Come September it will be the received wisdom of Washington that we need to figure a way to weasel out of Iraq.

That is fine, if losing in Iraq doesn't matter much. But if losing in Iraq does matter a lot, then it is mad to use diagnoses of our current shortcomings as a death sentence, rather than as a guide to better treatment methods.

It's like this conversation.  Doctor: "You have a high fever and infection. You're going to die."  Patient: "How about giving me some penicillin?"  Doctor: "I don't have any." Patient: "Could you get some?"  Doctor: "It would be quite a bother."  Patient: "Oh, in that case you are right to let me die."

Michael Moore's new docutribe Sicko is set to unleash a torrent of disinformation about the U.S. health care system that will play into the hands of those who wish to turn our entire health care industry over to government bureaucrats.

However, we're firing back with a new internet movie that attacks one of the central premises of his propaganda: that 45 million Americans have no health insurance - and no access to health care. Uninsured in America is a new 9-minute film which examines the facts behind the oft-repeated cries of an "uninsured crisis".

The newspaper I read regularly carried a story on June 20th, 2007, from Cox News Service, under the byline of a Bill Hendrick, reporting on a finding at Emory University's primate center that "the local customs that define human cultures also exist in the world of chimpanzees."

The story goes on to say, "That means that humans aren't the only animals with culture, said Frans de Waal...." The evidence for this is that when a couple of chimps began to use a new method for mutual cleansing, in a while the entire group adopted the method but chimps outside the group kept to the old ways.

The first question is, is the report itself accurate-

"Vladimir - I call him Vladimir", explained President George W. Bush, "you should not fear the missile defense system... the Cold War is over. Why don't you cooperate with us on the missile defense system? Why don't you participate with us?"

The answer is: because Cold War is over for some, but not for others. And because Russia does not trust the United States and feels psychologically more comfortable in confrontation with it.

When Jan Grzebski, the Polish rail worker, awoke on June 1^st from being in a coma for 19 years, two things he noticed, which did not change since 1988. The name of the US President is still George Bush, and Russia is still talking Cold War.

It feels sometimes like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin did not exist.