LIBERALS ARE hopping mad about the war with Iraq. Showing the nuance and complexity of thought liberals pride themselves on, they are excitedly restating all the arguments they made before the war - arguments which were soundly rejected by the American people, the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration.

Before the war, they said Saddam Hussein - their favorite world leader behind Jacques Chirac - was not a threat to America's interests in the region, was not developing weapons of mass destruction, and did not harbor terrorists. Now that we've taken the country and are uncovering mass graves, canisters of poison gases, victims of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and colonies of terrorists, liberals are claiming the war created it all.

Thus, an op-ed piece in the New York Times recently proclaimed: "America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one." This was written by Jessica Stern of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (Motto: "Where mediocre students pay exorbitant sums to say they went to Harvard"). You can't win with these people. The termites are swarming out into the light of day, and liberals are blaming the exterminator.

Liberals simply refuse to consider thoughts that would interfere with their lemming-like groupthink. They hold their hands over their ears like little children who don't want to listen to mother.

Yes, perhaps there are important textural differences between secular Saddam loyalists and Islamic crazies - though it's a little odd to be lectured on nuance from people who can grasp no difference whatsoever between Bill O'Reilly and Jesse Helms. But as George Bush said: You are with the terrorists or you are with America. Now we're getting a pretty clear picture of who is with the terrorists. As George Patton said, I like when the enemy shoots at me; then I know where the bastards are and can kill them.

But liberals are indignant for every day that we haven't turned a barbaric land into Vermont. They were willing to give Stalin 36 years for the awkwardness of his revolution. We have essentially imposed a revolution on Iraq - and liberals give us a month to work out the bugs. U.S. forces in Baghdad say that Iraq is well on its way to establishing American-style representative democracy and might even be holding its first free elections in less than a year. Within three years, the Iraqi people could be recalling their first governor.

Indeed, the war is going so well that now liberals have to create absurd straw-man arguments no one ever uttered in order to accuse the Bush administration of horrible miscalculations. Amid her sneering, PMS-induced anger toward the Bush administration, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed the Bush administration was "shaken" to discover "the terrible truth: Just because we got Odai and Qusai, Iraqi militants are not going to stop blowing up Westerners." I'd love to see the quote where anyone in the Bush administration - anyone in the universe - said that.

Admittedly, Republicans were not mourning the deaths of Odai and Qusai the way Democrats were, but only a moron would think that killing these two monsters would mark the end of the war on terrorism. Normandy didn't end World War II. That didn't make it a failure. MacArthur was still in Tokyo straightening out Japan in 1950 - five years after V-J Day. Not only was Japan an advanced and ethnically unified country, but U.S. forces also made things easier for MacArthur by killing several million of the most militant anti-American Japanese during World War II. Paul Bremer doesn't have this advantage in Iraq. In fact, he has the reverse situation: Saddam killed the most pro-American Iraqis before the war.

With all their pointless chitchat about Osama bin Laden, liberals of all people ought to have known the war would not be over with the deaths of Odai and Qusai. Speaking of which - where is Osama? We haven't heard much from him lately. Nor is Saddam Hussein out shaking his puny fist at the Great Satan anymore. Concerned that he might try to sneak out in disguise, U.S. soldiers in Iraq have been given pictures of Saddam Hussein in various outfits, hairstyles and even makeup schemes. (And I thought this was kind of interesting - it turns out he's a "winter.")

What is the point of liberal carping? What precisely are they proposing we do? Turn tail and abandon Iraq to the mullahs and the Syrians? Revert to the Democrats' tried-and-true method of abandoning the region to any local Pol Pot who might turn up?

Clinton's statesmanlike response to Islamic fanatics was to do nothing -- except when he needed to distract from his impeachment and would suddenly start bombing foreign countries at random. In eight years, the only domestic Muslim terrorist Clinton went after was a blind cleric sitting outside a mosque in New Jersey behind a card table with an "Ask Me About Terrorism" sign.

The Clinton approach was working great, if you don't count the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombing of our Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole and, finally, the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world right here on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001.

We have seen how well the Democrats' surrender approach works for 50 years. We saw it again last week. The United Nations stood shoulder to shoulder with American liberals, France, Germany and Saddam Hussein in opposing war with Iraq. And then last week in Iraq, the little darlings bombed the U.N. embassy in Baghdad. But that's Bush's fault, too. Perhaps Bush is also responsible for J-Lo and Ben Affleck's bomb of a movie. The only people whom liberals absolutely refuse to hold accountable for anything are their friends, the Islamofascists