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.

On June 5th the world will commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Israel's victory in the Six Day War. This was one of the most convincing conventional military accomplishments of the twentieth century, one which removed the threat of annihilation from the Jewish State for the following four decades.

During May 1967, Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and the leaders of Syria, apparently misled by carefully fed Soviet disinformation, mobilized their armies, and kicked out UN peacekeepers from Sinai. Nasser proclaimed that "the Jews would be thrown into the Mediterranean." "Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel," he vowed on May 26.

Against all odds, tiny Israel triumphed over the combined armed forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

The key to Israel's victory was recognition that the survival of the nation was at stake.  This led to full mobilization of the state and the people; and creation of a government of national unity. Both the people and its leaders had no choice but to become heroes overnight.

Israel's continued existence depends on its leaders remembering and not forgetting the lessons of the Six Day War.

A guest on Neil Cavuto's Fox News TV program this week, claiming that every illegal immigrant will eventually impose a $2.2 million burden on US taxpayers, said that it is "immoral to make American taxpayers shoulder this burden." 

True or not, it is important to understand that the immorality here is not putting illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense of American citizens.

The immorality lies in the welfare state itself, in the government's policy of coercive wealth redistribution.

In fact, if there were any moral justification to such wealth redistribution, having the wealth go to illegal immigrants could be considered far more morally defensible than having it go to American citizens or legal immigrants.