Hillary Clinton recently announced on "Meet the Press" that if elected president, she would begin withdrawing American troops from Iraq within 60 days of her taking office and would refuse to further support the current troop surge even if asked to do so by current commander in Iraq, David Petraeus.

Soon after Mrs. Clinton's remarks, the Pentagon committed an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan, a measure that met with virtually no criticism on the part of Democrats despite the fact that the needed time commitment for victory in Afghanistan is as (if not more) indefinite as that for Iraq.

Here is the problem: Mrs. Clinton and those who share her thoughts on Iraq fail to recognize that the United States has an equal if not greater stake in the success of Iraq as in that of Afghanistan, and just as putting an artificial deadline on a withdrawal from Afghanistan is out of the question, so too is the case for Iraq.

To set the context, a senator recently tried to corner a military general by asking him which front was more important: Iraq or Afghanistan. The general, spotting the trap, answered accordingly: "which of your children do you love more?"

The Democratic Party, a growing number of Republicans, and citizens heavily against the continued efforts in Iraq suffer from two fundamental misconceptions. First, they believe that the war in Iraq is like a candle that can simply be blown out. One day the troops are in Iraq, the next day they are back home, and the world continues to move along as if nothing has changed. Second, they fail to recognize that the war in Iraq cannot be isolated from the greater war against Islamic extremism.

It is true that Saddam Hussein had no active WMD program, alliance with al-Qaeda or involvement with 9/11 outside of perhaps the careless imagination of those who initiated the war on false pretenses, but we are no longer dealing in that realm.

Leaving Iraq now, or soon for that matter, would be more fatal than leaving Iraq prior to the success of the surge, when the United States, holding Iraq together by strings, was the only element preventing unthinkable exponential growth of the already gruesome conditions.

A precipitous withdrawal could easily erase recent improvements and bring Iraq back to the pre-surge chaos, including a reemergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, an affiliate of the same al-Qaeda we are currently battling in Afghanistan.

As to why the Democratic leadership is content to fight and suppress al-Qaeda in Afghanistan without an end in sight while demanding a swift withdrawal from Iraq, where we are fighting the same enemy, is anyone's guess, and they are certainly starting to grasp at straws.

Take for example Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's continued insistence that the surge, a purely military measure, was a failure on account of the fact that as of yet, full reconciliation, a political issue, has not been achieved in Iraq.

This sort of intellectual dishonesty is no different than that used by the likes of former Senator Rick Santorum, who argued that we were justified in invading Iraq due to the fact that we found "WMDs," buried underground or without evidence of knowledge by Saddam Hussein, of course.

The need for the surge and the maintenance of a high U.S. troop level was backed by elementary logic: the more good guys in Iraq killing and hindering the efforts of the bad guys, the more stable Iraq will become.

Due to the success of the surge, the United States is holding Iraq together by ropes, perhaps even chains, and it looks like the government of Iraq is slowly starting to take responsibility for its own affairs by moving forward with national reconciliation and crafting a more competent security force.

Although it is uncertain when Iraq will reach a level of stability such that it makes sense to start bringing troops home, it is better to base deployment levels off of the improvements made in Iraq in conjunction with flexible and conditional timetables, the current approach of President Bush.

It is essential that politicians on both sides of the aisle recognize that our ultimate goal is to defeat Islamic extremism and the terror it perpetuates. Whether Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party like it or not, Iraq is a crucial front in the war on terror, and applying one standard of patience in Afghanistan and another in Iraq is counter to the security interests of the United States.