As the American death toll rises in Iraq, the voices of panic are quailing here at home. United for Peace and Justice, the group that organized the anti-war march here during the Republican National Convention and whose steering committee includes a representative of the Communist Party USA, is planning three days of protest in Washington from September 24 to 26, including a day of “civil disobedience” that coincides with a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Sixteen Democratic congressmen, including Major Owens and Jose Serrano of New York, have already signed a letter to President Bush asking him to begin pulling troops out of Iraq. “By removing our troops from the country, we will remove the main focus of the insurgents’ rage,” the letter said.

Yesterday, the dean of the New York congressional delegation, Rep. Charles Rangel, circulated an opinion piece in which he asserted that “the U.S. is stuck in a quagmire.” Mr. Rangel called the Iraq conflict “a fraudulent war of choice, which members of the Bush administration had planned even before taking office.” And David Brooks, a New YorkTimes columnist who is often a voice of reason, yesterday dumped the whole Bush doctrine overboard, writing,”democratizing the Middle East, while worthy in itself, may not stem terrorism. Terrorists are bred in London and Paris as much as anywhere else.”

Well, it’d be nice to think that Messrs. Rangel, Brooks, and their ilk might take a deep breath and think about the consequences of what they’re saying. An American retreat would only encourage the terrorists the way America’s retreat from Somalia and Lebanon did. Chapter 2 of the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “The Foundations of the New Terrorism,” reports on Osama Bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa in which he spoke of Somalia and Lebanon and of Americans who “left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you.” Bin Laden said in a later television interview that “the United States rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace.”

Those who believe an American retreat from Iraq would make us safer can contemplate the fact that the fruit of the American withdrawal from Lebanon and Somalia is visible today in the form of a pit at ground zero in Lower Manhattan. Not that American actions are responsible for September 11 — the terrorists alone are to blame. But it is within our power to act in ways that discourage them or in ways that encourage them.

To the doubters that democratizing the Middle East will stem terrorism, we can only say that the strategy still has yet to be fully implemented. Indications from Britain — that one bombing suspect trained for two or three months in Saudi Arabia and that another called the kingdom shortly before his arrest — are that the violence there had ties to the unfree Saudi kingdom. Surely no one can deny the tens of millions of dollars that the Saudis pour into supporting extremist mosques in Europe and America.

To those who claim that the American troops in Iraq are the main focus of the insurgents’ rage, one can only say that the terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, before we had any troops in Iraq. They will keep attacking us until we defeat them and the states that breed them or until we Westerners all surrender and convert to an extreme form of Islam.

It is a measure of our character as a nation that each American combat death is painful and significant. It’s important to have some historical perspective, though. The number of Americans killed so far in Iraq — 1,815 — is dwarfed by the 54,246 Americans killed in the Korean War, where Mr. Rangel won his Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Or by the 405,399 American troops killed in World War II, according to the History News Network. If the American troops in Iraq have prevented a single additional terrorist attack on America of the magnitude of September 11, 2001, they will have reduced the loss of American lives, on a net basis.

As a matter of tactics, we have been advocating since even before the war for having as much of the fighting as possible in Iraq done by free Iraqis. This has been a central element of the strategy advanced by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. We have also been saying for years now that in order to win in Iraq, America is also going to have to address the situation in Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Saudi Arabia and Iran. That doesn’t mean invading them, but it does mean backing and emboldening the forces of freedom in those countries to liberate themselves.

If some doubters seem to have lost sight of what we are fighting for,Americans can be grateful at least that President Bush has a clarity of purpose. He articulated this yesterday in an inspiring way, speaking of “the clash of ideologies — freedom versus tyranny. We have had these kinds of clashes before, and we have prevailed. We have prevailed because we’re right; we have prevailed because we adhere to a hopeful philosophy; and we have prevailed because we would not falter.”