The recent attacks on President Bush by two of Sports Illustrated's writers after Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, and the vicious piece by University of Massachusetts student journalist Rene Gonzalez have a curious tone to them. I thought the general consensus of the left was, "Sure, go after Al Qaida. Afghanistan makes sense. But don't invade Iraq." But SI's Rick Reilly is "furious that these wars keep taking them". And Gonzalez describes Tillman's involvement in the war in Afghanistan as, "defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation".

So in their minds, I guess we should have done nothing after 9/11. But we did nothing after the WTC bombing in '93, and the attack on the Coles in 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. And the result was 9/11.

Nearly three years later, terror attacks are at their lowest level in 30 years. But that wouldn't have happened if we had followed their advice.

Compare the outbursts by Reilly and Gonzalez with how the left banded together when President Clinton deployed our troops in Kosovo, and cruise missiles against Iraq. As I wrote in February of 2003:

I'll never forget the conversation I had back around 1999 with an attorney who was an acquaintance of my wife, while we had dinner at a Los Gatos restaurant with another couple and her. A sixty-something hyper-liberal, after she had brought up (God knows how we got on the subject) the importance of liberating Kosovo, I casually mentioned that I didn't see why it was in our national interest to get involved there. She erupted like a volcano with, "We've got to liberate those poor people suffering under Slobodan Milosevic!!!! Don't you understand!!???", Well, no. But I'll bet any amount of money she's against liberating the equally suffering people of Iraq, largely--if not entirely--because of who will get the credit for it.