Our battle to stiffen the resolve of the British and American publics is in serious danger of being lost," Duncan Smith, a strong supporter of the Bush administration and of the decision to go to war in March 2003, said in a speech Monday at the conservative Hudson Institute. Without public support, a continued war effort was certainly impossible, he said.

Duncan Smith said the approach of instilling fear in the public to garner support for the war was always sure to backfire. There was the uncovering of the Downing Street Memo, the famous document that shot down the two primary cases for war: terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. And, he acknowledged, any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have yet to be found.

"Truth was a casualty of Tony Blair's case for war," Duncan Smith said.

It is anyone guess whether a loss of credibility will prove an insurmountable obstacle now in rallying the public for future conflicts. Recent polls in both countries show waning support, and discourse is stepping up on creating a timetable to pull troops.

However, past missteps and the question of whether the United States and British governments were right to go to war is neither here or there, Duncan Smith said. He maintained that dwelling on that debate now and confusing it with the question of whether or not the United States and Britain should stay in Iraq can only lead to certain defeat there.

"The terrorists are sophisticated enough to know that the best ally they have is a terrorized Western public and the media is their channel to achieve that," Duncan Smith said. "There is the insurgency itself and then the battle of the ether - the battle to sicken Western public opinion."

Speaking to a receptive audience, Duncan Smith evoked prophecies of Churchill and Gladstone in defending the invasion of Iraq. There can be no distinction between this war and the global war on terror, he said, calling Iraq the frontline in the "struggle that the civilized world finds itself engaged in."

"I continue to believe that it was absolutely right to liberate Iraq," he said.

Evoking common rhetorical themes of cross-Atlantic conservatives, Smith sought to vindicate a policy of preemption for reasons such as the spread of democracy and defeat of a tyrannical government in pursuit of dangerous technologies.

Trumping all else, in his view, was a crusade against evil. "The world has always had its share of evil men. The problem of our time is the portability, cheapness and availability of weaponry," he said.

However, taking a position different from that of many American pro-war politicians, Smith said this ultimate purpose for the war ought to have been leveled with the public from the very beginning. British and American leaders ought to have been forthright and unapologetic, he said: The Iraq war was but one step in a war on the newest manifestation of evil.

Drawing comparisons between ideological battles of the past, Duncan Smith asked, "I wonder if Washington would have been forced to sue for peace with Berlin?"

Duncan Smith acknowledged that the situation in Iraq was ugly, but he rebuffed the notion that Iraqis were better off before the war. He said he was convinced that retreating from Iraq was certain to exacerbate Islamic extremism and cast the United States and Britain as weak states.

"The terrorists don't want to win in Iraq in order to begin a happy retirement. They want to win in Iraq as a stepping stone to America and other free nations around the globe," he said. "(Osama) bin Laden's hate-filled followers will know that the West can be terrorized into capitulation."

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