This was by far the best of the two debates. President Bush showed up, and did very well. Kerry did well, but not as well as in the first debate. The pundits are divided as to who won.

Some conservative pundits moan that the President let some softballs hit the glove, instead of knocking them out of the park. That may be, but that doesn’t mean that the facts aren’t there for everyone to see.

Kerry voted against Gulf War I. He voted against a war during the run up to which the UN authorized the use of force, the sitting President assembled a coalition of Arabs and others to either fight, provide basing, allowed military over flight rights or other support, or just financial contributions. In Gulf War II, Kerry knew that Saddam had done what it had done in Kuwait, to the Kurds, to the Marsh Arabs. He had violated over a dozen UN resolutions. He fired missiles at coalition aircraft almost every day. He gave speeches (that can be read on Memri.org) in praise of his scientists who worked on weapons of mass destruction. His government mislead the UN weapons inspectors, providing old, misleading information to them, and no proof of the final disposition of the weapons of mass destruction that we know that he had because of inspections earlier in the ‘90s.

After the war, Kerry now knows that Saddam acted as a “weapon of mass corruption” to the UN and some of our traditional allies (thanks to the Duelfer report). His efforts lead to the loosening of the sanctions and restrictions on his conduct. He kept scientists and engineers who worked on his WMD program hidden, and on his payroll, so that they could resume their work in full some day. He murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. He paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He provided sites for terrorist training camps, and safe haven to some of the leaders of terrorist organizations. His government met with Al Qaeda representatives on numerous occasions. He commissioned paintings of his grinning visage against images of the burning Twin Towers, associating himself with their destruction. He attempted to buy an entire missile assembly line from North Korea. He bought weapons and spare parts from many countries (see the CIA report) that were proscribed. French Roland missiles shot down an A-10 in Iraq in ’03. Some of those missiles were sold to Iraq just months before the war began. Two M1 A1 tanks—almost indestructible—were knocked out by Russian Katyusha rockets. In the addition to the UN and the intelligence agencies of nearly every major nation, Saddam had the Presidents of Egypt and Jordan convinced that he had WMD—even his own generals believed it.

In Seattle, we’ve seen incidents where policemen have shot suspects who were believed to be armed and dangerous, but may not have been after the fact. No policeman can allow someone to brandish a weapon without taking steps to disarm him, one way or another. Saddam did everything he could to convince his enemies that he had such weapons to act as a deterrent and as a means of feeding his egomaniacal desire for preeminence in the region, especially vis a vis Iran. In the end, Saddam relied on his bribes of UN staff and Security Council members to protect him from the coalition. His calculation failed.

After 9/11, no reasonable leader would allow an enemy nation-state to threaten the US or its national interests. Since the end of Gulf War 1, Iraq has been at a state of war with the US and the coalition. The onus was on Saddam to prove that Iraq had complied with the terms of surrender that ended Gulf War 1. Saddam saw Al Qaeda treat the US as a paper tiger throughout the 90s (see Somalia, the Cole, and World Trade Center 1), and saw that the West could be bought off. The Iraqi limits on Oil-for-Food exports increased from under $500 million annually to over $2.5 billion within the decade of the ‘90s. The press continued to collaborate by showing images of malnourished Iraqi families living in squalor. Iraqi sympathizers called on the UN to end the sanctions so that this “outrage” could be ended. Saddam gambled that his supporters among the bribed and useful fools would be able to restrain the US and its coalition. He was wrong.

Kerry tries to paint a different picture. His comments on David Letterman's show indicate that Saddam might now be running Iraq today if Kerry had been elected President in 2000. He tries to move to the President’s right on Tora Bora, on adding two new divisions to the Army, on doubling our Special Forces, while not dismissing a whispering campaign about a new draft, a “back door draft” that affects Reservists, and strain on the National Guard that he claims are mistakes by the President. The President has firmly disavowed a new draft, but hasn’t put down Kerry’s charges on Tora Bora as firmly as he could. Perhaps that is because there is more to the story than we know today. Perhaps the collection of teeth, bones and fingernails that the Special Forces found in the Tora Bora caves contain some that were once UBL’s. Perhaps our leaders believe that we should not give the terrorists a martyr to avenge. Someday, we shall see.

Kerry’s record as a Lt. (jg.) is not enough to mark him as a great military strategist. No one has shown that the President has overruled his Pentagon officers like President Johnson did to affect the conduct of the war. Kerry seems to say that he would do just that.

I think that the President gave as good as he got on the domestic portion of the debate. On the foreign policy portion, he has ammo that he hasn’t used yet. I sincerely hope that he hasn’t waited too long.

Update: read this and this to see how consistent the President has been on Iraq. The second link contains the five (5) demands that the President made of Iraq in order to comply with the world and avoid going to war.

A man with a penchant for understatement says, "They're (the sanctions are) often better than nothing," said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is writing a book on the United Nations. The New York Times: U.S. Report Says Hussein Bought Arms With Ease

George Gilder has taken his lumps after the stock market bubble burst, but he shows that he still has an acute understanding of national economic policy--good and bad--in this editorial on the WSJ Online.WSJ.com - America's New Jingoes

Money quote: "The U.S. today stands at a crossroads. The key economic issue confronting the next president is whether to embrace the policies of decline and sclerosis that afflict old Europe and have left generations of young people unemployed; or whether to enlist with Asia in the supply-side policies of dynamism and growth that have brought more human beings out of poverty than any other regimes in world history.

It should be an easy choice. The American left once displayed a real concern for poor people, but today they exhibit merely a morbid envy of the rich. Once they supported American engagement in the world. Today, they retreat to a timorous parochialism. Now it is President Bush who shows compassion for the world's poor and confidence rather than timidity before the forces of global capitalism. It is Mr. Bush who is embracing Asian dynamism rather than Eurosclerosis. For America, that is the winning side."