One of the great murderers of the 20th (and briefly, the 21st) Century met his end tonight as 25 million freed Iraqis spoke through their elected leaders and independent judiciary in the execution of the fallen tyrant Saddam Hussein.

It is at once a solemn moment and a moment of jubilation, a moment lost to Germans who suffered under Hitler, to Russians and Chinese under a string of murderers even greater.

It is also a moment well worth every expense, every drop of blood our nation has shed. If only we could have done the same early enough against Mao, Pol Pot, Lenin, et al.

Tonight, though, we join our Iraqi friends here and abroad in their joy at the butcher’s final fall. We can all rejoice, at the end of so much suffering, at the beginning of so many possibilities for so many innocents, and at the end of the long Iraqi night.

This comes to us from Jack Wheeler:

Whether Osama Bin Laden is alive or dead is quite unclear, for he has produced no hard evidence (such as a time-dated video) of his existence for a long time now.  But the real brains of Al Qaeda, an Egyptian physician named Ayman Al-Zawahiri is definitely still around.

He recently recorded another Islamofascist rant, which some quite clever folks have “re-translated” into a Christmas message announcing Zawahiri’s conversion to Christianity.

It is a brilliant spoof and moving as well. You will likely laugh out loud as it brings tears to your eyes at the same time.  We suggest you send it to everyone on your Christmas list.  Here is the YouTube link to  A Man Gets Lonely In A Cave: Zawahiri’s Christmas Greeting.

Gotta love David Zucker, the director of Airplane. Here’s his latest YouTube video, this one on James Baker and the surrender monkeys of the Iraq Study Group.

Predictably, the Democrats’ comments about this over on YouTube are extremely anti-Semitic (like the the recent MoveOn/Democratic Underground slurs of the Senator they called “Jew Lieberman”). It’s always hard to tell from year to year whether the Dems are more inclined toward the KKK or Hamas. Maybe it’s al Qaeda this year.

When last I wrote, I had just spent some time on our weekly White House leadership call making the case for increased troop strength in Iraq.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Far be it from me not to give the devil (in this case John McCain) his due here. Nevertheless, you can feel good that TheVanguard.Org — your movement — is being heard at the highest levels and getting results. You make this possible.

The situation in Iraq is more like 1968 America than 1968 Vietnam. Fourteen of eighteen provinces are safer than our major cities. The economy is booming: CNBC reported today that Iraq’s economy is growing at twice the rate of China’s. Salaries are up across Iraq by an average of 100% since Saddam’s overthrow; teachers’ salaries are up 2,700%! A real estate boom is underway, with average home values up double in the past year.

Is this the picture of a war zone?

No, this is the picture of once-upon-a-time Watts and Harlem. And just as Nixon knew, the answer is law and order. If the Iraqis can’t quite get that together yet, who can blame them. But 30,000 more boots on the ground — which Democrats were demanding just a short time ago, so don’t let them get away with anything otherwise now! — could easily, if not precisely quickly, roll up a terrorist/criminal organization (which conveniently calls itself “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Ms. Pelosi) which is trying to steal the hard-won freedom of 25 million people and which precious few of those people even vaguely support.

The key in this deployment will be what is done with the new troops. My friends in the Pentagon and on the ground assure me that where our forces are proactive — hunters, if you will — al Qaeda gets shut down and all is well. Where they are passive — defensive — there is ongoing smoldering trouble. This is an issue of command, and clearly some changes need to be made: a political blog back home shouldn’t have to tell commanders in Iraq something so deadly obvious. But that’s the long and the short of it, and conservatives need to pressure the Administration in just this vein. I will surely continue to do so.

But the point remains that Iraq is a messy, yet thriving place. There is no excuse for defeat, no substitute for — or need for anything less than — victory. What surrender-monkey fool ever thought this would be quick or easy, much less that Iran, Syria, al Qaeda, et al. would lie back and wait for us to remake the region in an image which will ruin their totalitarian party? But Iraqis have voted repeatedly for freedom, for democracy, for the (admittedly flawed, like everyone else’s) leaders we now see. We made their freedom possible. We’ve made their booming economy possible. We must now see it through, to victory.

It’s been a while since my last post.  TheVanguard.Org is in the midst of deploying what we mean to be its final beta version before v.1.0, and a tremendous amount of new technology is rolling out (admittedly, not all of it is visible to all of you quite yet).  As a result, this blog has been offline for a couple weeks.  My apologies to our faithful readers: you will be well rewarded.