"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death."

So says Maulana Inyadullah in the first paragraph of Mark Steyn's Sleeping Giant, reminding me of the Mother-In-Law, a died-in-the-wool Pepsi fanatic if ever there was one, and a long-standing Democrat.

All dominant powers are hated -- Britain was, and Rome -- but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it.

That's one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.

But the article isn't simply more whining about how unjustly we're hated, it also makes the far more relevant point that we must not cut-and-run from Iraq.

But others cast the hyperpower's geniality in a different light. Visitors to America often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan usually found below a bold Stars and Stripes: "These Colours Don't Run." To non-Americans, it can seem a trifle touchy. But for a quarter century the presumption of the country's enemies was that those colours did run -- they ran from Vietnam, they ran from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, they ran from Somalia. Even the successful campaigns -- the inconclusively concluded 1991 Gulf War and the air-only 1999 Kosovo war -- seemed manifestly designed to avoid putting those colours in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colours ran from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, just as Zarqawi figured those colours would run from the Sunni Triangle. Being seen not to run -- or, if you prefer, being seen to show "resolve" -- should be the indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. Were these colours to run from Iraq, it would be the end of the American era -- for why would Russia, China or even Belgium ever again take seriously a superpower that runs screaming for home at the first pinprick?

This is right. We must succeed in Iraq because not to do so dooms our foreign policy for all of the forseeable future, no matter who wins the next election. I've never understood why some of the Democrats seem so willing to win election at the cost of weakening the nation, or at least the international perception of the nation, but it's not too late for them to do something about it.

Nancy? Harry? Don't you want to mention how much you despise Al-Qaeda, or Ayatollah Khamenei, or countries who assume legal sovereignty over our citizens, or someone? Anyone? Please?

No Pepsi until you do.