Last night, Americans learned that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. President George W. Bush said the killing “marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.” But the death of bin Laden was also a victory for President Obama who has long struggled against his own far left base ever since they turned against him for reigniting President Bush’s war in Afghanistan.

The president’s decision to maintain a powerful U.S. presence in the Middle East, and making it a top priority to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a huge blow to far leftists who wrongly presumed that Obama’s foreign policy would largely be an isolationist one.Many of the president’s critics believed that our mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan was misguided, without merit and even hopeless.In fact, Obama’s own base began treating him with the same hatred with which they treated President Bush when he sent troops to Iraq.

On January 24, 2009, the New York Times wrote, “Even as Mr. Obama’s military planners prepare for the first wave of the new Afghanistan ‘surge,’ there is growing debate . . . about whether – or how – the troops can accomplish their mission, and just what the mission is.” The Times also interviewed former Secretary of State Colin Powell in that same 2009 article who commented, “Think Iraq was hard?” Afghanistan will be “much, much harder.”

But the president was determined, and during a March 28, 2010 visit to a major U.S. base in Afghanistan, the president reassured U.S. troops there, “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away . . . The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. We persevere. And together, with our partners, we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.

He was right.

America and her partners prevailed, proving to the world that justice delayed would not be justice denied.Many isolationists probably believe this means this is the right time for U.S. forces to finally withdraw from the Middle East when in fact this is time to make an even deeper commitment to bonding with the Afghan and Pakistani people.

In his January State of the Union Address, President Obama told Americans “we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them.”

The killing of bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals is proof that he was right. After all, our mission could not have been successfully carried out without the cooperation of the Pakistani government and intelligence source there.

Our war against terrorism in the Middle East has been a long one and it will continue to be. However, the war against fascism and communism was long, too. History has proven when good fails to act against evil, evil only becomes more powerful. Isolationists like Joseph Kennedy, the former U.S. Ambassador to England in the 1930’s discouraged American intervention against the Third Reich, and at the time, the White House listened. If only President Roosevelt had taken a greater interest in the evil being perpetuated across Europe by Hitler earlier, we may have stopped the Nazis before the Holocaust ever happened.

Presidents Bush and Obama took relentless action throughout their presidencies to fight terrorism and human rights violations in the Middle East, and as a result people in the Middle East are taking a stand – some through open revolt and others by secretly helping our forces.

This is America’s moment.

This is our time to end terrorism and tyranny in the Middle East once and for all. President Bush was right when he told us that we simply should not accept the proposition that some countries were not meant to be free. There will always be opposition, but a major part of the population in the Middle East is yearning to be free. Presidents Bush knew that, and hopefully President Obama knows that, too.America’s mission is not yet complete – it has just begun.