We should have prepared the political battleground before the fighting ever started, by creating a democratic Iraqi government-in-exile. But internal divisions within the Bush administration proved intractable, and future historians will no doubt marvel at the fact that more passion and more man hours were spent fighting Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress than combating the likes of Moqtada and the remnants of Saddam's security forces.

As Syria is emerging as the principal facilitator of terrorism in both Israel and Iraq - see “Syria In The Gunsights” in last week’s TTP Weekly Report of April 23 - a Syrian democracy movement has just come in to being. It is the Reform Party of Syria, dedicated to terminating the Assad tyranny and achieving freedom and democracy for the Syrian people. The RFS immediately recognized that the “terrorist attack” in Damascus earlier this week (April 27) was staged by the Syrian government as a ruse to divert attention from its being wedded to the very terrorists they claimed were attacking. The RFS report enabled Members of Congress, such as Eliot Engle (D-NY) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), to denounce the attack as a “charade,” pointing out that it was on a vacant building. The RFS website is: http://reformsyria.org/ RFS now listed in Liberation Links. If you haven’t explored this feature of To The Point (listed on the left side bar), I invite you to do so. There are many people out there in the world struggling for liberation from Communist, Islamofascist, and other tyrannies. You can find out about a good many of them on Liberation Links.

All of you know of Google as a search engine; you probably use it. For a long while Google also has had a free toolbar for download. It appears as a toolbar on the top of your Internet Explorer page, along with Internet Explorer’s own toolbars. The Google toolbar enables searches without having to navigate to www.google.com. While convenient and useful, I normally wouldn’t mention it in these columns, because it hadn’t until recently enhanced your computer’s security. Google has come out with a second edition, and among several new features, it includes a pop-up killer.

She’s pretending to be John Kerry’s biggest supporter, but no one is rooting for George Bush to win in November more than Hillary. She got behind the best straw candidate Bush could most easily demolish, Dizzy Howard Dean. When he imploded, she looked around and asked, “Who’s the next worst?” A no-brainer: obviously, an egomaniacal gigolo with more negatives than an Algebra student who fantasizes he could be another “JFK.”

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was, "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them." The Fascists and Nazis believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust races and nations would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.The Terrorists have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.

The argument for taking out the government of Syria is growing by the day. The only things holding back the Marines from seizing downtown Damascus and imprisoning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a war criminal are (a) the lack of manpower to prevent the place from collapsing into anarchic chaos before a transition government can be set up, and (b) the literally hysterical objections of the State Department.

I’ve received a number of emails, all complimentary. I thank the readers for that. I’d like to go a step farther. My column isn’t read by every subscriber to ToThePoint. My writing needs to be tuned to those who do read my column. So please email me about what you like and don’t like. Are the columns too long, or too short? Too technical or too basic? I can’t answer the questions that subscribers have emailed me. It’d take all my time. Some questions are so wed to the user’s installation that I’d have to be at the computer to see what’s going on - or install Spyware to watch! However, I can comment on recurring themes.

Much is being made about the irony of an Iranian envoy arriving in Iraq to help negotiate a solution to the U.S. standoff with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. How could we allow a charter member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil" to negotiate a "peace" with the thuggish Sadr and his band of fanatical militants?