This is why, when I think Bush could lose, my heart sinks. At the one year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, London protestors scale the Big Ben clock tower to raise a banner that read "Time for Truth."

Now don't get me wrong. There is something attractive in the youthful vigor of physical prowess, evading very tight security, to climb a stone tower. Putting your freedom on the line—the climbers were arrested—as well as your physical safety is a perfectly acceptable, if illegal, practice of activist theater going back to the 1960s.

My problem? This vigor is also Yeats' "passionate intensity" of ideological politics. It is also conspiratorialist. Just why is Blair's government so corrupt and mendacious that it has become Orwell's fabled Oceania where the clock strikes thirteen (speaking of clocks)?

This will not serve the environmentalist movement, toward which I have always had mixed feelings:

We want to send a clear message to (Prime Minister) Tony Blair that we and the British people are fed up with the half-truths and evasions on Iraq," said Stephen Tindale, executive director of environmental group Greenpeace, which organized the stunt.

Don't subject your politics to double dipping. That is, if you have idealism, make sure its parts fit together. Are we to assume with the environmentalists that the "oil cartel," supposedly controlling the war in Iraq, will exploit Iraq's national resources for more gas-guzzling-monoxide-spewing metal coffins? Then why have gasoline prices gone up lately? No one denies the need for renewable non-fossil fuels but it is also true that Iraq's prosperity will be our prosperity. Oil is one part of the equation and if it were the only part it would have been far easier to keep Saddam in power and arrange deals with him the way the French and Germans did and the way we do so now, shamefully, with the Saudis. No conservative has to apologize for the necessity of free-markets in a democratic order. It's just best to do business with fellow democracies, because, as we have seen in the Middle East, for democracies to do business with dictatorships has a way of coming back to bite you. Answer? Create more democracies, hopefully without having to invade. Democracy, for example, could come to Iran without America firing a single shot. From my keyboard to God's eyes!

There must be some strict party-line connection for Greenpeace to show the cause and effect of environmental pollution and America running amok in Iraq and creating a living hell for all Iraqis. Why, just hear out some Iraqi artists who think differently:

Abdul Jabbar J. Awith, 58, attended the University of Oregon in Eugene in the early 1960s and today he is a math professor at a local university. Asked to describe freedom, Mr. Awith answered: "Marvelous. So nice, so lovely, like beautiful music but with slow dancing."

He added, "In America, when they built their society, it took more than 200 years to settle everything. In Iraq, we have to do the same within our habits, our experience, which is not the same as the Americans. But the principles are the same."

Clearly, the Americans are there to force the Iraqi people to bow down to a Moloch- inspired fossil-fuel oligarchy. The "real" truth behind this lovely little tale is that multi- media conspiratorial forces are depriving you of the true and real story: these guys were propped up to spin the war on terrorism as a good thing and not the imperial stealth foreign diplomacy that it must be.

Maybe the "greens" can answer me this: how much pollution Saddam caused? I mean, the kind that is not related to mass-murder but disturbing Mother Earth itself? You might think a Greenpeace activist would emphasize it is a good thing Saddam is gone. He couldn't possibly be good for the Earth. What about the marshlands of the Marsh Arabs that Saddam drained?

An ecological and human disaster developed as the water ran increasingly dry and salty, in a scorched region where rainfall is rare.

But Saddam was not the problem. Obviously the vision of Bush-Blair is a blight on the world, a spiritual cancer called "democracy." Enough to cause acrobats to stunt their way up Britain's national symbol. There is no truth found in liberation when America and Britain are the biggest oppressors and criminals in the world. It is they who will destroy the world through their globalization cabal of corporations, shareholders, and a sheepish public that only fuels (pun intended) religious fanaticism, theocracy, and terrorist violence. In other words, it is the democracies that are mainly responsible for the violence convulsing the Middle East. We are the cause of the problem and getting into the middle of it is not the solution. Leave the peoples of the Middle East to themselves (Yankee go home) and you will see they will sort out their business on their own. Who are we to judge?

Until a pathogen spreads throughout our land. That is another environmental hazard: bio-weapons. But it is too much to assume that Saddam would have used them since the U.S. led coalition has not yet found stockpiles of them. Ergo, he never would have acquired or used them in the future as he had in the past.

What is wrong headed here is that the anti-war internationalist Left actually believes a regime like Saddam Hussein's is owed due process like a citizen of a democratic republic. This is not at all the case. Saddam's regime was indeed "rogue" in that it was a loose cannon ready to fire as already long proved from his war with Iran to scaring the Saudis into having American troops stationed there. Now those troops have left Saudi Arabia because Saddam is gone. Kuwait has long been liberated and the liberation of the Iraqi people began one year ago yesterday.

Give me liberty or give me mass graves should be the new rallying cry for freedom and democracy now that our age is one that is considerably more dire than that of Patrick Henry's.

Consider the great man's concluding words that express a radicalism that outshines anything Greenpeace and the anti-war "peace" movement can inspire, because they now uphold, willingly or not, knowingly or not, the cause of tyranny:

The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

So also with the fight for the Iraqi people, forged in America's and the civilized world's self-interest. There is no mistake in naming issues of national security, with or without the presence of WMD in Iraq though Bush does have explaining to do with their absence. It was enough to know, by his actions in the past set against the realities of the perilous world today, that Saddam would have formed tighter links to terrorists, as he already had, and to anyone who would further his interests, regardless of his secularism despised by the Islamists. Al Queda had a friend in Saddam even if they didn't, yet, have direct dealings with them. It is only academic that no link between them, never claimed by Bush I must add, ever really existed. Abu Nidal was enough. The recently deceased Abu Abbas. Paying thousands of dollars to Palestinian families whose children blew themselves up to kill Jews. Saddam was a big fish in a not so big yet unseemly pond.

Saddam's interests were tyrannical, destabilizing, and located in an incendiary part of the world whose material backwardness, religious fanaticism, over-population of zealous male youth, autocratic regimes, and exploitation by the West, have spurred horrific violence against the Muslim peoples, which has decidedly seeped over into our own shores and that of our allies.

It is ultimately for the Iraqi people to create their own new nation. As the math professor said above, it will be an Iraqi democracy. Who would argue otherwise? What other kind would there be? We are fighting for our own interests as well as for the Iraqis. This fight is not without serious drawbacks and risks, but that is the very nature of war. That is why war can be noble when it is always terrible, and that nobility is not possible unless there is no alternative to war and it is fought for a higher purpose beyond the self- evident necessity to ensure our survival against global religious fanaticism.

That is what we have in Iraq, a radical shift in its history and ours, and one that will change the world forever. We all wish this would just go away, but we are stuck with it and must stay the course. The Iraqi people are already reaping the fruits of our efforts, and mostly certainly theirs, even as there are terrible setbacks to come. War, after all, is not a Hollywood script, even though many of Bush's enemies would ignorantly accuse him of thinking so.

Happy Anniversary, people of a free Iraq.