If this is failure, I don't wanna win!

Investor's Business Daily outlines some of the victories over terrorism that we've experienced -- just over the Memorial Day weekend:

• Iraqi forces ran al-Qaida terrorists out of Mosul, the terror organization's final urban stronghold. That victory reduces the killers to fringe areas with little public support, and a truncated capacity to recruit and strike terror in Iraq's cities. Al-Qaida has "never been closer to defeat than they are now," said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Iraqi troops also cleaned out Basra and Sadr City, reducing any prospect for domestic insurgents to take power by force. Along with al-Qaida, these terrorists may try to continue, but the will is fading as the pressure is ratcheted up.

• In Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos announced that Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, founder of the FARC Marxist terror group, died a hunted man in the jungle on March 26 as bombs rained down on him. Better still, the government knew this because it penetrated FARC. Marulanda died knowing his chosen successor, Raul Reyes, had been blown away, too. Indeed, three of FARC's seven top leaders have been killed since March, and the rest are headed "for the grave," Santos said.

Hundreds of FARC foot soldiers are now furtively phoning the government to beg for a deal. Along with fears of their own men turning them in for cash, FARC leaders now work in a poisoned atmosphere, knowing spies are in their midst. They won't win.

• British forces for the first time drove the Taliban from a southern stronghold in a 96-hour battle this month. It was their first combat operation since new troops arrived in March. The New York Times reported a "palpable" sense of relief among villagers, with the district chief and exiles returning to rebuild. "There has been huge optimism from the people," an officer was quoted as saying.

• In the south Philippines, Marxist and Muslim terrorists are desperate. A big arsenal belonging to al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf was unearthed in Sulu Saturday, taking 283 sacks of bomb components out of circulation. Meanwhile, Nur Misuari, the top terrorist of the Moro National Liberation Front, on parole in Davao, pleaded with other terrorists to drop arms and sue for peace at a rally Saturday.

• In Egypt's al-Qaida inner circle, a leading jihad ideologue, using the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl, has now openly questioned terrorism as a tactic, given al-Qaida's mounting losses. He threatened to renounce violence — a new blow to the jihadists.

All of these victories are a direct result of the Bush administration's response (military, economic, intelligence, diplomatic) to the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001.

And, contrary to the collective ignorance of many pundits and journalists alike, global terrorism is on the wane.

Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, the Human Security Brief 2007 reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.

Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.

The Brief also describes and analyses the extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa's security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.

Finally, the Brief updates the findings of the 2005 Human Security Report, and demonstrates that the decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world has continued. The number of military coups has also continued decline, as have the number of campaigns of deadly violence waged against civilians.

We are now in a safer world than we were in 2001. Thanks in a very large part to the actions taken by the United States of America (led by George W. Bush) and its allies.

And you can take that to the bank.

Saudi Arabia: Ally . . . or not?

Since 9-11-2001, there have been questions about whether or not Saudi Arabia was supporting terrorism. Investors Business Daily points out some disturbing behaviors of the Kingdom that seem to indicate they are, in fact, supporting terrorism.

There's new evidence the Saudis aren't cooperating in our battle to eradicate terrorists or those who bankroll them. Their negligence is shocking even to cynics.

According to the Treasury Department's top anti-terror official, the kingdom has not prosecuted a single person named by the U.S. or the United Nations as a terror financier. Asked by ABC News how many Saudis have been charged with funding terror since 9/11, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey said, "There have not been any." Not one? "No," he asserted.

Read the whole thing.

The Muslim Brotherhood -- in America

Rod Dreher, a columnist with the Dallas Morning News has a disturbing column about how the international Muslim Brotherhood (whose Palestinian arm is Hamas) has been quietly working in the USA for decades in an attempt to bring the caliphate to power here. An excerpt of their 'explanatory memorandum' (which is part of the evidence in a terror trial in Dallas) includes:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

This is alarming stuff . . . especially in light of other evidence in the trial that indicates that most mainstream Muslim organizations in North America, like CAIR and ISNA, are being run by the Muslim Brotherhood -- just like Hamas is being run by them in Palestine.

You know, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you . . .

The quagmire in Iraq

It's not what you think. [My emphasis.]

Say there's a group of people in Iraq fighting what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. The core of this group is made up of foreigners intent on a mission of 'liberation' in a land historically alien to their ideologies. In the process of enacting their designs, this group has suffered considerable casualties, sunk untold sums in resources, and lost many once-reliable friends. Sound familiar? This is the current state of international jihadism, an institution with a situation grimmer and an outlook more despairing than for the US-led coalition.

Go read it all.

Terrorist Tet

The horrific bombing in northern Iraq this week is all about psyops performed by terrorists and targeting America's congressmen. Ralph Peters explains:

But the second reason for those dramatic bombings was that al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Yazidis were just props: The intended audience was Congress.

Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out.

The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated al Qaeda.

Expect more attempts to generate massive bloodshed in Iraq in the coming weeks. The terrorists are well aware of the exaggerated-by-all-parties importance of Gen. David Petraeus' Sept. 15 progress report to Congress. They'll do all they can to embarrass the general and provide ammunition to the surrender caucus.

Meanwhile, our military progress has become undeniable.

The only way Al Qaeda can win is if America decides to lose.

Go read the whole thing.

We are making a difference

Michael Yon reports on Iraq in the New York Daily News and, from first hand experience, recounts one of the atrocities that Al Qaeda has committed there. He also reports on the progress he sees being made in eradicating the Al Qaeda pestilence in Iraq. And the need for more progress in order for us to claim victory.

Anyone who says Al Qaeda is not one of the primary problems in Iraq is simply ignorant of the facts.

I, like everyone else, will have to wait for September's report from Gen. Petraeus before making more definitive judgments. But I know for certain that three things are different in Iraq now from any other time I've seen it.

1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive Al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.

2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than it was in 2005. It is not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come.

3. Gen. Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.

And yes, in case there is any room for question, Al Qaeda still is a serious problem in Iraq, one that can be defeated. Until we do, real and lasting security will elude both the Iraqis and us.

The surge is working, but it will take some time for Iraq to stabilize. After all, it took 7 years after the fighting was over in WWII for us to turn Germany and Japan into stable democracies . . .

We need to be patient.

'Petraeus or betray us'

Investor's Business Daily has an excellent opinion piece out describing the tremendous progress being made in Iraq under General Petraeus' leadership.

On Saturday, members of the 1st Cavalry Division based near Taji brokered a formal agreement between Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders to join forces against al-Qaida and other jihadists. The Sunni and Shiite agreed to use members of more than 25 local tribes to protect the area around Taji, just 12 miles north of Baghdad.

The deal is just the latest example of the progress Democrats claim isn't happening in Iraq — a series of deals with various tribes and militia groups that at one point were part of the insurgency. But it's the first involving both Sunni and Shiite sheiks together.

Here's more:

Last October, al-Qaida in Iraq declared Baqouba to be the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq, and claimed to control both Anbar and Diyala provinces, of which Baqouba is the capital. But that was before Operation Arrowhead Ripper. Of the 1,000 al-Qaida who were thought to have been in Baqouba, those who haven't been killed or captured have fled.

And we're not doing it alone. Despite mainstream media reports, Iraqis are fighting and dying for their freedom in ever greater numbers. Progress is being made. But as even New York Times reporter John Burns notes: "The most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence."

The politicos and mainstream media who continually beat the drum of defeat are really missing the boat on this one.

Go read the whole thing.

Democrats kill John Doe amendment

It looks like the Dems want you and I to be held liable for reporting suspicious activities to the authorities.

As a result, be prepared for signs like this to be posted in public areas.

To be honest, it looks like Congress is on the side of the terrorists . . .

Al Qaeda on the wane

Michael Yon reports from Diyala province about the substantiated effectiveness of the current surge operations in Iraq. He also has a video interview with Abu Ali, the commander of the formerly insurgent 1920s Brigades (now allied with coalition forces against al Qaeda).

Before the tape was running, I asked Abu Ali why he and the 1920s turned against al Qaeda in Buhriz. Speaking through LT David Wallach, a native Arabic speaker, Abu Ali said that “al Qaeda is an abomination of Islam: cutting off heads, stealing people’s money, kidnapping . . . every type of torture they have done.”

The recent stories of baked children came to mind. I asked if Abu Ali had heard about children being baked. Ali said no, he had not heard such a story, but he would not be surprised if it were true because al Qaeda had done so many crimes, such as cutting off a man’s head, putting it up on a stick and parading it around town.

Ali said people had been afraid in their own homes because of al Qaeda. I asked if he had fought Americans and Ali laughed and said through Wallach, “What kind of question is that?” I chuckled. Unfortunately, we had to go to other meetings, so the time for taping was short. In closing, I asked Abu Ali if there was something he would like to say to Americans. The markets that had been closed under al Qaeda were bustling around us.

Ali thought for a moment as some local people tried to interrupt him with greetings, and he said, “I ask one thing,” and now I paraphrase Ali’s words: “After the Iraqi Army and Police take hold and the security forces are ready, we want a schedule for the leaving of the American forces.”

“I will tell the Americans this,” I said. Ali seemed satisfied as he went off with another American unit. We loaded back into the Stryker and headed to other interesting meetings on other interesting matters, all dealing with the grinding gears of winning or losing this war, and with catching and killing al Qaeda.

As Treebeard, of Fangorn Forest in Middle Earth, said: "Don't be hasty, that is my motto."

We, as a nation, must follow that philosophy if we are to ultimately defeat the blight of terrorism that threatens our world. After all, it took five years after the Treaty of Paris was signed with Britain in 1782 before the Constitution of the United States was written -- and that was motivated by the failed attempt to govern the country under the Articles of Confederation (which were signed in November of 1777, a full 10 years before our Constitution was signed).

We must give the Iraqis no less an opportunity.

Secret trials?

Judge Richard Posner has taken a controversial position advocating secret trials for terrorists.

A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution. Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had "over-invested" in them.

I disagree with his solution, but I completely agree that the threat to the U.S. from terrorism is as dire as he says. I just wish others in this country would wake up to the reality we face.

UPDATE to 'Bless the beasts and the children'

UPDATE: Michael Yon has an update to this tragic story. He also comments upon the virtual silence about this story at mainstream media outlets -- despite reporters being less than 4 miles away from the village that Al Qaeda eradicated.

Today, late afternoon on 3 July in Baqubah, Colonel Hiduit from 2nd Brigade 5th Iraqi Army was able to provide some additional details about the murders, as the ongoing investigation begins to yield more facts. The name of the village was not on any maps I examined while preparing the dispatch, but Colonel Hiduit said the name is al Hamira. Coordinates to the area of the gravesites are MC 679 381.

In my dispatch, I reported that six people were killed, but mentioned that Iraqi soldiers were still digging out bodies when I left. A few hours ago, Colonel Hiduit put the number at 10-14, and said the search for bodies had ended. I made video of the graves, bodies and of interviews with Iraqi and American soldiers while we still were at the scene and have been working to make material from this available on this website.

As the investigation unfolds more pertinent details, I’ll continue to update the story. But the biggest question rippling across the internet–“Why hasn’t the mainstream media picked this up?” –is something only representatives of mainstream media can answer.

Maybe we should call them, too . . .

Bless the beasts and the children

Michael Yon, along with elements of Charley Co., 1-12 CAV and the 5th IA, made a horrifying discovery in a village on the outskirts of Baqubah.

I told the Iraqi commander, Captain Baker, that it was important that Americans see this; he took me around the graves and showed more than I wanted to see. He said the people had been murdered by al Qaeda. I made video of him speaking, and of the horrible scene. The heat and stench were crushingly oppressive and broken only by the sounds of shovels as Iraqi soldiers kept digging.

This is the enemy we fight. Do we really want to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan so that these inhuman monsters can have their way with innocent men, women, and children?

Go read the whole dispatch.

And then call your congressional representatives.

Who is funding CAIR?

Good question.

Pollyanna-ism

Cox and Forkum have nailed it.

More evidence of the uselessness of the U.N.:

The UN knew about the armed terrorists in their own UNRWA-run refugee camp.

The UN once again shows itself to be useless when it comes to fighting international terrorism. They have sovereignty in few places around the world and outside of those places have no ability to act independently. UNRWA camps, however, fall completely under their jurisdiction. If foreign terrorists establish themselves with heavy weapons inside the camps, why didn’t the UN inform member nations of the danger?

Go read the whole thing, including the citations.

OBL: U.S. is weak

Was Osama Right?
Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won't change their view.

BY BERNARD LEWIS
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?"

A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals--notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.

---

These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.

Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled--or misruled--half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.

One might have expected that the recently established Organization of the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a month of negotiation and manipulation, the organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the U.S.

The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders. An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world--some grants of money, and growing numbers of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called Osama bin Laden.

To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies.

Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy.

We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.

---

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.

Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

reference link

Stop the war

Mohammed at Iraq the Model supports ending the war by eliminating the murderous terrorists who are perpetuating it.

What did the last wave of terror attacks and the many crimes committed against our people all this time reveal?

If we look at how the media handles the situation we'll find something like this almost everywhere;

Dozens killed, scores wounded in attacks suggest failure of security measures…

It's as if the speaker here wants to only emphasize the defect in security measures in a way that honestly angers and disgusts me.
When shall they realize, if ever, that we are dealing with brutal crimes against humanity, a genocide against the people of Iraq? Why don't people talk about the cruelty of the crimes and expose the obvious goals of the terrorists behind the crimes?

Isn't it everyone's duty to expose the criminals, describe their sick ways and purposes and alert the world about the danger?

Where are the media when terrorists use chlorine poisonous gas, acids, and ball bearings to kill and hurt more and more civilians in utter disregard to all written and unwritten laws, ethics and values?
I understand it's the duty of the media to practice scrutiny over the work of governments but isn't it equally their duty to expose criminals and their evil deeds?

It's frustrating to see the media turn a blind eye to the nature of the crimes and open fire on an honest endeavor to restore peace to a bleeding nation. I'm sure the terrorists are pleased by the coverage. Why not, when their crimes are being portrayed as successful breakthroughs against the efforts of Iraq and America it's likely motivating them to keep up the killing.

Would it be "hate speech" to expose the terrorists for what they are?
I think our hate for their crimes must not be hidden; there is no shame in hating those blood-thirsty monsters.
Even more appalling I see and hear some people who think the solution is to end the war from our end and I can't find an argument more naïve than this—I've seen enough wars in my life that I can't remember a day when there was peace and I hate wars more than they can imagine. But we didn't start his war; it's the terrorists who started this war against life.

Instead of telling us to stop fighting back, I'd like to see some people stand up and protest the crimes of the terrorists and tell them to stop the killing and destruction…turn the stop-the-war campaign against the terrorists, is that too much to ask for?
Tell the criminals to stop killing us and stop attacking the people who are risking their lives fighting for liberty and equality.
We're not asking the media and the stop-the-war crowd to carry arms and shoot the terrorists; we just want them to stop shooting at us.

The Dishonorable Harry Reid should read this . . .

WMD discovered in Iraq!

Unfortunately, it was discovered by terrorists, and is now being used by them against innocents.

Three suicide bombers driving trucks rigged with tanks of toxic chlorine gas struck targets in heavily Sunni Anbar province Friday, including the office of a Sunni tribal leader opposed to Al Qaeda.

The attacks killed at least two people and sickened 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops, the U.S. military said Saturday.

That's right, chlorine gas is considered a weapon of mass destruction.

And the bad guys are now using it.

Here's more on this from Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail. He cites attacks in January and February, as well.

Hezbollah's legacy

Michael Totten is back in Lebanon and reporting from the southern, Hezbollah-controlled, part of the country. He talks to one of his Lebanese guides who talks about the struggle against terrorism in Lebanon.

"We have been screaming about this conflict for 30 years now," Henry said as he dealt himself a hand of Solitaire from a deck of cards in his pocket. "But no one ever listened to us. Not until September 11. Now you know how we feel all the time. You have to keep up the pressure. You can never let go, not for one day, one hour, not for one second. The minute you let go, Michael, they will fight back and get stronger. This is the problem with your foreign policy."

"Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world," Said said. "We are on the front lines. Why doesn't the West understand this? America can withdraw from Iraq, you can go back to Oregon, but we are stuck here. We have to stay and live with what happens."

Something about terrorism -- and our struggle against Islamist fascism -- we Americans have yet to fully understand . . . or take to heart.

Recommended.

The Iran connection

Eli Lake, on the New York Sun website, reports that captured documents irrefutably link Iran to both Shiite and Sunni terrorists in Iraq.

Iran is supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in the Iraqi civil war, according to secret Iranian documents captured by Americans in Iraq.

The news that American forces had captured Iranians in Iraq was widely reported last month, but less well known is that the Iranians were carrying documents that offered Americans insight into Iranian activities in Iraq.

An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force — the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads — is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.

Another American official who has seen the summaries of the reporting affiliated with the arrests said it comprised a "smoking gun." "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," the official said.

One of the documents captured in the raids, according to two American officials and one Iraqi official, is an assessment of the Iraq civil war and new strategy from the Quds Force. According to the Iraqi source, that assessment is the equivalent of "Iran's Iraq Study Group," a reference to the bipartisan American commission that released war strategy recommendations after the November 7 elections. The document concludes, according to these sources, that Iraq's Sunni neighbors will step up their efforts to aid insurgent groups and that it is imperative for Iran to redouble efforts to retain influence with them, as well as with Shiite militias.

I also recommend you read Michael Ledeen's commentary on this situation. He urges that we finally acknowledge and act on the information that Iran has been stirring the pot in Iraq for years.

In passing, it follows from this that the entire debate over more or less troops in Iraq, surge or no surge, Baghdad or Anbar Province, all of it begs the central question. As long as Iran and their appendage in Damascus have a free shot at us, all these stratagems are doomed.

As it happens, this is a particularly good moment to go after the mullahs, because they are deeply engaged in a war of all against all within Iran. I wrote in NRO two weeks ago that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been carted off to the hospital–a major event, of which the Intelligence Community was totally unaware–and his prognosis is very poor. That information has now trickled out, and I found it today in the Italian press and on an Iranian web site. The mullahs are maneuvering for position, and Ahmadi-Nezhad’s ever more frantic rhetoric bespeaks the intensity of the power struggle, which includes former president Rafsanjani, Khamenei’s son, and Ahmadi-Nezhad’s favorite nut ayatollah. We should propose another option to the Iranian people: freedom.

Freedom is what most Iranians want, and, unlike their neighbors in Iraq, they have considerable experience with self-government. The Iranian Constitution of 1906 is remarkably modern, and Iranian intellectuals have in fact been debating the best form of government for their country for many years. Iranian workers are in open revolt against the regime, along with such minority groups as the Kurds, the Balouchis, the Azeris, and the Ahwazi Arabs. In other words, most of the Iranian people. It is long past time for us to speak clearly to them and support their cause.

We've known that we need to do something about Iran for years. Perhaps we should show some resolve and follow through on our national pledge to treat supporters of terrorism as our enemies.

The enemy we fight

Those who viciously murder people for daring to educate girls provide us another reason to fight This murderous brand of Islamic fascism.

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.

New war strategy

Callimachus posts these interesting ideas about how to eliminate terrorism.

His ideas are intriguing. Though he likens the strategy to the Cold War, it seems a lot more like isolationism to me. However, his ideas are still valid.

Terrorist perspective

This story provides interesting insight into the roots and motivation behind terrorism. From an ex-terrorist. Here is an excerpt:

But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"

He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."

Highly recommended.

Jihadists to America: 'Vote Democrat'

WorldNetDaily interviewed some terrorists about the U.S. elections, and this is what they said:

The terrorists told WorldNetDaily an electoral win for the Democrats would prove to them Americans are "tired."

They rejected statements from some prominent Democrats in the U.S. that a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency, explaining an evacuation would prove resistance works and would compel jihadists to continue fighting until America is destroyed.

They said a withdrawal would also embolden their own terror groups to enhance "resistance" against Israel.

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.

Politically savvy jihadists

Ed Lasky, over at The American Thinker has a provocative note about the jihadists strategy to influence our elections next month.

It's in the extended entry.

From Tom Friedman

Jihadists admit they are killing for the the camera and for the Democrats. A new twist for the “Party of Death”. From behind the Times Select wall:

But while there may be no single hand coordinating the upsurge in violence in Iraq, enough people seem to be deliberately stoking the fires there before our election that the parallel with Tet is not inappropriate. The jihadists want to sow so much havoc that Bush supporters will be defeated in the midterms and the president will face a revolt from his own party, as well as from Democrats, if he does not begin a pullout from Iraq.

The jihadists follow our politics much more closely than people realize. A friend at the Pentagon just sent me a post by the “Global Islamic Media Front” carried by the jihadist Web site Ana al-Muslim on Aug. 11. It begins: “The people of jihad need to carry out a media war that is parallel to the military war and exert all possible efforts to wage it successfully. This is because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations to make them either support or reject an issue.”

It then explains that for jihadist videos of attacks on Americans to have the biggest impact, “Some persons will be needed who are proficient in the use of computer graphics including Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, or other programs that the people of jihad will need to design … video clips about the operations.”

Finally, the Web site suggests that jihadists flood e-mail and video of their operations to “chat rooms,” “television channels,” and to “famous U.S. authors who have public e-mail addresses … such as Friedman, Chomsky, Fukuyama, Huntington and others.” This is the first time I’ve ever been on the same mailing list with Noam Chomsky.

It would be depressing to see the jihadists influence our politics with a Tet-like media/war frenzy.

Ed Lasky   10 18 06

Hezbollah Didn't Win
Arab writers are beginning to lift the veil on what really happened in Lebanon.

BY AMIR TAHERI
Friday, August 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The way much of the Western media tells the story, Hezbollah won a great victory against Israel and the U.S., healed the Sunni-Shiite rift, and boosted the Iranian mullahs' claim to leadership of the Muslim world. Portraits of Hassan Nasrallah, the junior mullah who leads the Lebanese branch of this pan-Shiite movement, have adorned magazine covers in the West, hammering in the message that this child of the Khomeinist revolution is the new hero of the mythical "Arab Street."

Probably because he watches a lot of CNN, Iran's "Supreme Guide," Ali Khamenei, also believes in "a divine victory." Last week he asked 205 members of his Islamic Majlis to send Mr. Nasrallah a message, congratulating him for his "wise and far-sighted leadership of the Ummah that produced the great victory in Lebanon."

By controlling the flow of information from Lebanon throughout the conflict, and help from all those who disagree with U.S. policies for different reasons, Hezbollah may have won the information war in the West. In Lebanon, the Middle East and the broader Muslim space, however, the picture is rather different.

---

Let us start with Lebanon.

Immediately after the U.N.-ordained ceasefire started, Hezbollah organized a series of firework shows, accompanied by the distribution of fruits and sweets, to celebrate its victory. Most Lebanese, however, finding the exercise indecent, stayed away. The largest "victory march" in south Beirut, Hezbollah's stronghold, attracted just a few hundred people.

Initially Hezbollah had hesitated between declaring victory and going into mourning for its "martyrs." The latter course would have been more in harmony with Shiite traditions centered on the cult of Imam Hussain's martyrdom in 680 A.D. Some members of Hezbollah wished to play the martyrdom card so that they could accuse Israel, and through it the U.S., of war crimes. They knew that it was easier for Shiites, brought up in a culture of eternal victimhood, to cry over an imagined calamity than laugh in the joy of a claimed victory.

Politically, however, Hezbollah had to declare victory for a simple reason: It had to pretend that the death and desolation it had provoked had been worth it. A claim of victory was Hezbollah's shield against criticism of a strategy that had led Lebanon into war without the knowledge of its government and people. Mr. Nasrallah alluded to this in television appearances, calling on those who criticized him for having triggered the war to shut up because "a great strategic victory" had been won.

The tactic worked for a day or two. However, it did not silence the critics, who have become louder in recent days. The leaders of the March 14 movement, which has a majority in the Lebanese Parliament and government, have demanded an investigation into the circumstances that led to the war, a roundabout way of accusing Hezbollah of having provoked the tragedy. Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has made it clear that he would not allow Hezbollah to continue as a state within the state. Even Michel Aoun, a maverick Christian leader and tactical ally of Hezbollah, has called for the Shiite militia to disband.

Mr. Nasrallah followed his claim of victory with what is known as the "Green Flood"(Al-sayl al-akhdhar). This refers to the massive amounts of crisp U.S. dollar notes that Hezbollah is distributing among Shiites in Beirut and the south. The dollars from Iran are ferried to Beirut via Syria and distributed through networks of militants. Anyone who can prove that his home was damaged in the war receives $12,000, a tidy sum in wartorn Lebanon.

---

The Green Flood has been unleashed to silence criticism of Mr. Nasrallah and his masters in Tehran. But the trick does not seem to be working. "If Hezbollah won a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one," says Walid Abi-Mershed, a leading Lebanese columnist. "They made Lebanon pay too high a price--for which they must be held accountable."

Hezbollah is also criticized from within the Lebanese Shiite community, which accounts for some 40% of the population. Sayyed Ali al-Amin, the grand old man of Lebanese Shiism, has broken years of silence to criticize Hezbollah for provoking the war, and called for its disarmament. In an interview granted to the Beirut An-Nahar, he rejected the claim that Hezbollah represented the whole of the Shiite community. "I don't believe Hezbollah asked the Shiite community what they thought about [starting the] war," Mr. al-Amin said. "The fact that the masses [of Shiites] fled from the south is proof that they rejected the war. The Shiite community never gave anyone the right to wage war in its name."

There were even sharper attacks. Mona Fayed, a prominent Shiite academic in Beirut, wrote an article also published by An-Nahar last week. She asks: Who is a Shiite in Lebanon today? She provides a sarcastic answer: A Shiite is he who takes his instructions from Iran, terrorizes fellow believers into silence, and leads the nation into catastrophe without consulting anyone. Another academic, Zubair Abboud, writing in Elaph, a popular Arabic-language online newspaper, attacks Hezbollah as "one of the worst things to happen to Arabs in a long time." He accuses Mr. Nasrallah of risking Lebanon's existence in the service of Iran's regional ambitions.

Before he provoked the war, Mr. Nasrallah faced growing criticism not only from the Shiite community, but also from within Hezbollah. Some in the political wing expressed dissatisfaction with his overreliance on the movement's military and security apparatus. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they described Mr. Nasrallah's style as "Stalinist" and pointed to the fact that the party's leadership council (shura) has not held a full session in five years. Mr. Nasrallah took all the major decisions after clearing them with his Iranian and Syrian contacts, and made sure that, on official visits to Tehran, he alone would meet Iran's "Supreme Guide," Ali Khamenei.

Mr. Nasrallah justified his style by claiming that involving too many people in decision-making could allow "the Zionist enemy" to infiltrate the movement. Once he had received the Iranian green light to provoke the war, Mr. Nasrallah acted without informing even the two Hezbollah ministers in the Siniora cabinet or the 12 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese Parliament.

Mr. Nasrallah was also criticized for his acknowledgement of Ali Khamenei as Marjaa al-Taqlid (Source of Emulation), the highest theological authority in Shiism. Highlighting his bay'aah (allegiance), Mr. Nasrallah kisses the man's hand each time they meet. Many Lebanese Shiites resent this because Mr. Khamenei, a powerful politician but a lightweight in theological terms, is not recognized as Marjaa al-Taqlid in Iran itself. The overwhelming majority of Lebanese Shiites regard Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in Iraq, or Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussein Fadhlallah, in Beirut, as their "Source of Emulation."

Some Lebanese Shiites also question Mr. Nasrallah's strategy of opposing Prime Minister Siniora's "Project for Peace," and instead advancing an Iranian-backed "Project of Defiance." The coalition led by Mr. Siniora wants to build Lebanon into a haven of peace in the heart of a turbulent region. His critics dismiss this as a plan "to create a larger Monaco." Mr. Nasrallah's "Project of Defiance," however, is aimed at turning Lebanon into the frontline of Iranian defenses in a war of civilizations between Islam (led by Tehran) and the "infidel," under American leadership. "The choice is between the beach and the bunker," says Lebanese scholar Nadim Shehadeh. There is evidence that a majority of Lebanese Shiites would prefer the beach.

---

There was a time when Shiites represented an underclass of dirt-poor peasants in the south and lumpen elements in Beirut. Over the past 30 years, however, that picture has changed. Money sent from Shiite immigrants in West Africa (where they dominate the diamond trade), and in the U.S. (especially Michigan), has helped create a prosperous middle class of Shiites more interested in the good life than martyrdom à la Imam Hussain. This new Shiite bourgeoisie dreams of a place in the mainstream of Lebanese politics and hopes to use the community's demographic advantage as a springboard for national leadership. Hezbollah, unless it ceases to be an instrument of Iranian policies, cannot realize that dream.

The list of names of those who never endorsed Hezbollah, or who broke with it after its Iranian connections became too apparent, reads like a Who's Who of Lebanese Shiism. It includes, apart from the al-Amins, families such as the al-As'ad, the Osseiran, the al-Khalil, the Hamadah, the Murtadha, the Sharafeddin, the Fadhlallah, the Mussawis, the Hussainis, the Shamsuddin and the Ata'allahs.

Far from representing the Lebanese national consensus, Hezbollah is a sectarian group backed by a militia that is trained, armed and controlled by Iran. In the words of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, "Hezbollah is 'Iran in Lebanon.' " In the 2004 municipal elections, Hezbollah won some 40% of the votes in the Shiite areas, the rest going to its rival Amal (Hope) movement and independent candidates. In last year's general election, Hezbollah won only 12 of the 27 seats allocated to Shiites in the 128-seat National Assembly--despite making alliances with Christian and Druze parties and spending vast sums of Iranian money to buy votes.

Hezbollah's position is no more secure in the broader Arab world, where it is seen as an Iranian tool rather than as the vanguard of a new Nahdha (Awakening), as the Western media claim. To be sure, it is still powerful because it has guns, money and support from Iran, Syria and Hate America International Inc. But the list of prominent Arab writers, both Shiite and Sunni, who have exposed Hezbollah for what it is--a Khomeinist Trojan horse--would be too long for a single article. They are beginning to lift the veil and reveal what really happened in Lebanon.

Having lost more than 500 of its fighters, and with almost all of its medium-range missiles destroyed, Hezbollah may find it hard to sustain its claim of victory. "Hezbollah won the propaganda war because many in the West wanted it to win as a means of settling score with the United States," says Egyptian columnist Ali al-Ibrahim. "But the Arabs have become wise enough to know TV victory from real victory."

Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe, 2002).

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Nuclear terrorism

Thomas Sowell makes some somber comments on what will happen when terorists get their hands on nukes. And he talks about the futility of our "land for peace" approaches to placating the implacable terrorists.

Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

This is not just another in the long history of military threats. The Soviet Union, despite its massive nuclear arsenal, could be deterred by our own nuclear arsenal. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred.

Fanatics filled with hate cannot be either deterred or bought off, whether Hezbollah, Hamas or the government of Iran.

The endlessly futile efforts to bring peace to the Middle East with concessions fundamentally misconceive what forces are at work.

Hate and humiliation are key forces that cannot be bought off by "trading land for peace," by a "Palestinian homeland" or by other such concessions that might have worked in other times and places.

Humiliation and hate go together. Why humiliation? Because a once-proud, dynamic culture in the forefront of world civilizations, and still carrying a message of their own superiority to "infidels" today, is painfully visible to the whole world as a poverty-stricken and backward region, lagging far behind in virtually every field of human endeavor.

Go read the whole thing.

Israel vs. Hezbollah from a financial perspective

Jerry Bowyer has an interesting chart and brief analysis commenting on a correlation between the Dow Jones Arabia Titans 50 Index and the Israeli-Hezbollah war. [Emphasis added.]

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Israeli stock exchange rallied and fell in step with Israel’s fortunes in the war. But as the above chart shows, the Arab Titans index did the same, rising and falling in step with Israel’s success. Why? Because Israel’s counter-attacks were not the destabilizing factor in the region. Hezbollah’s failed-state warlordism was.

Israel’s attack was part of the solution. That’s because the conflict isn’t between Arab and Jew; it’s between civilization and chaos. The complex web of information that constitutes Saudi bankers, Kuwaiti phone execs, and their shareholders seems to have been voting that civilization is either winning, or that it must win.

Very interesting . . .

'Islamic fascism' is an accurate term

Janet Daly has a pertinent article up at The Telegraph wherein she maintains that 'fascistic' is the right word for Islamic fundamentalism.

George W. Bush was pilloried for referring to "Islamic fascists" by, among others, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu. Using that kind of language "on the ranch in Texas" did not help, he said, to make society "a good, neighbourly place".

I don't know what the ranch in Texas has to do with anything, but Dr Sentamu seems not to understand the difference between describing Islamic fundamentalists as fascistic, and saying that all Muslims are fascists.

She goes a lot further, though, in discussing the danger in appeasement to terrorism by the print and broadcast media, politicians, and nations. And she points out that we need to take this threat very seriously.

This is a critical moment. What we must call the "free world" will either decide that it must unite unequivocally against a force so dark that it is almost incomprehensible to democratic peoples, or else succumb to a daydream of denial that is nothing more than appeasement.

I cannot help but agree.

Recommended.

Tuesday-Thursday

Michael Barone has a provocative editorial up at Townhall where he spends some time showing the reader how the political Left in this country is missing the boat about the terrorist threat we face.

What we are looking at here is cognitive dissonance. The mindset of the Left blogosphere is that there's no real terrorist threat out there. We wouldn't have any serious problem if we'd just do something different -- raise the minimum wage or reduce the number without health insurance (the first issue Lamont mentioned on election night), withdraw from Iraq or (as some Left bloggers suggest) sell out Israel.

As for Lamont, on victory night he mentioned his policy to handle the nuclear threat posed by Iran: We should "bring in allies" and "use carrots as well as sticks." He evidently failed to notice that we deputized Britain, France and Germany to negotiate with Iran for three years and that Iran has been offered plenty of carrots and has not been threatened with many sticks. Once again, a disconnect with reality.

At the risk of sounding paranoid, I am afraid that many more Americans than those whom Mr. Barone described are equally clueless about it.

And that is a problem.

Recomended reading.

We have to continue the offensive

Saul Singer has an excellent analysis of the current state of our war against terrorists, and what we need to do to win it.

The thwarted plot to blow up multiple airliners with liquid explosives, and the subsequent British ban on all carry-on luggage except for wallets and passports carried in clear plastic bags, shows that this war cannot be won on defensive terms.

Perhaps it is possible to hermetically seal an aircraft cabin from bombers willing to die with their victims; it is not possible to seal off entire democratic countries, bursting with unguarded targets. The only way to win is to suck the air out of jihad by driving the regimes that support it out of power or out of the terror business.

Isolated jihadis can kill but they have no hope of winning. The whole point of jihad is to gain power, so the jihad will lose steam if the states that back it lose power. The US, UK, France and Germany, perhaps individually and certainly collectively, have the power to force the key rogue regime - Iran - to end its race for the bomb and support for international aggression.

He shows the cyclical nature of global politics through a brief examination of our last 180 years of history, or so. Then he shows that we have lost our way in this current war.

Now we are in World War IV, as Norman Podhoretz has pointed out, between what Tony Blair aptly calls Reactionary Islam and the rest of us. The first striking thing about this war is that we've managed to fall asleep at a relatively late stage of it.

Highly recommended.

[Via Betsy Newmark.]

Staging photo-ops

Betsy Newmark provides a good compilation of links concerning the staging of photographs and video in Lebanon. It's pretty damning stuff.

Recommended.

The bottom line

In all of the discussion/analysis/finger-pointing concerning the foiled terrorist plot yesterday, and since, Ed Morrissey puts it into proper perspective.

Do you want to know what the big story of the day really was? We beat the terrorists -- again -- and saved lives. Perhaps we could have spent the day reflecting on that and the need for continuing vigilance. The politics could have, and should have, waited for another day.

Thanks for bringing it back into focus, Cap'n.

Iranian military link

Reuters reports that Iranian soldiers are fighting for Hezbollah.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel's Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.

It said the Iranians were identified by documents found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when. Neither the Israeli military nor Hizbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report.

Somehow, I'm not the least bit surprised.

Hezbollahwood

CNN's Anderson Cooper, a veteran war journalist with extensive experience in the Middle East, has some interesting observations about how Hezbollah is staging things for the press. He draws from his recent firsthand experience in Lebanon.

Please check out the video at the link -- especially the last 30 seconds where Cooper is discussing Hezbollah's deceptive PR efforts.

Terror plot

Allahpundit at Hot Air has put together a good compilation of news and information regarding the terror plot to blow up airplanes flying between the UK and the US. He is updating this post continuously, so it is current info.

Recommended. Highly.

Terrorism and the Media

Rachel Neuwirth has a provocative op-ed up about how the Media enables terrorism. Here's how she begins:

A major segment of the global media is behaving in a manner that makes terrorism and mass killings more likely rather than less likely. They enable and encourage terrorist slaughter of innocents by supplying providing a propaganda bonanza for the terrorist cause. Without the gain, there would be less incentive for the horrific behavior.

This is true now with Israeli defense measures against Hezbolla terrorism, and has been true for many years, especially during the long Arab-Israeli conflict. Not enough attention has been paid to media manipulation. It is long overdue that this be exposed and the media be confronted and held accountable.

Read the rest.

Hizbollah -- not your usual terrorist group

Bill Roggio, over at Counterterrorism Blog, has a post up about the sophistication of Hezbollah's army in Lebanon.

We began discussing Hezbollah's military capabilities on July 21, after it became clear during the ambush of the Golani Brigade forced the unit to retreat near Maroun al-Ras that Hezbollah was not your average militia. On that date we noted "Hezbollah also possesses mortars, RPGs, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, anti-tank missiles and possibly surface to air missiles.... Hezbollah is using infantry tactics and fighting at the squad and platoon level." The IDF's slow advance (over two days) into Bint Jubayl and the ambush on a tank unit were clear indications of Hezbollah's abilities to stand up to the IDF as well as the IDF's cautious nature on the battlefield. Yesterday we confirmed Hezbollah is fighting at the company level, has specialized units (mortars, antitank, logistics, etc.) in its combat units and is using sophisticated communications equipment, body armor and other gear.

It's well worth reading . . .

Jihad

Michael Yon has an excellent dispatch discussing jihad -- the lust for self-destruction and someone to blame.

The only common thread to all the violence described in this dispatch is militant Islam. Not Islam. Militant Islam. Militant Muslims around the globe are waging war against anything different, be it the Buddhists’ carvings destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Hindus burned alive on trains in India, or Sunni against Shia in Iraq. This is not about Islam; this is not rooted in even a most fundamentalist reading of the Quran.

A thought-provoking read.

The UN seeks to legitimize terrorism?

Alan M. Dershowitz, over at the Chicago Tribune, has an op-ed describing how the UN legitimizes terrorists. Here's how he begins:

If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties. In his statement, Annan never condemns, or even mentions, terrorism, which is a root cause and precipitator of the conflict.

And there is a lot more. There exists a U.N. track record -- supporting Mr. Dershowitz's contention -- that is decades long. Highly recommended.

CNN: Soft on terrorism?

Mary Katherine Ham has a thought-provoking post up at the Townhall Blog about CNN's apparent softness about Hezbollah and terrorism.

Look, I do youth ministry with a group called Young Life. It's a great Christian group that brings spirit[u]al guidance, mature friendship, and quite often, Cheetos and pizza and trips to Six Flags, to high-school kids all over the nation.

Great organization, right? Well, imagine if a good segment of us Young Life leaders was more than pleased to strap plastic explosives around our waists in the name of Jesus and kill whichever high-school kids didn't accept Christ into their lives. What if our stated mission were to support the Christian kids with pizza and Cheetos and to detonate anyone who believed differently than us? What if we encouraged other Christian high-school kids to do the same to their friends who weren't Christians?

Kinda puts things in proper perspective, doesn't she? The only problem I see with her arguments is that I do NOT see terrorist leaders strapping the explosives on themselves -- they strap them on others.

Go read the rest.

The difference

For those who are unclear about the difference between Israeli soldiers and Hizbollah terrorists, this illustration should help clarify the concept.

Hat tip to My Pet Jawa.

Civilians or combatants?

Alan Dershowitz, over at the L.A. Times, does a good job of pointing out that the Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon are being aided and abetted by 'civilians',. Therefore, he argues, we should be careful of equating all civilians with innocents.

There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.

He's not trying to justify civilian casualties here, he's just trying to point out that there is no clear line delineating innocent civilians from civilians who are actively aiding the terrorists. Recommended.

Hizbollah's ball bearings

Michael Kraft comments on a report about Hizbollah deliberately adding ball bearings to their rockets' payloads in order to maximize civilian casualties.

In a rather unusual story, the Reuters new agency reported that the Human Rights Watch criticized Hezbollah’s practice of packing ball bearings into the rockets it fires at Israel as a violation of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes.

The Reuters report said that some of the Kutyusha rockets fired into Haifa Sunday and Monday contained hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military targets but “cause great harm to civilians and civilian property. The ball bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm.�

This is just another indication that Hizbollah is just trying to indiscriminately kill, maim, and destroy.

Not a pleasant prospect

Michael Ledeen has an op-ed up at NRO in which he is connecting the dots between Syria, Iran, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine. The resultant picture is not pretty.

I don’t think it is worth our time and energy to try to answer the “why now?� except to agree with Allahpundit who remarked that there does seem to be something special about dates numbered “11.� The important thing to keep in mind is that both the Gaza and northern Israel attacks were planned for quite a while, which means that Iran wanted this war, this way. It isn’t just a target of opportunity or a sudden impulse; it’s part of a strategic decision to expand the war.

Mr. Ledeen makes some very serious claims in this column. Claims that we all need to evaluate.

Psychopathy in Palestine

Dr. Sanity has a thoughtful and enlightening post about how psychopathic characteristics are being inculcated in Palestinian children. And elsewhere in the Middle East. Islam seems to be the key.

Islam has become toxic, infusing the entire Middle East with a culture inimical to not just the 50% who are female; but equally to the half who are male and consider themselves "superior". Children are raised in a misogynist family and cultural environment and the young boys are thus encouraged to hatred and violence. This has been going on for decades among the Palestinians in particular; but everywhere the jihad mindset has spread it cancerous message.

This is well worth your time to read. Even if you do not agree with it all, she makes some good points.

How to treat terrorists

Ralph Peters dives right in and speaks truth to political correctness about the treatment of terrorists. And he makes some good points.

We need to clarify the rules of conflict. But integrity and courage have fled Washington. Nobody will state bluntly that we're in a fight for our lives, that war is hell, and that we must do what it takes to win.

Our enemies will remind us of what's necessary, though. When we've been punished horribly enough, we'll come to our senses and do what must be done.

This isn't an argument for a murderous rampage, but its opposite. We must kill our enemies with discrimination. But we do need to kill them. A corpse is a corpse: The media's rage dissipates with the stench. But an imprisoned terrorist is a strategic liability.

Nor should we ever mistreat captured soldiers or insurgents who adhere to standing conventions. On the contrary, we should enforce policies that encourage our enemies to identify themselves according to the laws of war. Ambiguity works to their advantage, never to ours.

Our policy toward terrorists and insurgents in civilian clothing should be straightforward and public: Surrender before firing a shot or taking hostile action toward our troops, and we'll regard you as a legal prisoner. But once you've pulled a trigger, thrown a grenade or detonated a bomb, you will be killed. On the battlefield and on the spot.

Isn't that common sense? It also happens to conform to the traditional conduct of war between civilized nations. Ignorant of history, we've talked ourselves into folly.

Go read the whole thing.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

Gitmo's utility

Daniel Freedman at The New York Sun has a post up about French investigators interviewing prisoners at Guatanamo Bay about terrorist operations in France.

What? Those at Guantanamo might have information necessary to prevent future attacks? Who would have thought.

[Via Captain's Quarters.]

Our fight

Jules Crittenden has an excellent essay wherein he discusses the cluelessness and self-centeredness of many of this country's elites. Like the editorial staff at the New York Times, for example.

Some people just don’t get it. Five years on, some people remain unaware that this is war; that we are facing an enemy that will do anything in its power to destroy us.

The fact that on any given day we are free to fly around the world, drive our cars without restriction and buy as much food as we like in rich variety seems to have confused them.

The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like World War II. They mock the very notion that it is a war, having fun with the name “Global War on Terror.� They put forward the notion that, like almost everything else in our American lives, this thing that has been called a war is a choice. A bad choice.

He does a good job of summing my thoughts on the subject. Much better than I could do.

Highly recommended.

Compromised program

Byron York talks to Thomas Kean, a co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, about the intelligence program that the New York Times deep-sixed when they betrayed America by revealing its details.

Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.�

Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean called Times executive editor Bill Keller in an attempt to persuade him not to publish — has done terrible damage to the program. “I think it’s over,� Kean says. “Terrorists read the newspapers. Once the program became known, then obviously the terrorists were not going to use these methods any more.�

I guess the NYT no longer considers integrity or patriotism to be important.

Extremism

Author Fouad Ajami has an op-ed up at OpinionJournal about the bigotry of extremism. He is talking about terrorists, but I think his premise easily applies to all extremists.

I've reprinted the article in the extended entry.

The Extremist Is Never Alone
Zarqawi is history, but the bigotry on which he thrived lives on.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Sunday, June 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's tribe in Jordan, the Al-Khalayleh, claimed last November that they had disowned the man who had sown havoc in Iraq. They made that public declaration in the aftermath of his attack on three Amman hotels. That day, Nov. 9, 2005, was dubbed by the Jordanians as their own 9/11. But blood has its claims, and in truth Zarqawi had been, and remained, a man of high standing in Jordan and in other Arab lands. After his death, the regime in Amman may have announced that his corpse would not "stain Jordan's soil," but his clan held a "martyr's wedding" for him, and four members of Jordan's Parliament turned up at that funeral ceremony. Grant Jordan's rulers their due: They know that a Zarqawi grave on Jordanian soil would become a shrine to his cult.

The four parliamentarians were rounded up by Jordanian security forces and hauled off to prison. But the matter of Zarqawi cannot be written off as the "embarrassing" scandal of a prison bully and enforcer given to macabre videotapes and grim beheadings. For in the way he lived and died, Zarqawi illuminated much of the Arab reality from which he hailed. The bigotry of Zarqawi was not his alone. He came to Iraq to war against Shiite heretics (al-rafida) and Americans, and countless Sunni Arabs shared his aversion to the new order in Iraq. He saw a noble war that had deposed a tyrant as an alliance between "heretics" and "crusaders." America had dared give liberty to the Shiite majority of Iraq, as well as to the Kurdish people, and this perpetrator of terror shared the wider judgment of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, and of Egypt, that the Shiites were "collaborators" in an American project bent on securing dominion over the Arabs. Modern Iraq had been an Anglo-Sunni dominion when it was cobbled together in the 1920s. The Shiites had been the rebels then, and paid dearly for their purity: British hegemony shattered their autonomy and delivered power to the Sunni political class of the towns. Now the Sunni Arabs feared that this new order would be an American-Shiite edifice.

The extremist is never alone; the terrorist on the fringe of political life always works with the winks and nods of the society that gives him cover. Forgive the likes of Zarqawi their belief that the world around them shares their aversion to the Shiites. From the commanding heights of the Arab states around Iraq, to the storefront mosques of Finsbury Park and Toronto, the claim of the Shiite Arabs to a measure of their world's bounty and power has never been recognized. It was in that vein that King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shia crescent" that stretches from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, while jihadists from his own country were bringing calamity to Iraq. And it was of a piece with this moral obtuseness that the Egyptian ruler recently said that the loyalty of the Shiite Arabs was to Iran. The regimes in Amman and Cairo were bidding for American patronage, holding out the promise that they would--and that only they could--lead the foreign power through the labyrinth of Araby.

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Here is a glimpse of these self-appointed guides in America's awkward journey. It comes from Paul Bremer's chronicle of his stewardship of Iraq. It is June 4, 2003, at an American base in Qatar, and President Bush wants to know from his man on the scene if this American project in Iraq will work. "Will they be able to make a free country?" the president asked. "Some of the Sunni leaders in the region doubt it. They say 'All the Shia are liars.' What's your impression?" A whole world of bigotry, a culture that had never found its way out of sectarianism, was being passed onto the Pax Americana, with the distant foreign power being asked to partake of the phobias of the Arab ruling stratum.

The Jordanians are now eager to claim that they were helpful in the hunt for Zarqawi, that their intelligence had found its way to the Sunni Arab tribes of western and central Iraq. In their recent statements, though, the Jordanians tell us much about the ways of our allies: The collaboration with U.S. intelligence, they add, had begun in earnest in the aftermath of the hotel bombings of last November. But Jordanian jihadists had been at work in Iraq long before they struck Amman. For the rulers in the saddle in Arab lands, jihadism has been a commodity for export. There has been a covert and subtle understanding with the perpetrators of terror: The order would avert its gaze from them so long as they took their furies beyond their homelands.

Jordan is not unique. The Saudi realm awakened to the terror only when its perpetrators struck within the peninsula itself. This happened in the spring of 2003. All that had transpired before was sanctioned and perhaps admired. Pamphleteers and preachers had praised the zeal of the jihadists, took their brutal deeds as evidence of youth's purity and faith. In the same vein, the Egyptian regime, merciless in the way it deals with challenges to its power at home, has never owned up to the darkness of Egyptian terrorists operating the world over. No one in Egypt has accepted responsibility for Mohammed Atta; nothing has been said in official life about the culture that shaped Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took out on other lands the wrath bred in him by the violent struggle between the Egyptian Islamists and the military autocracy.

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It is fitting that the early intelligence has identified Zarqawi's successor as an Egyptian, one Abu Ayyub al-Masri (who goes by another nom de guerre, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer). From Jordan to Egypt: We are still in the darkness of regimes in the orbit of American power. With the torture and murder of two young American soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who had been kidnapped at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, Zarqawi's successor has sent a grim, cruel reminder that the end of this terrible darkness in the Arab world is not yet at hand.

Yet the identity of this successor will be of little consequence: He and his ilk emerge out of a broader context that ought to be familiar to us. Doubtless, they are misfits in their homelands who have come to Iraq to kill and be killed because they were not given a dream of normalcy, nor modern skills, nor a place in the world. Zarqawi epitomized the jihadists: Life in Jordan offered him little. He had been unable to find work that would sustain him. He hit his stride and found his calling in the "fields of battle" in Afghanistan and Iraq. There would come his way fame and money; the "charities" would find their way to him. Devotees would give him--a one-time prison thug--the honorific title of sheikh, acclaim him for picking up the Sunni standard against crusaders and apostates. His was no solitary campaign. He was a witness to his own glory: He no doubt watched his own videotapes on the satellite TV channels of the Arab world.

By accounts available, these jihadists are junkies of the Web and the Arabic press: They can read between the lines, and know of the unease in their world at the emergence from serfdom of the Shiites. They partake of the antimodernism and conspiracy theories on the loose in Arab lands. They are virulently anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism is a familiar weed on contemporary Arab soil. They may be "embarrassing," those jihadists, in their talk of "crusaders" bent on plundering the Arab world, but the respectable Arabic press out of London, and out of Arab capitals, is now filled with anti-Americanism.

No one wishes the distant Great Power well in Arab lands, and the beneficiaries of American largesse are no exception. Zarqawi and al-Masri did not descend from the sky: One was formed by the world of his native Zarqa, east of Amman, the other joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1982, and his odyssey must duplicate that of countless young men who flooded the Islamist movements after Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981. Egypt has been reduced to a terrible standoff between a plundering autocracy and a vengeful Islamist opposition. The regime in Cairo has nothing to offer the young. Embittered Islamists take to the road bereft of mercy, for none has been shown to them on their own soil. A cynical ruler winks at the chaos, and in his silence about his country's breed of radicals, he speaks volumes about the terrible bargain America has struck with his regime. He picks our pockets and sends our way--and the way of the Iraqis--the angry outcasts of his domain. <

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In the aftermath of his surprise trip to Iraq, President Bush has returned to an old theme: He has called on the Arabs, yet again, to come to the aid of Iraq. On the face of it, this is the most natural of requests, for the fire in Iraq, and a failure in Iraq, is sure to spill into neighboring Arab lands. But here we are face-to-face with the ways of the Arab world. No Arab cavalry shall ride to Iraq's rescue; no Arab development funds--in a region wallowing in oil wealth--shall be committed to Iraq. The foreign leaders who have visited Iraq were from Britain, Australia, Poland, South Korea, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ukraine and Spain. No Arab king or president has deemed it fit to turn up in a show of solidarity with Iraq's people. (A prime minister of Jordan came to repair the breach between the two countries, but prime ministers in Jordan come and go; political power is the king's prerogative.) The Arabs who cross into Iraq are jihadists, and "mules" who bring money to keep the insurgency alive. In the main, Arabs are content to pronounce on Iraq's "innate" violence, and on the errors of the American war. No greater sense of responsibility can be expected from the custodians of political power in the Arab lands.

We should be under no illusions about Iraq's Arab neighbors: They are content to see America bleed, and they see this great struggle as a contest between American power and the region's laws of gravity. True cynics, pessimists through and through, they see the American mission in Iraq as one of extravagant optimism and hubris. The mere claim that the Shiite step-children and the Kurdish highlanders can find a way out of darkness galls them. The Arab ruling elites are invested in the insurgents and the jihadists in Iraq. The more these forces of mayhem engage American power, the more time they buy for the entrenched order. There is no "Arab solution" for Iraq, as there was none for Lebanon in its long Syrian captivity. The Iraqis understood the great Arab silence which attended the death of Zarqawi. A clerical leader of Najaf, Sadr al-Din Qabanji, noted the sorrow with which the men of Hamas responded to the hunting down of Zarqawi. Addressing neighboring Arabs, Qabanji asked the question: "Why do you accept the shedding of our blood?"

The borders of Iraq, examined closely, tell of a powerful but overlooked truth. The borders with Arab lands--Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--are borders with harsh deserts. The more natural borders--across population centers, contiguous human habitations--are with Turkey and Iran. In the face of these stark facts of ecology and demography, Arab nationalism and Arab legend, insisting on the "Arabness" of Iraq, declared it the "eastern gate of the Arab world." This willfulness falsified Iraq's life: This was a borderland across Arab-Turkish, and Arab-Persian, divides. And within, there was a Kurdish nation with its own separate memory, its own dream of autonomy and independence. Now this Iraqi order, delivered through American sacrifices, struggles to take hold. The cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was long in coming, fought over, and divided across sect and ethnicity--a Shiite interior minister, balanced by a Sunni minister of defense, a Kurdish foreign minister, two portfolios given to the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr, etc. But this is Iraq today, and better this diversity, and the ways of the bazaar, than the pharaonic regime of Hosni Mubarak and the servile culture of his court.

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A gap has opened between Arab jihadists and the Sunnis of Iraq. As a celebrated Iraqi intellectual, Hassan al-Alawi, put it: The former have their gaze fixed on the green fields of Paradise, while the latter have theirs fixed on the Green Zone. A balance of fear has been arrived at in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shiites, a development that issued out of a bloody struggle, and this has altered Iraqi politics for the better. For the first time in their history, Sunni Arabs have come to accept that their old hegemony has been irretrievably shattered; this new order gives them a claim to their country's bounty that is, also for the first time, not indecent.

President Bush took with him to Baghdad the right message: a reaffirmation of the American commitment mixed with a reminder that Iraq's salvation lies in the hands of its new government. The Arabs nearby will say, as they have, that the American leader traveled into an occupied country, that he did not venture beyond the Green Zone, that the place he visited was more his domain than Nuri al-Maliki's. But President Bush called on an elected government, a rare plant in Arab soil. This new government should be strengthened by the promise of American resolve. But it should also take to heart that it is reckoning-time for Iraq's leaders, that it is their country, and their history, that lies in the balance.

Mr. Ajami, a 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Abuse of confidence

Austin Bay does a good job of outlining why the is guilty of traitorous acts against the USA.

A lot of what passes for reporting and analysis in Washington and New York is merely passing on government and academic gossip. That’s why the leap to leaks is but a nudge and a puddle jump. The government officials and employees participate; some of them are legitimate whistle blowers, but folks, those are rare and when they occur they are Pulitzer material. Most of the game is simply incestuous Beltway conversation and the rapacious media demand for a “headline.�

But some headlines hurt– they damage our government’s Job One: national security. Perhaps the Times’ editors don’t believe we are engaged in a global counter-terror war against Islamo-fascism. We are. At one time there was hole in south Manhattan they could not ignore.

Read the whole thing.

Working for the enemy

Andrew McCarthy, formerly a federal prosecutor and currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, has an op-ed up at NRO that explains how the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times knowingly revealed a classified program for no good reason. Unless you consider undermining our national security a good reason.

It was in view of the TFTP’s [Terrorist Finance Tracking Program -- ed.] palpable value in protecting American lives, its obvious legal propriety, and the plain fact that it was being responsibly conducted that the administration pleaded with the newspapers not to reveal it after government officials despicably leaked it. Exposing the program would tell the public nothing about official misconduct. It would accomplish only the educating of al Qaeda — the nation’s enemy in an ongoing war; an enemy well-known to be feverishly plotting new, massive attacks — about how better to evade our defenses. About how better to kill us.

Appealing to the patriotism of these newspapers proved about as promising as appealing to the humanity of the terrorists they so insouciantly edify — the same monsters who, as we saw again only a few days ago with the torture murder of two American soldiers, continue to define depravity down.

The newspapers, of course, said no.

It disgusts me to see U.S. newspapers aiding and abetting terrorism like this.

Recommended reading.

Symbiotes: Terrorism and the News Media

James Pinkerton has a provocative article up at Newsday describing research results indicating that news coverage of terrorism leads to a win-win situation for the news media and terrorists.

But the problem raised by Frey and Rohner is the same problem that many observers have intuited all along: In portraying violence, especially terror violence, the media are unwittingly - or maybe wittingly - encouraging such violence.

So we are reminded of that old line from the "Pogo" comic strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Go read the whole thing. This guy hit it right on the head.

Web of terror

Michael Ledeen makes a good case for treating disinfecting Iran in the same manner we disinfected Saddam's Iraq.

. . . A week ago Director of National Intelligence Negroponte gave a very interesting interview to the BBC in which he reiterated what everybody knows: ‘(the Iranians) are the principal state sponsor of terrorism in the world.’

So how come we’re not going after them?

Read the rest . . .

Ode to al-Zarqawi

And not in a good way, either.

The world's highest-profile mass killer has finally gotten what he had coming. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi rose (which is to say sunk) to a level of squalid wickedness not even mastered by Osama bin Laden, whose stately visage belied a desire to keep his hands out of the muck of murder. For Zarqawi this was not a problem. He killed among the people. The killing he orchestrated, as much as a devil can orchestrate pandemonium, brought the dilemma of the entire war in Iraq into the flesh. The mere presence of a man like Zarqawi heartened the defeatism of those whose crisis in moral confidence cannot tolerate a situation of misery and injustice touched off by American military action. As for Zarqawi's tactical attitude of nihilism -- played out in the lurid dehumanization of random beheadings and detonations -- it seemed as if the terrible price to be paid for U.S. intervention in Iraq was a living nightmare itself, drawn from the same irrational evil as the statist totalitarianism of the 20th century.

It's worth reading, though.

Jihadignorance

Michelle Malkin has a good op-ed up at Townhall about the West's penchant for ignoring the origins of almost all modern terrorism.

Many clueless North Americans remain shocked, shocked, that jihadis live among them -- despite the open secret of our northern neighbor's reputation as an Islamic terrorist safe haven. A cloud of befuddlement looms. The Toronto Star reports, with jaw-dropping dim-wittedness, that "it is difficult to find a common denominator" among those who would kill us.

Pass me a clue-by-four: It's the jihad, stupid. It's been going on since before the Crusades. And it continues under our noses.

Recommended.

'Lawfare'

David Rivkin and Lee Casey have made the case that Americans are helping the terrorists in Iraq.

It is worth reading.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

'Lawfare' Over Haditha
The administration's domestic opponents play into the enemy's hands.

BY DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY
Wednesday, June 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The unfolding investigation of last November's events in Haditha reveals much more about the Bush administration's critics than it does about the U.S. armed forces. Although the inquiry is ongoing, it appears that 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were deliberately murdered, allegedly by American Marines seeking revenge for a fallen comrade. If true, the episode was a war crime, something that must be--and no doubt will be--severely punished. However, the administration's critics are already cynically leveraging the Haditha killings as a means of undercutting the president, heedless of the effect this may have on American national interests.

Here is an outline of the emerging anti-Bush thesis: Haditha was the fault not of a handful of Marines, but of an administration that has refused to honor international law. As support, critics point to the administration's refusal to grant Geneva Convention rights to al Qaeda or the Taliban, to the use of aggressive interrogation techniques to obtain intelligence from terrorist detainees, and to a determination not to treat these individuals as ordinary criminal defendants. All of this is claimed despite the fact that the most fundamental aspects of administration policy--that the U.S. is at war, that individuals captured in this war can be held without trial as "enemy combatants" or tried by a military commission--have been vindicated so far by the courts.

Nevertheless, the killings at Haditha and a handful of other incidents in which U.S. troops have violated the laws of war (and are in the process of being punished) are already being cited as evidence of a systematic problem with American forces abroad and American leadership at home. In fact, although scores of atrocities have been alleged in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority have been false claims. Most recently, for example, charges that U.S. forces executed civilians during a March 15 night-time raid on an al Qaeda safe house in Ishaqi proved to be groundless.

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To put things in perspective, it is worth noting that abuses and violations of the laws of war have occurred in every armed conflict in human history, regardless of how well-led or disciplined were the troops involved. Indeed, by the standards of past conflicts, U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have behaved in exemplary fashion, using force in combat with unprecedented precision, minimizing collateral damage and civilian deaths--often at risk to themselves and to their mission. In Iraq, this has been the case even though American forces are fighting in the toughest possible urban insurgency environment.

Overall, all U.S. forces, including the Marines, have used deadly force in a proportionate and discriminate manner, fully in accord with the laws and customs of war. By contrast, our enemies engage in war crimes on a daily basis as a matter of policy. For them, targeting civilians is not the exception but the rule--it is the essence of the "asymmetrical" warfare they practice.

Throughout history, irregular forces have used the surrounding civilian population in two distinct ways. First, guerrilla fighters do not wear uniforms or carry their arms openly--critical elements of lawful warfare--so as to hide among the civilian population. In effect, they use civilians as shields. Second, like the insurgents in Iraq, they seek to goad opponents into mistakenly, or deliberately, attacking civilians--as a means of mobilizing the population against the regulars. The killings at Haditha show how this strategy can work.

However, the advent of modern media coverage--coupled with a growing and valid concern among democracies about humanitarian norms during warfare--has provided a new tactical innovation, increasingly known as "lawfare." Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents thus routinely claim that American forces systematically violate the laws of war by targeting civilians and abusing prisoners. These claims are not targeted at the Iraqi people (although similar claims regarding insults to Islamic believers are so directed) but at public and, especially, elite opinion in the U.S. and other democracies. With Vietnam as its model, the Iraqi insurgency well understands that it can win only by undermining America's political will to win, and the center of gravity in this conflict lies in Washington, not Baghdad or the Sunni Triangle.

These lawfare tactics have several other important consequences. If the Pentagon's investigation of Haditha was delayed, it was most likely because similar massacre allegations are made virtually every time American forces take to the field. The fact that, in Iraq, IED explosions are so often followed by insurgent attacks launched from civilian structures also clearly gave credence to the initial--and evidently incorrect--reports from Haditha. When civilian buildings are used in insurgent operations, civilians often are killed in the crossfire, and so the report that a number of civilians had been killed by small arms in Haditha would not have appeared exceptional to the U.S. commanders.

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Ultimately, the Haditha incident must remind American policy makers--and the American people--of the challenges of modern warfare. Although the individual actions of U.S. forces on that day may have been exceptional, the surrounding circumstances are not--and our enemies will look more and more to such irregular tactics. The Pentagon's emphasis on exhaustively training American troops in the laws of war is a good first step. U.S. forces already are the best equipped and trained in history, and it is only through a constant emphasis on duty, discipline and American values that our armed forces will prevail in Iraq and similar conflicts.

At the same time, should the Haditha incident mature into a full-fledged war crimes drama prompting a premature U.S. withdrawal, the damage would not be limited to Iraq. If the U.S. cannot fight and win against a brutal urban insurgency in Iraq today, its ability to defeat any determined foe willing to sacrifice the civilian population in irregular warfare will be in question. This can only benefit the most vicious regimes and movements. The Bush administration's critics should pause a moment, and reflect, on whether this would really be worth it.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, lawyers in Washington, served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Zarqawi's death: reaction in Baghdad

Iraqis' reaction to Zarqawi's death may not be completely understood by some Westerners who oppose the war against terrorists.

The scene around Baghdad today is quite familiar. Iraqis are huddled around televisions , listening to radios and, of course, firing celebratory volleys of automatic gunfire into the air. This morning there is a little something extra in the air, hope.

Mid-morning local time the news broke, Abu Musab al Zarqawi has been killed. The celebrations on the street and the cheers at the press conference announcing this news may seem odd to some in the comfortable confines of the west. While a BBC reporter today referred to al Zarqawi as a “controversial leader of the resistance� the reaction among most Iraqis lacks such nuance, they are glad for one simple reason, al Zarqawi is dead.

The people who have the most to lose in Iraq, the Iraqi's themselves, are celebrating al-Zarqawi's demise. I think we should follow suit.

Recommended.

A forward strategy for freedom

Austin Bay has a good column up at Strategy Page that discusses the the need for a multi-administration strategy to defeat terrorism.

A "forward strategy of freedom" means fostering the development of states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. Implementing that strategy means nation-building. Since the 2000 presidential campaign, the Bush administration has done a necessary 180 on nation-building. Bush entered office disdaining it. Sept. 11 changed that calculus.

It makes a lot of sense. Recommended.

War on Terrorism

Widespread terror incidents in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and now Canada tend to support the premise that it's not about settling some differences, or redressing some grievances. It's about the survival of western civilization.

What follows is this truth: the options this leaves Canada and other free nations are, in other words, either defeating their enemy or surrendering to it. Concessions short of surrender won’t satisfy the enemy, as the example of Canada demonstrates.Nor will a crackdown on immigration entirely solve the security problem for the West — it appears that many of those arrested over the weekend were Canadian-born.

Recommended.

We ARE winning

Ralph Peters has a column out about how we really are defeating terrorism and winning the war in Iraq. He's taking no prisoners, though.

With the formation of Iraq's new government, it's a good time to take stock of where we stand in our confrontation with Islamist terror. You wouldn't know it from the outrageously dishonest headlines, but we're winning.

We could do even better, if we put national security above partisan politics.

Go read the rest . . .

Hamas and the killing of innocents

Edward Bernard Glick, over at the American Thinker, gives us his take on Hamas, innocents, and the Israeli Defense Force. He starts with:

Why should Hamas care if its irredentist terrorism kills or causes Israel to kill innocent civilians?

Unfortunately, it makes a lot of sense. Read the whole thing.

AQ-Baghdad SITREP

It looks like the bad guys in Iraq are singing the blues. At least it seems that way:

CENTCOM announced today that they had captured al-Qaeda correspondence in Iraq that discusses the state of the insurgency, especially around Baghdad but also around the entire country. Far from optimistic, the documents captured in an April 16th raid reveal frustration and desperation, as the terrorists acknowledge the superior position of American and free Iraqi forces and their ability to quickly adapt to new tactics.

Go read the rest at Captain Ed's place.

Moussaoui trial -- a good thing?

J. R. Dunn, over at The American Thinker has a different take on Moussaoui's trial and sentencing than most of the rest of us. But he makes some good points:

So, in the end, despite everything, Moussaoui has been valuable. He has accomplished the last thing he would have chosen to do; he has given us something no one else could provide. Subjected to the endless minutia of the legal process, he at last cracked open and showed us what he really was. And for that we can be grateful. Because if Zacarias Moussaoui is any example of what we’re up against, there is no way, whatever the inattention, folly, or negligence, that we will not see this thing through.

Recommended reading.

The wrong verdict

Peggy Noonan makes a strong case that we should have sentenced Moussaoui to death.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

[. . .]

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

Because we did not sentence Zacarias Moussaoui to death, our society and our judicial system has diminished.

I've reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn't vengeance.

Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)--Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

---

This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.

As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.

Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.

I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.

I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear.

---

I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.

It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.

If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?

And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?

I don't want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here's some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn't get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn't get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn't allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn't allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don't take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.

I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

The late al-Qaeda?

Harold C. Hutchinson has an interesting op-ed up at StrategyPage explaining why al-Qaeda has been losing so badly:

Despite the many brickbats of the media, al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can. If it can. Just over four and a half years, al Qaeda has gone from being the dominant terrorist group in the world to a defeated shell of its former self. In trying to defeat the United States, al Qaeda made three big mistakes: They fought the last information war, they underestimated the American leadership, and they also managed to anger the Iraqi people.

Go read the rest.

Tragedy at Iraq the Model

Mohammed's family has been struck by the violence of criminals in Baghdad, and has lost a family member as a result.

Last week our little and peaceful family was struck by the tragic loss of one of its members in a savage criminal act of assassination. The member we lost was my sister's husband who lived with their two little children in our house.

Mohammed and his family have been courageously and diligently working toward a free, democratic, and safe Iraq since Saddam was removed from power three years ago. Please hold his family in prayer, and leave him a word of gratitude and comfort in his blog comments.

The pope's got it

Quoted in this article.

Attention has rightly been drawn to the danger of a clash of civilizations," said Benedict. "The danger is made more acute by organized terrorism, which has already spread over the whole planet. Its causes are many and complex, not least those to do with political ideology, combined with aberrant religious ideas. Terrorism does not hesitate to strike defenseless people, without discrimination, or to impose inhuman blackmail, causing panic among entire populations, in order to force political leaders to support the designs of the terrorists. No situation can justify such criminal activity, which covers the perpetrators with infamy, and it is all the more deplorable when it hides behind religion, thereby bringing the pure truth of God down to the level of the terrorists' own blindness and moral perversion.

-- Pope Benedict XVI

I wonder when those responsible for the security of Europe will get it, too?

Proof positive

Captain Ed provides us proof that Saddam Hussein was actively recruiting terrorists to attack American targets.

And he observes:

Interesting that no one in the media, or really all that much in the blogosphere, seems to be picking this one up ....

Interesting indeed.

Saddam's terror ties

With the release of pre-liberation Iraqi documents, more and more evidence is turning up that Saddam was nurturing relationships with terrorists and dabbling in WMDs. Author Laurie Mylroie published a summative article about some initial documentation indicative of this activity on OpinionJournal this past Sunday.

I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry below. Recommended reading.

The Paper Trail
Newly released documents provide more evidence of Saddam's terror ties.

BY LAURIE MYLROIE
Sunday, April 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

After substantial prodding--including from The Wall Street Journal--the U.S. government has finally begun to release its captured Iraqi documents and is posting them at the Web site of the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. This material will take considerable time to absorb and analyze, but it may yet contribute significantly to our understanding of the nature of the threat Saddam Hussein posed.

Most dramatically, an Iraqi intelligence report, apparently written in early 1997, describes Iraqi efforts to establish ties with various elements in the Saudi opposition, including Osama bin Laden. Until 1996, the Saudi renegade was based in Sudan, then ruled by Hassan Turabi's National Islamic Front. One of Iraq's few allies, Sudan served as an intermediary between Baghdad and bin Laden, as well as other Islamic radicals. On Feb. 19, 1995, an Iraqi intelligence agent met with bin Laden in Khartoum. Bin Laden asked for two things: to carry out joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia and to broadcast the speeches of a radical Saudi cleric. Iraq agreed to the latter, but apparently not the former, at least as far as the author of this report knew. Notably, the report also states, "We are working at the present time to activate this relationship through new channels."

This one report hints at the extensive international presence that the Iraqi Intelligence Service maintained. Iraq's ambassadors to Sudan and Yemen were intelligence agents, suggesting that those two countries were major centers of IIS activity. The report also mentions IIS stations in Islamabad, New Delhi and New York.

Another newly released document bears the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It is a flier from the "Committee for Arab Liaison with the Islamic Emirate" (i.e., Afghanistan) for recruiting volunteers in Iraq to fight in Afghanistan. It explains that the "Arab brothers" who wish to go there should send a written proposal "so that we can know him and his needs." Zarqawi is among six people listed as individuals to contact.

How close were relations between Iraq and the Taliban, a regime officially recognized by only three countries? The answer is necessary for understanding the nature of any ties Iraq may have had with al Qaeda or other Afghan-based Islamic groups. Hopefully, other documents will emerge to shed light on this question.

The formal cease-fire to the 1991 Gulf War required Iraq to recognize Kuwait and release the Kuwaiti hostages it had seized. Iraq did neither. On Marc  4, 2003, with war looming, Saddam's son Qusay ordered 448 Kuwaiti prisoners taken to sites the United States would likely attack. Nothing of their fate has been reported, and they might well have died. Iraq formally recognized Kuwait in 1994, but the official stationery of the Fedayeen Saddam in 2001 shows a map of Iraq that includes the state.

---

Other documents from this database were leaked some time ago. Perhaps because their provenance was not understood, these 30 pages did not receive the attention they merited. Particularly notable is an order issued by Saddam on Jan. 18, 1993: "Hunt Americans on Arab territory, particularly in Somalia."

Most of these documents deal with terrorism and date from January to May 1993. They suggest that in early 1993, Saddam began to move actively to revive terrorist programs that had been established three years before, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Responding to a request from Saddam, Iraqi intelligence produced a six-page report, listing the names and nationalities of 100 Arab "martyrs" whom it had trained in the fall of 1990.

Another report explains that the IIS had reached an agreement with the deputy head of Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front "to use the Islamic Arab elements that had been fighting in Afghanistan and now have no place to go and who are physically present in Sudan, Somalia and Egypt." The IIS also agreed with Khartoum to renew its relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad--headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, familiar as al Qaeda's most prominent contemporary spokesman.

Still another report describes Iraq's earlier agreement with Islamic Jihad, concluded on Dec. 24, 1990, as the start of the Gulf War loomed. Iraq was to provide training, financing and supplies to the organization "to execute martyr operations" against the members of the U.S.-led coalition, of which Egypt was a key Arab member. However, as this document explains, those operations stopped immediately after the cease-fire.

In 1993, Iraq was cautious about backing Egyptian terrorists, more so than the Sudanese. When Khartoum informed Baghdad that it was sending an Islamic Jihad leader, who had been based in Afghanistan and then lived in Sudan, to Iraq on a Sudanese plane carrying meat (this exemption from the general ban on flights to Iraq was granted by the U.N. Security Council), the IIS asked that the visit be postponed. Sudan insisted, and the IIS approved on condition the visit be kept secret. Subsequently, the IIS recommended that assistance to the Egyptian group be limited to financial support.

---

Two documents relate to Iraq's proscribed WMD programs. One is a table, providing details of a Sept. 6, 2000, contract for the production of "the malignant pustule"--the Pentagon official who leaked these documents believed it referred to anthrax--along with earlier contracts for sterilization and decontamination equipment. Another table describes an Aug. 21, 2000, contract for the production of mustard gas and earlier contracts for protective equipment. Small amounts of material are mentioned: three ampules of "the malignant pustule" (an ampule is a small, sealed glass vial) and five kilograms of mustard gas. These contracts could have represented test runs, or, as a former U.N. weapons inspector suggested to me, the material could have been intended for terrorism.

Many more documents are to be released in the coming months. Quite possibly, they will vindicate the decision to undertake the Iraq war; help maintain public support for fighting it; and radically change our understanding of Saddam's role in international terrorism.

Ms. Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America" (AEI, 2001).

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Lessons learned

John Noonan, at The Officer's Club has a good post up about what we can learn about the kidnapping and release of journalist Jill Carroll. Here's how he starts:

The question of whether or not Jill Carroll would survive captivity was answered this weekend with favorable results. Now the question that begs asking is: "what does the Carroll captivity teach us about our enemies?"

In short, quite a bit.

Read the whole thing.

Jihadi alternatives, parts 2 and 3

Part 2 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives is here.

Part 3 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives is here.

And if you missed my earlier post, part 1 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives can be found here.

All are long, but highly recommended reading.

Jihadi alternatives

J.R. Dunn, over at the American Thinker has an excellent essay on grand strategy, strategy, goals, and methods of both the U.S. and the jihadists in the conflict in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

A political solution is necessary to secure the military victories already won. This strategy will require patience, understanding, and willingness to overcome setbacks. Things are going to happen that we do not like. There will be disappointments and failures. These are not products of policy, but aspects of the human condition. None of them will be any reason to turn back or abandon the effort. Errors can corrected, failures can be overcome. And it should never be forgotten that, in the words of Churchill, the ongoing liberation of the Middle East remains "one of the great unsordid acts of history."

This is a well thought out, in depth analysis of what has worked, what has failed, and what still needs to be done in the struggle for supremacy between Western democracies and Islamofascists.

It is a long article (and it's only part 1 of 3!), but it is well worth your time. Grab a cup of coffee and settle down for a good read.

From the eye of the storm

Haim Harari, Chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and Past President of the Weizmann Institute of Science Talk, delivered a speech two years ago about the underlying reasons for the expansion of terrorism over the last 25 years. Still pertinent today, his remarks include a wide range of regional issues that contribute to the proliferation of terrorism -- yet he does not blame Israel:

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.

The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.

The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.

The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.

Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.

Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel.

Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.

The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

This is a must read.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

The strategy of terrorism

Ginny Franks, a senior communications major at UNC, has published an op-ed about how Islamic terrorists are working toward changing us. Here's an excerpt:

Terrorists are evil, but they aren't cowards. The truth is that terrorists aim to make cowards of us.

Taheri-azar didn't just want nine funerals with nine gravestones to mark his crime. Taheri-azar wanted front-page photographs of our faces in anguish; he wanted to draw us into reactions of irrational violence against Muslims; he wanted his day in court.

He wanted us to fear standing in the Pit - the spot that represents everything Islamist terrorism seeks to eradicate.

Every college campus, indeed every community in this country, has a "Pit" -- a place where a person can stand up and voice his opinion without fearing violent reprisal. The Islamofascists want to take that away as a first step toward dominating us.

Ms. Franks eloquently argues for us to stand up and fight against such an outcome. I recommend you read her words and consider your own position in this conflict.

Wage war against Islam?

Jack Kelly, over at the Pittsburg Post-Gazette does a good job of discussing the real difference between "Islamists" and moderate Muslims. Alas, he is unkind to journalists, but they do seem to be part of the problem:

It is easier to find moderate Muslims who are willing to speak out than to find journalists who will pay much attention to what they have to say. Afghans, Iraqis and Lebanese struggling for liberty and democracy are given short shrift because to give them proper credit would be to give indirect credit to George W. Bush.

Recommended.

Key terrorist captured in Bangladesh

Abdur Rahman, one of the original signatories of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring war against the West, is arrested.

Go read about it at Bill Roggio's blog. Recommended.

Terrorism on our home turf

This post should impress upon us all that the terrorist threat is very real, and that it is here in the U.S.

Now will someone please explain to me again why we should be upset by the NSA monitoring communications of suspected terrorists?

AQAM and the 'Long War'

Brendan Miniter has a piece up at OpinionJournal that discusses the long war we find ourselves in versus terrorism. It will take persistent efforts on several fronts to defeat this foe. I just hope and pray that Americans still have the intestinal fortitude to persevere and win this fight.

Food for thought.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry below.

'Bin Ladenism'
The Pentagon's vision for the "Long War."

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

At a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sized up the progress of the war on terror, compared it to the struggle against Nazism and communism, and noted this struggle will take years to win. It was similar to remarks the president, the vice president and other top administration officials have been repeating for years. And it also is the line of reasoning that the press corps has largely dismissed as hyperbole. Many in the media simply don't accept the comparison of Osama bin Laden to Hitler.

But looking over the Defense Department's plans for remaking the military, it quickly becomes clear that that comparison isn't dismissed inside the Pentagon. The recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, which reveals long-term military planning, shows a top brass worried about the ideology of hate preached by imams across the Islamic world. This ideology, though twisted, is somewhat coherent and calls for using terrorism to create a "caliphate," a unified Islamic state, stretching from Afghanistan and Iran all the way to Spain and including most of North Africa. For a lack of a better term, some American military planners call this ideology "bin Ladenism."

Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for U.S. Central Command (which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East), dropped by the offices of The Wall Street Journal recently. He noted that bin Ladenism has deep roots in many Islamic countries and that bin Laden isn't the only terrorist leader trying to appeal to populations oppressed by dictators. There are some 18 terrorist organizations that are part of what the military calls al Qaeda and Affiliated Movement. The military, he said, even has an acronym for it: AQAM.

To counter bin Ladenism, the military is planning a two-stage war. The first is being fought in open battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and looks a lot like the kind of war most Americans assumed we'd wage on al Qaeda and terror-sponsoring states after the Sept. 11 attacks. The second stage is what senior military planners--including Mr. Rumsfeld--call "the Long War." It involves countering one set of ideas with another.

---

It is this stage of the war that President Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and other members of the administration worry isn't well understood by most Americans and therefore is in danger of being lost after Mr. Bush leaves office. At the Press Club, Mr. Rumsfeld reminded the journalists in the audience that al Qaeda and its affiliates have "media relation committees." "Think of that--they get up in the morning, have committee meetings and think about how they're going to manipulate the world's press to their advantage," he said. It's not just that al Qaeda members watch CNN or the Fox News Channel for tactical information, but they have "proven to be highly successful at manipulating the world's media here in this country."

The good news is many Americans have a healthy skepticism when it comes to the media, and, as in the Cold War, the U.S. is well positioned to win the long war on terrorism. What that will require is a better understanding of what such a war involves. For starters, it requires not withdrawing from Iraq. Spreading freedom is the best way to appeal to oppressed people and therefore is essential to undercutting bin Ladenism. It also involves making the military more flexible and able to respond to natural disasters and other crisis in unstable regions. The help America's armed forces delivered after Pakistan's devastating earthquake last year might have done more to build goodwill with ordinary Pakistanis than anything else in the past 50 years. The same is true for tsunami relief in Indonesia and other countries.

The military is laying the groundwork in other countries as well, in hopes of turning indigenous populations away from bin Ladenism. One area that has largely escaped media attention is the Horn of Africa, and in particular the small country of Djibouti. Bordering Somalia to the north, Ethiopia to the east and directly across the Red Sea from Yemen, Djibouti has an impoverished population that may find terrorism appealing if it promises the glory involved in helping build a grand Islamic state. And Djibouti historically has served as a passageway for trade into the heart of Africa. Shortly after 9/11 the U.S. set up a base of operations in Djibouti to help stabilize the region and build schools as well as infrastructure. At one point nearly 2,000 Marines were on the ground there. Military officials tell me Djibouti is a success story that hasn't made it into the news because U.S. soldiers aren't getting killed there.

---

The military can't win the Long War on its own. To defeat bin Ladenism, Americans must use every institution at their disposal--including the State Department and United Nations--to put pressure on those who spread the ideology of terrorism while not being timid in making the hard decisions necessary to confront rogue regimes. Iran cannot be allowed to build nuclear bombs, because it is a terror sponsoring state. Likewise Syria must be compelled to behave like a civilized country. Hamas won the Palestinian elections, but its leaders cannot be accepted by Western countries until they renounce terrorism and their desire to wipe Israel off of the map.

The Quadrennial Defense Review points out that the U.S. now has a window of opportunity to shape the world to bolster American security. Undercutting bin Ladenism now, before it gains the strength that Nazism and communism once had, will be much easier before another superpower (presumably China) emerges. America's long-term security depends on it.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Posted by USAdave at 05:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Terrorist activity is down

Strategy Page has an article that indicates that terrorism in Iraq is much less than in the past. Here's how it starts:

The annual Shia Ashura festival brings out the faithful in large numbers, and was banned when Saddam ruled. Since then, terrorists have attacked the Shia participants, killing 55 in 2005, and 181 in 2004. This year, the terrorists were unable to kill anyone. Iraqi police and soldiers supplied the security, with the help of some religious militias. This sharp drop in terrorist activity was no fluke.

It's worth reading . . .

'Freedom fighters?'

This is what our troops are fighting against in Iraq.

A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.

And there are people in this country that want us to pull out and leave the Iraqis to suffer these kind of consequences?

The deaths reported Thursday included five people killed in a suicide car bombing at a market in Hilla, an overwhelmingly Shiite town about 60 miles south of Baghdad. "There were no police or army at the scene when the car exploded, so all the casualties were Shiite civilians," said Ahmed, the provincial police spokesman. News agencies reported that the car exploded outside a soft-drink stand on Thursday evening, when many fathers take their families out for snacks and a stroll at the beginning of the Muslim weekend.

The Islamofascist murderers aren't even pretending to fight for the people of Iraq anymore. In fact, they are murdering them without compunction.

Yet they are being glorified by the likes of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan.

I am outraged and disgusted.

Terrorists' rights

Thomas Sowell puts the rights of terrorists in proper perspective. He's an excerpt:

There is no penalty for false claims but potentially deadly consequences for letting international terrorists tie up our legal system by exercising rights granted to American citizens and now thoughtlessly extended to people who are not American citizens and who are bent on killing American citizens and destroying American society.

After decades of ignoring the fact that rights and responsibilities go together, it was perhaps inevitable that an under-educated and easily confused generation should include some who do not understand that the rights granted to captured troops by the Geneva Convention apply to those who have accepted the terms of the Geneva Convention. It does not apply to people who are not troops and who have blatantly violated the whole framework of that convention.

For more than two centuries there has been a tendency on the political left, here and overseas, to make wrong-doers look like victims rather than people who are victimizing others. So it was perhaps inevitable that some would extend this attitude from criminals to terrorists.

Highly recommended.

26 April 2004

This CNN article reports that Jordanian authorities recovered 20 tons of chemicals in raids against terrorists.

Jordanian authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of Jordan's capital, Amman.

The plot would have been more deadly than anything al Qaeda has done before, including the September 11 attacks, according to the Jordanian government.

Where did the 20 tons of chemicals (including blistering, choking, and nerve agents) come from? My guess is that they came from Iraq -- before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Saddam Hussein had become proficient at dismantling and moving his WMDs (he had been doing it quite often since Desert Storm in 1991), so it makes sense that that huge quantity of chemical warfare agents could well have originated in Saddam's Iraq.

Another thing to be thankful for.

The Arab street

Mark Steyn discusses the "Arab street" response to the bombings in Amman, Jordan.

On Friday, the allegedly explosive "Arab street" finally exploded, in the largest demonstration against al-Qa'eda or its affiliates seen in the Middle East. "Zarqawi," shouted 200,000 Jordanians, "from Amman we say to you, you are a coward!" Also "the enemy of Allah" - which, for a jihadist, isn't what they call on Broadway a money review.

It is encouraging to see this happening in the Middle East. Because of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, the people in other Middle Eastern countries are beginning to see that America is not "the Great Satan", but that Islamofascism is.

Another something to be thankful for . . .

Suicide bomber problem?

Here is one solution.

Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple has a sobering perspective on suicide bombers in the Autumn 2005 issue of City Journal.

It's a long article, but worth your time.

Radical jihadism rooted in Europe?

Francis Fukuyama has an interesting op-ed up at OpinionJournal wherein he postulates on the origins of jihadist terrorism. Here's an excerpt:

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy. There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

And it is reprinted in its entirety in the extended entry.

A Year of Living Dangerously
Remember Theo van Gogh, and shudder for the future.

BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

One year ago today, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Muslim born in Holland who spoke fluent Dutch. This event has totally transformed Dutch politics, leading to stepped-up police controls that have now virtually shut off new immigration there. Together with the July 7 bombings in London (also perpetrated by second generation Muslims who were British citizens), this event should also change dramatically our view of the nature of the threat from radical Islamism.

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

---

We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture. In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from your social environment. In such a society there is no confusion as to who you are, since your identity is given to you and sanctioned by all of the society's institutions, from the family to the mosque to the state.

The same is not true for a Muslim who lives as an immigrant in a suburb of Amsterdam or Paris. All of a sudden, your identity is up for grabs; you have seemingly infinite choices in deciding how far you want to try to integrate into the surrounding, non-Muslim society. In his book "Globalized Islam" (2004), the French scholar Olivier Roy argues persuasively that contemporary radicalism is precisely the product of the "deterritorialization" of Islam, which strips Muslim identity of all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society.

The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.

Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigid European labor laws have made low-skill jobs hard to find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. Religion is no longer supported, as in a true Muslim society, through conformity to a host of external social customs and observances; rather it is more a question of inward belief. Hence Mr. Roy's comparison of modern Islamism to the Protestant Reformation, which similarly turned religion inward and stripped it of its external rituals and social supports.

If this is in fact an accurate description of an important source of radicalism, several conclusions follow. First, the challenge that Islamism represents is not a strange and unfamiliar one. Rapid transition to modernity has long spawned radicalization; we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not.

Further, radical Islamism is as much a product of modernization and globalization as it is a religious phenomenon; it would not be nearly as intense if Muslims could not travel, surf the Web, or become otherwise disconnected from their culture. This means that "fixing" the Middle East by bringing modernization and democracy to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not solve the terrorism problem, but may in the short run make the problem worse. Democracy and modernization in the Muslim world are desirable for their own sake, but we will continue to have a big problem with terrorism in Europe regardless of what happens there.

The real challenge for democracy lies in Europe, where the problem is an internal one of integrating large numbers of angry young Muslims and doing so in a way that does not provoke an even angrier backlash from right-wing populists. Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.

The first has already begun to happen. In recent months, both the Dutch and British have in fact come to an overdue recognition that the old version of multiculturalism they formerly practiced was dangerous and counterproductive. Liberal tolerance was interpreted as respect not for the rights of individuals, but of groups, some of whom were themselves intolerant (by, for example, dictating whom their daughters could befriend or marry). Out of a misplaced sense of respect for other cultures, Muslims minorities were left to regulate their own behavior, an attitude which dovetailed with a traditional European corporatist approaches to social organization. In Holland, where the state supports separate Catholic, Protestant and socialist schools, it was easy enough to add a Muslim "pillar" that quickly turned into a ghetto disconnected from the surrounding society.

New policies to reduce the separateness of the Muslim community, like laws discouraging the importation of brides from the Middle East, have been put in place in the Netherlands. The Dutch and British police have been given new powers to monitor, detain and expel inflammatory clerics. But the much more difficult problem remains of fashioning a national identity that will connect citizens of all religions and ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the American creed has served to unite new immigrants to the United States.

---

Since van Gogh's murder, the Dutch have embarked on a vigorous and often impolitic debate on what it means to be Dutch, with some demanding of immigrants not just an ability to speak Dutch, but a detailed knowledge of Dutch history and culture that many Dutch people do not have themselves. But national identity has to be a source of inclusion, not exclusion; nor can it be based, contrary to the assertion of the gay Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn who was assassinated in 2003, on endless tolerance and valuelessness. The Dutch have at least broken through the stifling barrier of political correctness that has prevented most other European countries from even beginning a discussion of the interconnected issues of identity, culture and immigration. But getting the national identity question right is a delicate and elusive task.

Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well.

Mr. Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins and chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Savagery

I would watch out for those "freedom fighters" in Iraq, if I were you. Unless, of course, I was Michael Moore.

This is the second of our contractors to be kidnapped in the past three weeks. The previous victim was a woman in her mid-40s who has her own company. She was kidnapped in front of her house by a gang of between 10 to 12 terrorists. They first beat up her husband and young son who were standing with her, then fled in a get-away car that was in front of the house next door.

The kidnappers held her for 13 days before releasing her for a ransom I have heard of $200,000. Before dumping her out of a moving car, the "insurgents" (as the MSM refer to terrorists) broke most of her ribs with a baseball bat. Since that didn't seem to satisfy them, they also broke many of the bones in her face with the same bat.

Never let it be said that these Islamists are savages, because we must never forget that one man's savage is another man's "freedom fighter."

Letter from al-Z to al-Z

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a letter from one terrorist, al-Zawahiri, to another one, al-Zarqawi. Here is the news release:

Letter from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi

October 11, 2005

ODNI News Release No. 2-05

Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a letter between two senior al Qa'ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that was obtained during counterterrorism operations in Iraq. This lengthy document provides a comprehensive view of al Qa'ida's strategy in Iraq and globally.

The letter from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi is dated July 9, 2005. The contents were released only after assurances that no ongoing intelligence or military operations would be affected by making this document public.

The document has not been edited in any way and is released in its entirety in both the Arabic and English translated forms. The United States Government has the highest confidence in the letter's authenticity.

Al-Zawahiri's letter offers a strategic vision for al Qa'ida's direction for Iraq and beyond, and portrays
al Qa'ida's senior leadership's isolation and dependence.

Among the letter's highlights are discussions indicating:

• The centrality of the war in Iraq for the global jihad.
  
  
• From al Qa'ida's point of view, the war does not end with an American departure.
  
  
• An acknowledgment of the appeal of democracy to the Iraqis.
  
  
• The strategic vision of inevitable conflict, with a tacit recognition of current political dynamics in Iraq; with a call by al-Zawahiri for political action equal to military action.
  
  
• The need to maintain popular support at least until jihadist rule has been established.
  
  
• Admission that more than half the struggle is taking place "in the battlefield of the media."

Looks like things aren't so peachy in Islamofascist Land . . .

12 Oct 2000

Today is the fifth anniversary of the suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole which took 17 of our sailors' lives and injured 40 others.

What we really didn't understand at the time was that the war on terrorism had already begun -- and the terrorists had started it.

And we need to be the ones to finish it, because terrorism will not end until we destroy those murderers and the conditions in which they thrive.

[Thanks to Michelle Malkin for reminding me about this anniversary. Go here for more.]

al Qaeda in Gaza

Here is some interesting news: al Qaeda is moving into Gaza.

[Via Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

More about this from John Hindraker at Power Line: Al Qaeda Moving Into Gaza.

It definitely appears as if al Qaeda is "moving in on the action" in Gaza. Would that be, perhaps, because Iraq is going poorly for them? I really feel sorry for those innocent Palestinians who (after decades of oppression under the PLA, Hamas, and others) now have to suffer under the weight of al Qaeda's "liberation".

Maybe we should move in and clean up the terrorist cesspool in Palestine after Iraq has stabilized?

10 foiled plots

Here are the 10 foiled plots that President Bush referred to in his speech last week.

Peace in Iraq - NOT! (yet)

William Shawcross has a good article, in the Los Angeles Times no less, that makes the case that peace in Iraq is not the best solution -- at least not yet. Here's a taste:

. . . U.S. soldiers are being killed not by romantic nationalist insurgents (as some liberal journalists and marchers like to pretend) but by an unholy grouping of Saddamite gangsters furious at losing power, Syrian and Iranian agents intent on creating mayhem and then theocracy, and Islamo-fascists who want to enslave the world and whose local Pol Pot, Abu Musab Zarqawi, boasts of seeking to murder as many of Iraq's majority Shiite population as he can.

He makes some good points. I recommend it.

The road to victory

Remember Oliver North? Well, he's got an op-ed up at Townhall.com about triumphing over terror. Here's an excerpt:

So as the protests grow louder on the home front, Americans will continue be targets for radical Islamic extremists. The best hope we have of protecting innocent civilians is to continue to improve protection here at home, take violent action against the perpetrators where they gather and train, and ameliorate the conditions that make it conducive for those inciting the jihad to recruit more volunteers. It is a strategy that has been working and which the president expanded upon this week.

Recommended.

Why Bali?

Ed Morrissey has posted a good essay on why terrorists continue to attack Bali.

I like the way he thinks. Yes, I do.

President Talabani speaks

The president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, talks about the importance of defeating terrorism. Here's how he begins:

There is no more important international issue today than the need to defeat the curse of terrorism. And as the first democratically elected president of Iraq, I have a responsibility to ensure that the world's youngest democracy survives the inherently difficult transition from totalitarianism to pluralism. A transformation of the Iraqi state and Iraqi society is impossible without a sustained commitment of soldiers from the United States and other democracies.

The rest is in the extended entry. Highly recommended reading -- it puts our military struggle back into perspective (without the distortions of viewing it through our media's dark lens).

We Need American Troops

Thank you for liberating my country. Please don't leave before the job is done.


BY JALAL TALABANI

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

BAGHDAD--There is no more important international issue today than the need to defeat the curse of terrorism. And as the first democratically elected president of Iraq, I have a responsibility to ensure that the world's youngest democracy survives the inherently difficult transition from totalitarianism to pluralism. A transformation of the Iraqi state and Iraqi society is impossible without a sustained commitment of soldiers from the United States and other democracies.

To understand why, let us recall how we reached this juncture in history. How is it that Iraq today has a democratically elected head of state, government and Parliament? How it is that members of the most repressed ethnic groups now hold the highest offices of state? All these welcome developments are a result of the courage and vision of President Bush and his allies, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, leaders whose commitment of troops to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions liberated Iraq.

---

Without foreign intervention, the transition in Iraq would have been from Saddam's bloodstained hands to his psychopathic offspring. Instead, thanks to American leadership, Iraqis have been given an opportunity of peaceful, participatory politics. Contrary to the new conventional wisdom, Iraq and the history of 20th-century Europe demonstrate that force of arms can implant democracy in the most arid soil.

The rapidity of the democratization and reform of Iraq is staggering. There was no German state for four years after the Second World War. By contrast, Iraq has moved from a centralized, one-man dictatorship to a decentralized, federal republic in half that time.

Inevitably, there have been stresses and strains. In Iraq these have been amplified by the terrorism of the remnants of the fascist Baathist dictatorship and our interfering neighbors. To contain these tensions, and to defend our young democracy, requires the support of American and other troops. Foreign forces are needed to train and equip the new Iraqi armed forces and to give Iraq its own counterterrorism capability. Only the United States and its closest allies are able to provide such assistance.

Creating these Iraqi forces has not been easy, but Iraqis have been undaunted by the difficulties. Every terrorist attack on Iraqi forces leads to a surge in military recruitment--the opposite of the appeasers' myth that resisting terrorism causes more terrorism. For all the short-term problems, the soundness of the long-term strategy of building up Iraqi forces was demonstrated in recent days when Iraqis took over sole control of security in the holy city of Najaf.

As Iraqi forces gain in confidence and capability, so the need for foreign troops will diminish. The number of foreign troops will be determined in consultations between the Iraqi government and its foreign allies on the basis of operational requirements.

American forces are in Iraq at the invitation of the democratically elected government of Iraq, and with the backing of a United Nations Security Council resolution. Your soldiers are in my country because of your commitment to democracy. Moreover, during my visit to Washington, Mr. Bush reaffirmed the United States' complete support for the Iraqi political process toward sustainable democracy, and for the fight to defeat fascist and jihadist terrorism in Iraq.

That commitment to liberty has shaped our opposition to any timetable for withdrawal. There are also two practical, policy reasons to avoid such a scheduled reduction in foreign troop numbers. First, a timetable will aid the terrorists and tell them that all they have to do is wait. Second, military plans must be flexible. We should have the suppleness to respond to the often-changing level of terrorist threat. Indeed, we will require ongoing security assistance in many forms for many years to come.

If we keep progressing at the present rate, Iraqis may be able to take over many security functions from foreign forces by the end of 2006. That is not a deadline, but it is reasonable aspiration. During my visit to the United States, I was fortunate to meet relatives of some of the brave troops serving in Iraq. They were staunch, and I want their loved ones to have to serve in Iraq not a moment longer than is necessary.

---

Americans should be proud of what its soldiers have achieved. The presence of foreign forces has prevented a renewed civil war in Iraq--renewed because there has already been a civil war in Iraq. For 35 years, Saddam and his Baath Party made war on the Iraqi people. The liberation of Iraq ended that civil war.

Above all, American forces provide Iraq with a much-needed deterrence capability. In the past, Iraq sought an illusory security through the follies of aggression, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Today, our external security comes from our alliance with the United States. Our neighbors can thereby be assured that we will settle all of our differences with them peacefully.

Sadly, some of our neighbors have chosen not to understand this. They seem either unwilling or unable to shut off the pipeline of terrorists crossing into Iraq. And in addition to what is at least passive support for the terrorists, some of them are providing financial and material support to them, too. They must desist from this behavior now.

While the problem of some of our neighbors supporting terrorism is bad enough, we can only imagine what our neighbors might have done if American troops had not been present. Most likely, Iraq would have been transformed into a regional battlefield with disastrous consequences for Middle Eastern and global security.

Without American forces, the vision of American leadership and the quiet fortitude of the American people, Iraqis would be almost alone in the world. With its allies, the United States has provided Iraqis with an unprecedented opportunity. Iraqis have responded by enthusiastically embracing democracy and volunteering to fight for their country. By giving us the tools, your troops help us to defend Iraqi democracy and to finish the job of uprooting Baathist fascism.

Mr. Talabani is president of Iraq.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

How can we possibly abandon Iraq now?

Gaza -- new haven for terrorists

This does not bode well for our Israeli allies. I hope it is inaccurate, but am afraid that it is all too true. Here's an excerpt:

All indications point to Gaza becoming a haven for gathering Palestinian terrorist groups, as well as global terrorists affiliated with them. Many have openly stated they will be moving their bases of operations there.

The Saudi daily Al-Watan reported in the last week of June that Palestinian Authority leaders have invited all Palestinian rejectionist groups to Gaza. They include multiple groups and individuals on the U.S. list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations including Syrian based Hamas officials such as Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk, as well as leaders from the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Struggle Front.

It was also announced that the Tunis based head of the PLO, Faruq Qaddumi is moving his base of operations to Gaza. He is a possible successor and key rival to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. According to him, the PLO charter which calls for the destruction of Israel has not really been amended. Qaddumi will be bringing with him a 'volunteer popular army' of at least 1,500 who will be under his control according to Saudi media reports from August 3.

This follows other reports from Lebanon that additional Palestinian fighters devoted to Israel's destruction are also coming to Gaza. One report, in the Lebanese Daily Star from August 1st quoted a senior Fatah official who "did not deny rumors" and was quoted explaining "we were informed we will be with them [other Palestinian fighters in Gaza] soon."

Does anyone still believe that Israel is not fighting for its life?

Terror continues

This article, at American Spectator is very disturbing. It is about a family, living in Iraq, that has been marked for kidnapping and ransom by terrorists -- to fund more murderous endeavors.

The article describes how a man was kidnapped by the terrorists.

Obviously the "Iraqi soldiers" were not Iraqi soldiers. It was subsequently learned that they were actually some elite gunmen from Al Zarqawi's very well run organization of kidnappers. They run an extremely lucrative kidnap business and, from the ransoms they collect, are able to fund much of the terrorist activity in Iraq.

There is a lot more to the article, though. I highly recommend it.

Terrorists' WMD

The Washington Post has a report of a stash of chemicals discovered in a lab in Iraq that could have been intended for WMD. The military spokesman cited in the report stops short of saying that the stash was, in fact, intended for chemical warfare, but he did say that 11 different precursor agents ( intermediate chemical compounds used to produce chemical warfare agents) have been identified so far. And there were 1500 gallons of chemicals found in this lab that was evidently set up sometime after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

This should be a pretty good indication of the indiscriminate nature of the terrorists' murderous campaign. You can't be very specific about who, or what for that matter, you kill when you undertake chemical warfare. They just want to kill.

What are terrorists really saying?

Victor Davis Hanson has some pointed things to say about our lack of focus in dealing with radical Islamists. Or maybe we just don't take it seriously enough (though the first time an innocent was murdered in the name of Islam should have rivetted our attention).

Here's a taste:

Throughout this war we have an understandable, if ethnocentric, habit of ignoring what our enemies actually say. Instead we chatter on, don't listen, and in self-absorbed fashion impart our own motives for their hatred. We live on the principles of the Enlightenment and so worship our god Reason, thus assuming that even our adversaries accept such rational protocols as their own.

So they talk on and on of beheading, suicide bombing, another holocaust, and blowing thousands of us up, while we snooze, now and again waking in the midst of a war to regurgitate Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, flushed Korans, the abusive Patriot Act, and the latest quip of Donald Rumsfeld.

Recommended reading.

More indications

Notice the date on this report (also reprinted below). We know through other reports that the center of Mohammed Atta's recruiting for the 9/11 attacks was in Germany. It looks like there might be a connection between Saddam's Iraq and the murderous attacks on the WTC and Pentagon after all.

Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany
16 March 2001

Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.

The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.

Is anybody surprised?

Insurgents = Chickens

We hear the question all the time: How can those insurgents kill their own people — women and children, innocent lives — in the name of some cause?

The answer is surprisingly simple: Insurgents are chickens.

Here's the link.

Bombers' rights

Jonah Goldberg has a good opinion article up at townhall.com about bombers' (terrorists') rights. He starts with this:

When Ramzi Mohammed, one of the failed bombers in the second wave of attacks on London, was surrounded by representatives of the decadent, infidel West, he didn't shriek, "Allahu Akbar!" and throw himself at his captors in a suicidal lunge for martyrdom. No, instead he whined, "I have rights! I have rights!"

I was willing to bet we'd be arguing about this odd plea for weeks. One side would complain, "Can you believe the chutzpah?" The other side would applaud how even alienated Islamic youth have learned to respect the majesty of our criminal justice system.

And he ends up drawing a parallel between modern day terrorism and Third World Marxism. It's worth the read.

Cowards

Mathias Doepfner, a German, wrote this condemnation of European leadership for The Australian. He starts like this:

THE writer Henryk Broder recently issued a withering indictment: Europe, your family name is appeasement. That phrase resonates because it is so terribly true.

It makes for an interesting read.

Radical Islamists 101

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about how radical Islamists see the world. It makes for some interesting reading.

Steps in the right direction

Judith A. Klinghoffer, guestblogging at AndrewSullivan.com, has listed signs of progress amongst moderate Muslims.

It is something that is desperately needed.

[Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.]

6 Mar 2003

Let's travel back in time about 29 months and read the transcript of a speech by James Taranto about Iraq and terrorism. You may find it a bit disconcerting because it shows a very different situation than the revisionist version being hawked by the anti-war mob.

End terrorism thru Palestine?

Larry Elder at the Jewish World Review raises some good questions about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and its relationship to terrorism. Here's an excerpt:

What about Osama bin Laden? He claims to pursue jihad, at least in part, because of Palestinians. But according to "Globalized Islam" author Olivier Roy, "Abdullah Azzam, [Osama] bin Laden's mentor, gave up supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad . . . "

Mr. Elder reminds us of things that have been said by various Arab leaders over the years, and then he wonders:

So who's really the victimizer?

"The caliphate or death"

Arthur Chrenkoff points out what should be increasingly obvious to all of us -- jihadists want nothing short of world domination.

Too strongly worded? Perhaps.

Is it likely to happen? We don't know.

Strange men and missile launchers

Michelle Malkin describes a very real threat here in the U.S. -- terrorists with anti-aircraft missiles.

Yup, that's right. Many readers have e-mailed me about a recent report floating on the Internet that reveals military concerns about a suspicious trio of Middle Eastern men who apparently pointed a rocket launcher at low-flying aircraft near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma earlier this month. It's authentic. Battle Staff Directive #41, categorized as "For Official Use Only," was issued at Hill Air Force Base in Utah last week to raise a red flag about the incident at Tinker AFB:

"On 14 Jul 05, three individuals were observed outside of the perimeter of Tinker AFB, OK. They were looking through binoculars, taking pictures and one appeared to be holding a large weapon at chest level. The weapon appeared to be aimed towards a low flying aircraft. The three individuals were described as being of Middle Eastern decent and left the area when approached. The weapon was later identified as a rocket launcher (MANPAD) and the low flying aircraft to be a B-1 Bomber. FBI in Oklahoma City and AFOSI [Air Force Office of Special Investigations] determined the threat to be credible."

Ms. Malkin never fails to make you think. I recommend it.

Spot on the (New)mark

Go read Betsy Newmark's post . Go to the link that she references, and read that article. Then come back and tell me that you don't agree with Betsy's summation about irresponsible journalism:

When the media hypes up and exaggerates stories of abuses of Muslims in American prisons, they are inflaming the minds of those who want to kill us. Perhaps if the media spent half as much time writing stories about how Muslims abuse Muslims in places like Syria, Saudia Arabia, etc. some of these young men will begin to realize that their enemy is not Britain or the United States but their own Muslim leaders. But it's always easier to blame Israel, America, or Britain than your own societies.

Why doesn't the mainstream media get it? Does one get lobotomized when one begins a career in journalism?

Strategy of Terror

Former governor of Delaware Pete du Pont has an insightful column posted at OpinionJournal. Here's an excerpt:

The terrorist strategy may have changed, but the objective remains the same. Al Qaeda understands that in the end the United States is what matters. The United Nations is irresolute and corrupt, and important European nations are indecisive and vulnerable. So drive the United States from the Middle East, establish control of all its nations, and then force the Western European nations to appease and accept an Islamic, theocratic global society.

Go read the rest in the extended entry.

Shoring Up the Western Front

Is Old Europe finally learning that it must join the global war on terror?


BY PETE DU PONT

Monday, July 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Nov. 9, 1989, and Sept. 11, 2001, each changed the modern world. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of 75 years of communism, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks the beginning of what may be a similar period of global Islamic terrorism.

But not all of Western civilization wants to fight this not so cold war. Turkey, fearing attacks by Muslim insurgents, ended its anti-terrorism efforts in 2003. Spain followed suit after the 2004 Madrid bombings. Then Hungary and the Netherlands also all but capitulated, even without any dramatic, world-attention grabbing, attacks on their soil. Now Italy says it will withdraw its forces from Iraq by year end.

Old Europe may be falling apart before our eyes. This is suggested by the opposition of Western Europeans to the American military action in Iraq as well as the defeat of the European Union Constitution in France and Holland last spring and the economic decline of European socialist economies. In any case, Old Europe has neither the political will nor the economic strength to combat terrorism. Without the United States, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq would be terrorist-controlled nations. Once again it will be up to America to defeat an assault on Western civilization, just as it was left to the United States to rescue Europe against Nazism and then against the global assualt of communism.

---

Within the European continent thousands of trained terrorists live and travel freely. Historian Walter Laquer reports that security authorities estimate more than 600--perhaps several thousand--British residents are actual graduates of Osama bin Laden's training camps. Dr. Hani al-Siba'i, the director of the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London was quoted as approving of the subway bombings as a great victory, for it was legitimate to target civilians since "the term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic law . . ." The Islamic fanatic who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh told the court: "I acted purely in the name of my religion," and that "one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same . . ."

But none of this means continental Europeans or the British establishment are prepared to criticize terrorism. Christophe Chaboud, France's antiterrorism coordinator, said last week that the war against Iraq--evidently not the blowing up of Spanish or British trains--is making Europe dangerous, and the BBC forbids the use of the word "terrorist" in its coverage of the London bombings.

France, Germany and their European allies believe the welfare state economic model--high taxes and welfare benefits, shorter work weeks, strong restrictions on hiring and firing of workers, huge government subsidies for industry and agriculture, and suffocating regulation by a massive bureaucracy in Brussels--is preferable to Anglo-American democratic capitalism and will lead to prosperity. But it hasn't and it won't, and without economic strength the military strength needed to fight terrorism becomes impossible to assemble.

Simply put, Old Europe's thinking today is that of 1930s, when the Oxford Union voted "under no circumstances [to] fight for King and Country," and British PM Neville Chamberlain believed appeasement should be the policy and "peace in our time" the goal. Winston Churchill had the better understanding: "You ask what is our aim? I can answer that in one word, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." He was talking of Hitler and Nazi Germany, of course, but without victory there will be no survival against Islamic terrorism either.

Meanwhile, the terrorist network has changed its focus, making the fighting of the war more complex. An al Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence in 2003 laid out its revised strategy: spectacular attacks like those of 9/11 against the United States need to be supplemented by attacks on European nations so they will withdraw their support of the Afghan and Iraqi military operations in order to increase the burden on the United States.

University of Chicago professor Robert Pape's excellent New York Times piece of July 9th lays out its specifics: attack Britain, Poland, and Spain as the most vulnerable nations. "It is necessary to make the utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain . . . we think the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows . . . then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be in the electoral program." They hoped that would put "huge pressure on the British presence that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly."

The terrorist strategy may have changed, but the objective remains the same. Al Qaeda understands that in the end the United States is what matters. The United Nations is irresolute and corrupt, and important European nations are indecisive and vulnerable. So drive the United States from the Middle East, establish control of all its nations, and then force the Western European nations to appease and accept an Islamic, theocratic global society.

Combating terrorism is thus the modern version of war--no huge armies, but nevertheless a real war--and winning this war is no less important to global freedom than winning the World War II and the Cold War.

America can win the war against terrorism, but it will take time and resources and a considerable intellectual effort. The Bush administration will continue to provide military and intelligence resources, but it must also continue the intellectual debate.

Like Old Europe, liberal America is bothered by principled international positions. "The Right Nation," by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, points out that liberals were "nervous about moral absolutes, preferring to see the world in shades of grey. After Sept. 11, liberal academics looked for reasons to explain al Qaeda: Was it the product of racism? Of economic injustice? Of American policies in the Middle East?" In his presidential campaign Howard Dean, now national Democratic Party chairman, said our "pre-emptive war is wrong for America"; and liberal leader Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that "the U.S. presence [in Iraq] is part of the problem, not part of the solution."

President Bush better understands the reality, for as he said at West Point in 2002, "the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy . . . the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act." He must continue to make the case, for to appease rather than oppose the enemy will lose the war against terrorism.

---

The good news is we will likely have more international allies in the future. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said after the July 7th London terrorist attack that "What we are confronting here is an evil ideology . . . a battle not just about their terrorist methods, but their views. Not just about their barbaric acts, but their barbaric ideas." After the attack that came the following week, England will be making the case more aggressively.

Old Europe may currently be opposed to both democratic capitalism and a war against terrorism, but that could now change as people begin to see that controlled economies and socialist policies actually make it more difficult to fight off the terrorists who are attacking not just the United States, but them as well. Thus Angela Merkel, a free market Thatcherite and potential American anti-terrorism ally, may well defeat Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party in Germany's September elections. It is too soon to say that continental Europe has abandoned its pro-Saddam/anti-American foreign policies and socialist economic policies, but there is movement in that direction.

And that will help the world fight the global war against Islamic terrorism. The war will be long--a 50 year religious war says the father of Mohamed Atta, the terrorist who flew the first plane into the World Trade Center--and for some time America may have to fight on nearly alone. But terrorism is slowly changing European thinking, and that will help Americans and the people of the world win an essential victory in advancing the freedom that will insure a better future for people of every nation.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Media-enabled terrorism

Clipped from the Townhall.com C-Log.

You can read it in the extended entry.

Media continues to enable terrorists

By TrevorBothwell

Posted on Sun Jul 24th, 2005 at 11:24:02 AM EST

The AP still refuses to call terrorism by its name.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide attacker slammed a truck loaded with explosives into sand barriers outside a Baghdad police station Sunday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 30, police said.

The attacker detonated his charge at the Rashad police station in the eastern neighborhood of Mashtal around 2:50 p.m., said Capt. Mahir Abdul Satar.

Most of the 22 killed were civilians, police Col. Ala'a Salih said.

When the vast majority of your victims of a single attack are civilians, you're a terrorist. Pity the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge this. But make no mistake: Until the side that supposedly represents the good guys begins to act like the other guys are bad, you can expect to see these terrorist attacks continue for a very, very long time.

Our enemies are apparently "bombers" and "attackers." Just like us. Get it? You can scan the AP's report for yourself, but you won't find any reference to terrorists or murderers. These terms, you see, are reserved for their proper occasion, when U.S. troops attack.

Just for the record: These are bombers; these are terrorists.

Cynical, yes. But accurate.

Radical Islam

Joel Mowbray has an op-ed showing the relationship between terrorism and radical Islamism. Here's a taste:

Already, many have attempted to claim that the “reason� for the London attacks was Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq. What this ignores, however, is that adherents of al Qaeda don’t need a reason to attack other than the existence of freedom—a concept that goes against the core belief in Shari’a law and the necessity of Islamic states.

In the decade before 9/11, many U.S. targets were hit: the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers in 1996, the East Africa embassies in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Each time, we did nothing. Yet al Qaeda struck anyway on September 11.

An interesting read, though certainly not politically correct. And I think Mr. Mowbray is pointing to a very real tenet of Islam. It certainly was true a thousand years ago when converts to Islam were made by imposing (upon penalty of death) Islam on the peoples of conquered lands.

Scary, isn't it?

We must continue to run the course

Austin Bay has an op-ed up on the Weekly Standard entitled Nervous in Baghdad. Here's a taste:

My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off. By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform.

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

It is well worth reading (it is a two-page article).

Neocon maturation

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column up at OpinionJournal that puts the Bush doctrine into a historical perspective that, frankly, is pretty darn impressive.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry. You really need to read it.

The Neoconservative Convergence

Some once famously dissenting ideas now govern U.S. foreign policy, maturing as they go.


BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.

The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination. Mr. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves. His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of 15 free and independent states.

But we must not be retrospectively too severe. Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in the early 1990s, and Mr. Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Mr. Bush's other area of triumph--Iraq--that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.

Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf War, begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies, diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of U.N. sanctions. All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been fought far more easily--and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites, who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions--in 1991. One recalls with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the inconclusive end to the first Gulf War.

Still, the achievements of the elder Mr. Bush far outweigh the failures. The smooth and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire began, Saddam was stopped, and Arabia was saved. But then came the second, radically different experiment. For the balance of the 1990s, for reasons having nothing to do with foreign policy, realism was abruptly replaced by the classic liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

It is hard to be charitable in assessing the record. Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege." During its 7 1/2-year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

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Then came another radical change. By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Fla., this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy. One prominent columnist, speaking for the conventional wisdom of the moment, called the Bush project in Iraq "a childish fantasy." And this, from a friend of neoconservatism.

As for the liberals who had come on board the project of liberating Iraq, they took its perceived foundering as an opportunity to engage in a mass jumping of ship. Some justified their abandonment of the Bush doctrine on the grounds that it was they who had been betrayed--by an administration whose incompetence, mendacity, political opportunism and various other crimes had ruined a policy that would already have been crowned with success if only they had been in charge of postwar Iraq, calibrating brilliantly precise troop levels, calculating to three decimal places the required degree of de-Baathification, and overseeing just about every other operational detail according to the dictates of their own tactical genius.

Other liberals donned the guise of realists, who by the summer of 2004 were back in fashion. At the height of this new vogue, just before the November election, even John Kerry's advisers, noting that the liberal-internationalist critique of the war (namely, that it lacked international support and legitimacy) was not exactly winning converts, settled instead on a "realist" line of attack. From then on, Iraq would be known as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," which, translated, meant that we should be chasing terrorists cave-to-cave in Afghanistan rather than pursuing an ideological crusade in the Middle East.

If you add to this mix the classical realists, from Brent Scowcroft to Dimitri Simes, who had opposed the entire project from the beginning and were now penning their I-told-you-so's, there seemed scarcely anyone left on board the neoconservative ship. But the most interesting about-face was that of some professed neoconservatives themselves. Among these, the most prominent was Francis Fukuyama, whose lead article in the summer 2004 National Interest was a "realist" attack on the entire ideological underpinnings of the Iraq war and the liberationist idea. The article's very title, "The Neoconservative Moment," made the mocking suggestion, also very much in vogue, that neoconservative foreign policy was finished, that its moment had come and gone, that it had been done in by Iraq, by its own overweening arrogance, and by its blindness to the realist wisdom that failure in Iraq was, as Mr. Fukuyama put it, "predictable in advance."

As it happens, Mr. Fukuyama had neglected to make that prediction in advance; at the time of the war and during the months of debate preceding it, he had been silent. Moreover, from the perspective of today, even his retroactive prediction in summer 2004 of inevitable and catastrophic failure in Iraq appears doubtful, to say the least. Getting a retroactive prediction wrong is quite an achievement, but it tells you much about the intellectual climate just a year ago.

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Today, there is no euphoria regarding the Iraq project, but sobriety has replaced panic. Things have changed, and what changed them was four elections: two in the West, and two in the Middle East. First came the re-election in Australia of John Howard, a firm ally of the administration. This presaged the re-election of George W. Bush, which reaffirmed to the world America's staying power, gave popular legitimacy to the Bush doctrine, and established a clear mandate to continue the democratic project. The refusal of the American people last November to turn out a president who, rejecting an "exit strategy," pledged instead to remain until Iraqi self-governance had been secured, was a seminal moment.

The other two elections took place in the areas of our exertion: first the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed by the American media, then the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. The latter were a historical hinge point. After a string of other important steps in Iraq that had been confidently dismissed as impossible and certainly impossible to do on time--the writing of an interim constitution, the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government--came the greatest impossibility of all: free elections as scheduled. The overwhelming popular turnout, in what was essentially a referendum on the insurgency and on the democratic idea, sent a clear-cut message. Those who had said that the Iraqis, like Arabs in general, had no particular interest in self-government were wrong--as were those who claimed that the insurgency was a nationalist, anti-imperialist and widely popular movement.

This is hardly to say that things have not remained difficult in Iraq. The insurgency is still raging. It has the capacity to kill, to instill fear, and perhaps ultimately to destabilize the elected government. What the election did do, however, was to confirm what was already suggested by the insurgency's clear lack of any political program, any political wing, any ideology, indeed even any pretense of competing for hearts and minds. The election exposed the insurgency as an alliance of Baathist nihilism and atavistic jihadism, neither of which has a large constituency in Iraq.

And that is hardly all. The elections newly empowered fully 80% of the Iraqi population--the Kurds and the Shiites--and created an indigenous representative leadership with a life-and-death stake in defeating the insurgency. By giving that 80% the political and institutional means to build the necessary forces, the elections infinitely improved the chances that a stable, multiethnic, democratic Iraq can emerge, despite the current mayhem. As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, upon returning from a visit to the region:

"The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. . . . By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world."

The elections' effect on the wider Arab world was likewise both immediate and profound. Millions of Arabs watched on television as Iraqis exercised their political rights, and were moved to ask the obvious question: Why are Iraqis the only Arabs voting in free elections--and doing so, moreover, under American aegis and protection? The rest is so well known as barely to merit repeating. The Beirut spring. Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. Open demonstrations and the beginnings of political competition in Egypt. Women's suffrage in Kuwait. Small but significant steps toward democratization in the gulf. Bashar Assad's declared intent to legalize political parties in Syria, purge the ruling Baath party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and move toward a market economy. (Not that Assad is likely to do any of this, but the fact that he must pretend to be doing it shows the astonishing reach of the Bush doctrine to date.)

Mr. Ajami has called this (in the title of a recent article in Foreign Affairs) the "Autumn of the Autocrats." Not the winter--nothing is certain, and we know of many democratizing movements in the past that were successfully put down. There are too many entrenched dictatorships and kleptocracies in the region to declare anything won. What we can declare, with certainty, is the falsity of those confident assurances before the Iraq war, during the Iraq war and after the Iraq war that this project was inevitably doomed to failure because we do not know how to "do" democracy, and they do not know how to receive it.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation--a truth that on Jan. 30 even al-Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical "realism" that began with FDR's deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.

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The Iraqi elections had one final effect. They so acutely embarrassed foreign critics, especially in Europe, that we began to see a rash of headlines asking the rhetorical question: Was Bush Right? The answer to that is: Yes, so far. The democratic project has been launched, against the critics and against the odds. That in itself is an immense historical achievement. But success will require maturation--a neoconservatism of discrimination and restraint, prepared to examine both its principles and its practice in shaping a truly governing philosophy.

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last year, I tried to draw a distinction between a more expansive and a more restrictive neoconservative foreign policy. I called the two types, respectively, democratic globalism and democratic realism.

The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.

This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?

But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.

In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils. That means postponing radically destabilizing actions in places where the support of the current nondemocratic regime is needed against a larger existential threat to the free world. There is no need to apologize for that. In World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin against Hitler. (As Churchill said shortly after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.") This was a necessary alliance, and a temporary one: When we were done with Hitler, we turned our attention to Stalin and his successors.

During the subsequent war, the Cold War, we again made alliances with the devil, in the form of a variety of right-wing dictators, in order to fight the greater evil. Here, again, the partnership was necessary and temporary. Our deals with right-wing dictatorships were contingent upon their usefulness and upon the status of the ongoing struggle. Once again we were true to our word. Whenever we could, and particularly as we approached victory in the larger war, we dispensed with those alliances.

Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators. In 1986, we openly and decisively supported the Aquino revolution that deposed and exiled Marcos, and later in the '80s we pressed very hard for free elections in Chile that Mr. Pinochet lost, paving the way for the return of democracy.

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Alliances with dictatorships were justified in the war against fascism and the Cold War, and they are justified now in the successor existential struggle, the war against Arab/Islamic radicalism. This is not just theory. It has practical implications. For nothing is more practical than the question: After Afghanistan, after Iraq, what?

The answer is, first Lebanon, then Syria. Lebanon is next because it is so obviously ready for democracy, having practiced a form of it for 30 years after decolonization. Its sophistication and political culture make it ripe for transformation, as the massive pro-democracy demonstrations have shown.

Then comes Syria, both because of its vulnerability--the Lebanon withdrawal has gravely weakened Assad--and because of its strategic importance. A critical island of recalcitrance in a liberalizing region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border, Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous geopolitical advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.

Some conservatives (and many liberals) have proposed instead that we be true to the universalist language of the president's second inaugural address and go after the three principal Islamic autocracies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Not so fast, and not so hard. Autocracies they are, and in many respects nasty ones. But doing this would be a mistake.

In Egypt, we certainly have liberal resources that should be supported and encouraged. But, keeping in mind the Algerian experience, we should be wary of bringing down the whole house of cards and thereby derailing any progress from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Saudi Arabia has a Byzantine culture, and an equally Byzantine method of governance, which must be delicately reformed short of overthrow. And Pakistan, which has great potential for democracy, is simply too critical as a military ally in the war on al Qaeda to risk anything right now. Pervez Musharraf is no bastard; but even if he were, he is ours. We should be encouraging the evolution of democracy in all of these countries, but relentless and ruthless means--of the kind we employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and should, perhaps short of direct military invention, be employing in Syria--are better applied to enemies, not friends.

What is interesting is that the Bush administration, in practice, is proceeding precisely along these lines. It pushes on Hosni Mubarak, but gently. It moves even more gingerly with Saudi Arabia, fearing what may emerge in the short term if the royal kleptocracy is deposed. And, because Pakistan is so central to the war on terror, it disturbs not a hair on the head of Mr. Musharraf.

In short, the Bush administration--if you like, neoconservatism in power--has been far more inclined to pursue democratic realism and to consign democratic globalism to the realm of aspiration. This kind of prudent circumspection is, in fact, a practical necessity for governing in the real world. We should, for example, be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Indeed, the behavior of the Bush administration implies that in practice, the distinction between democratic realism and democratic globalism may collapse, because globalism is simply not sustainable.

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Another important sign of the maturing of neoconservative foreign policy is that it is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity. The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.

The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Ms. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Mr. Cheney served as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism--not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature.

What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy--so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts--have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.

This is not party discipline. It is compromise with reality, and convergence toward the middle. Above all, it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and an essayist for Time. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and in 2003 was a recipient of the Bradley Prize. This essay, in somewhat different form, was delivered in New York City in May as Commentary's first annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture, and it appears in the July/August issue of Commentary.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Michael Yon's latest

Michael Yon has a very interesting post about a terrorist weapons cache. He provides a lot more than just a narrative of finding, cataloguing, and disposing of the weapons found:

Part of the persistence of the insurgency results from a staggering availability of fighting materials. There are tons of explosives and munitions here in Mosul, with more streaming in every day, though mounting evidence strongly suggests this flow is abating. For example, the street price of 60mm "mortar bombs" was about $3/shot 9 months ago. Now it’s up nearly seven-fold to over $20. Car bomb incidents in Mosul, while still causing major damage to both military and civilians, have been declining. Whether this is a temporary dip or steady trend remains to be seen. Even if the ongoing flow were completely cut off, there is still a deep well of material on hand.

There are several pictures, as well. Recommended.

Refuting the "breeding ground" argument

Hugh Hewitt, at The Daily Standard , has posted an op-ed discussing some misconceptions about the cause of terrorism. Here's a taste:

The long years ahead in the global war on terrorism will be spent trying to undo the damage done by allowing the Islamist radicals a safe haven from which to export their ideology and to train and deploy their converts.

His article is worth your consideration.

al Qaeda and publicity

Austin Bay, at The Washington Times states the obvious. Here's an excerpt:

What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists' capabilities. This suggests winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately requires denying terrorists weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is now al Qaeda's greatest strategic capability: media magnification and enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Obvious, and yet, the news media still seems to have missed it.

Perhaps the poverty . . .

. . . is one of a moral nature.

Perhaps the poverty . . .

. . . is one of a moral nature.

Covert (but very real) ties

This op-ed by Claudia Rosett at OpinionJournal is one of many that states what has now become very obvious -- there really was a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda.

The primary collection of evidence to which Ms. Rosett refers can be found here. It is impressive.

You can read Ms. Rosett's entire article in the extended entry.

Saddam and al Qaeda

There's abundant evidence of connections.


BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

President Bush has given some good speeches lately, including his talk June 29 at Fort Bragg, N.C., in which he stressed some of the reasons for going into Iraq, and his address this past Monday at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., in which he talked about the role of intelligence in defeating terrorists and stressed that "the heart of our strategy is this: Free societies are peaceful societies."

But there's another speech Mr. Bush still needs to give. That would be the one in which he says: I told you so--there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

In some quarters, that would of course provoke the usual outrage. Since the U.S.-led coalition went outside the corrupt United Nations to topple the Baathist regime in Baghdad more than two years ago, it has become an article of faith that there was no such connection. Typical of the tenor in both the media and western politics is an article that ran last month in The Economist, describing Iraq as Mr. Bush's "most visible disaster" and opining that "even Mr. Bush's supporters admit that he exaggerated Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda."

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If anything, Mr. Bush in recent times has not stressed Saddam's ties to al Qaeda nearly enough. More than ever, as we now discuss the bombings in London, or, to name a few others, Madrid, Casablanca, Bali, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, or the many bombings in Israel--as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center in both 1993 and 2001--it is important to understand that terrorist connections can be real, and lethal, and portend yet more murder, even when they are shadowy, shifting and complex. And it is vital to send the message to regimes in such places as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran that in matters of terrorist ties, the Free World is not interested in epistemological debates over what constitutes a connection. We are not engaged in a court case, or a classroom debate. We are fighting a war.

But in the debates over Iraq, that part of the communication has become far too muddied. Documents found in Iraq are doubted; confessions by detainees are received as universally suspect; reports of meetings between officials of the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda operatives are discounted as having been nothing more than empty formalities, with such characters shuttling between places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, perhaps to share tea and cookies. Any conclusions or even inferences about contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda are subjected these days to the kind of metaphysical test in which existence itself becomes a highly dubious philosophical problem, mired in the difficulty of ever really being certain about anything at all.

Certainty is then imposed in the form of assurances that there was no connection. This notion that there was no Saddam-al Qaeda connection is invoked as an argument against the decision to go to war in Iraq, and enjoined as part of the case that we were safer with Saddam in power, and that, even now, the U.S. and its allies should simply cut and run.

Actually, there were many connections, as Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, spell out under the headline "The Mother of All Connections." Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

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The difficulty lies in piecing together the picture, which is indeed murky (that being part of the aim in covert dealings between tyrants and terrorist groups)--but rich enough in depth and documented detail so that the basic shape is clear. By the time Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn are done tabulating the cross-connections, meetings, Iraqi Intelligence memos unearthed after the fall of Saddam, and information obtained from detained terrorist suspects, you have to believe there was significant collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda. Or you have to inhabit a universe in which there will never be a demonstrable connection between any of the terrorist attacks the world has suffered over the past dozen years, or any tyrant and any aspiring terrorist. In that fantasyland, all such phenomena are independent events.

Mr. Bush, in calling attention to the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the first place, did the right thing. For the U.S. president to confirm that clearly and directly at this stage, with some of the abundant supporting evidence now available, might seem highly controversial. But reviving that controversy would help settle it more squarely in line with the truth.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Homicidal Maniacs

Greyhawk, over at the Mudville Gazette has a post entitled Building Small Coffins. It will make you weep.

It did me . . .

"But None Ever Cried for Me"

Read this.

Terrorism's Root Causes

Cal Thomas, over at JWR has an interesting column about terrorism's root causes. Here's a taste:

No amount of G8 aid to the "Palestinians," nor a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, will pacify these current and potential killers. Even if Israel were obliterated (the goal of much of the Muslim world), the terror would continue until the entire non-Islamic world is under their control.

This is not the belief of an "Islamophobic" bigot. This is what they say in their sermons and media, teach in their schools, and believe in their hearts. It matters little that "the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists," to quote a familiar Western mantra. It matters a great deal that most terrorists are Muslims. The sooner Western leaders and Western media begin stating what is obvious to most people; the quicker the real root cause can be dealt with.

The excuses given by Westerners and many Muslim clerics for terrorism are just that: excuses.

Though Thomas's tone is strident, he makes sense. It's worth reading. And thinking about.

[Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.]

From Hostage to Hunter

This post, by Chrenkoff, shows a former hostage in a new light. It turns out that the terrorists had kidnapped a wolf in sheep's clothing . . .

Call to Action

Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal is saying that it is time for us, as a nation, to put up or shut up about really reckoning with global terrorism.

And he is 100% correct. Here's an excerpt:

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

The entire op-ed is in the extended entry. And it's a good one.

'Close Guantanamo'?

Our politics fiddles while London burns.


BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, July 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

London's images of blood, toil, tears and sweat were seen by all the world's civilized people yesterday, and I think there is one thing they would agree on: You don't blow up the bus.

In cities everywhere men and women board buses daily for work or school, and you don't need a U.N. declaration on human rights to understand that part of the deal is that no one blows up the bus. You don't blow up the office building. You don't blow up the train. It's too easy. It is the most cowardly cheap shot one can imagine. But they keep doing it.

So maybe for starters, we don't want to close Guantanamo.

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

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Every Islamic terrorist, from bin Laden and al-Zarqawi down to the next suicide bomber, knows how politics in the West works now. They know that many people of the West react to acts of violence differently than they did in 1940 when Winston Churchill demanded "Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be."

But there were no cameras and satellite feeds set up on every corner of that death-strewn road. Yesterday's attack produced another new-media first: Grainy video images fed by a cell phone from a bombed subway tunnel. If the American people had seen daily the up-close reality of every battle and bomb in 1943, might we have "withdrawn" before June 1944?

For bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the relatively small bombs they set off in Iraq or London are a second-grade weapon. Their large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

We think we're merely observers of events such as London's awful scenes yesterday or the Baghdad car bombs. No, if you watch television, you're on the battlefield. And some of us don't want to be there. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi set off these bombs to pound the combatants at home, or in Congress, to make them put their hands on their head and, in effect, surrender. Suffering living-room shell shock, some do. The experience of seeing battlefield death or blown-up people from the couch is not normal.

What happened yesterday in London was an attack on the modern world by pre-modernists. Tony Blair said, "Our values will outlive theirs." Maybe. Ours might not, though, if against theirs of wanton murder, our answer is "close Guantanamo." But there is a better example of the fundamental inability of our politics to sustain seriousness against such a threat: the Bolton nomination to the U.N.

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We know that Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and the Senate Democrats believe Mr. Bolton is temperamentally unfit to represent us at the U.N. Less well known is that in April 2004, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540 to prevent proliferation of "nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery"--what the terrorists will ultimately win with if they can get it.

Resolution 1540 outlaws A.Q. Khan-type networks, including state participation. It is a Chapter Seven action, and thus binding. It requires members to report their compliance measures in detail. It requires member states to "establish, develop, review and maintain appropriate effective national export and trans-shipment controls over such items."

We should want this if we indeed believe that a complex, globalized threat exists. Its success, however, depends on the will of the Security Council and whether its five Permanent Members will punish with sanctions any country not in compliance. Are you already ahead of me on this?

The one person in the world with the knowledge, experience and will to conceivably make 1540 work is John Bolton. At State Mr. Bolton ran the Security Proliferation Initiative, whose goals precisely parallel those of Resolution 1540. The SPI under Mr. Bolton, for example, helped to shut down the A.Q. Khan nuclear-weapon materials network.

Mr. Bolton is famous for his views of North Korea, but he is expert in the activities of one other incorrigible proliferator--Iran. Yesterday I asked a high international official, whose job is to develop global anti-terror structures, which states are still actively supporting terrorism. He said, "There are two, Syria and Iran."

If the U.S. Senate wanted to send a signal of resolve and seriousness to whoever bombed London, Democrats would join with Republicans their first day back to dispatch proven anti-terror warrior John Bolton straight to the U.N. They won't. They'll keep playing political fiddles while London burns.

The standard response to all this is that if George Bush and Tony Blair hadn't done Iraq, we'd all be as one in the war on terror. The standard response before September 11, was that if we weren't so close to terror-beset Israel, none of this would ever happen. For 30 years, the standard response to this terror has gotten many of us killed.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

I think it is time that our distinguished Senators in Washington, D.C. lay aside their petty politics, get off of their candy asses, and buckle down to the very serious long-term task of supporting the war on terrorism!

GWOT, by Captain Ed

Captain Ed, over at the Captain's Quarters, does a good job deconstructing a Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial about how to fight terrorism.

It's well thought out and well worth reading.

Efraim Halevi on the GWOT

Efraim Halevi used to be the head of the Isreali Intelligence service, Mossad. He has some pertinent things to say in a column published by the Jerusalem Post about the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

Here is a taste:

We are in the throes of a world war, raging over the entire globe and characterized by the absence of lines of conflict and an easily identifiable enemy. There are sometimes long pauses between one attack and another, consequently creating the wrong impression that the battle is all over, or at least in the process of being won.

Generally speaking, the populations at large are not involved in the conflict, and by and large play the role of bystanders. But once in a while, these innocents are caught up in the maelstrom and suffer the most cruel and wicked of punishments meted out by those who are not bound by any rules of conduct or any norms of structured society. For a while, too short a while, we are engrossed with the sheer horror of what we see and hear, but, with the passage of time, our memories fade and we return to our daily lives, forgetting that the war is still raging out there and more strikes are sure to follow.

It is well worth our time to read the words of a man who has been dealing with terrorism for so many years of his life. He makes good sense, too. And he's not afraid to call a spade, well, a spade . . .

Brit Grit

And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none.

-- Sir Winston Churchill, BBC Broadcast, 14 July 1940

Amen.

Syria vs. Al Qaeda

Here is an article on the World Times Online website that reports on a two-day battle between Syrian authorities and terrorists bound for Iraq. Get this -- the battle took place in Syria near Damascus.

Maybe America can work with Syria in the war against terrorism, after all.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

From the WTC to Baghdad

Daniel Henninger posted an op-ed with the subtitle September 11 and the collapse of national unity. His words are well worth our consideration.

I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

Ground Zero to Baghdad
September 11 and the collapse of national unity.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Fourth of July weekend begins today, and among the verities certain to occur is that every waking hour in four days people will be standing at the high wire fence near Church Street in lower Manhattan, staring at Ground Zero, at what's left of what we now call "September 11."

We know these visitors to Ground Zero will be there looking into this austere pit, because those of us who work nearby and walk past it see them there, every day. They came the moment they were allowed to on Dec. 30, 2001, at the famous viewing platform, and have come each day since, amid the disgusting cold winds of February and impossible August heat. But if their presence is a certainty, its meaning, of course, has gone up for grabs.

Nearly four years after what happened on September 11, we must now debate whether a linkage exists between that day and the war in Iraq. After President Bush associated the two several times in his defense of Iraq this week at Fort Bragg, both the House and Senate Democratic leaders pounded the linkage.

House Leader Nancy Pelosi was explicit: "He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq." Senate Leader Harry Reid said the September 11 references don't offer "a way forward" in Iraq and only remind us that bin Laden "is still on the loose." To be able to separate September 11 and Iraq into wholly unrelated realms may be possible for very smart people--but not everyone.

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On a very warm Wednesday this past May, during Fleet Week in New York City, a passerby at Ground Zero encountered some 150 astonishingly young Marines in fatigues, wet with sweat after a run, standing at attention on the site's edge, outside the fence. They were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and they appeared to be in the middle of a formal ceremony. Yesterday the organizer of the May event, Maj. Dave Anderson, explained they were laying a wreath to honor the victims of September 11, and that the three Marines chosen to lay the wreath had earned Purple Hearts while serving in Iraq. When the ceremony ended, he said, a woman came out of the crowd, crying, and grabbed his wrist to say that her brother had died in there that day, and she said to him, "When people see you Marines doing this, they'll know that you will take the fight forward."

So it is that below the level of exquisite analysis now common in our politics, some Americans do exist who credit a connection between September 11 and events in Iraq. Perhaps there will be a poll out in a few weeks that will expose their sentiment to the greater weight and rigor of statistical science.

In time even Pearl Harbor became more a symbol than the bloody reality that ultimately hurled American forces against a Germany that didn't attack us at Pearl Harbor. But time seems to pass faster today. The first Fourth of July after September 11 was a day of national unity, in sorrow but also in belief that the U.S. had to go on offense, over there, against the force that had hit us. Now there is no unity; September 11, the war in Iraq, pretty much anything George Bush does and even Afghanistan is a fair target.

After Mr. Bush delivered the speech on Iraq that many said, rightly, was overdue, David Letterman made jokes about the war. DNC Chairman Howard Dean dismissed it as the "darkness of divisiveness" and "pandering to fear." John Murtha, the party's top spokesmen on military affairs, said, "I believe they are going to cut and run." A Times reporter announced as well that "for the first time," Afghans are "feeling uneasy about the future."

The day following the president's speech, architect David Childs unveiled the latest design of the long-overdue tower intended to replace the twin towers in downtown Manhattan. If we must have an office building in this space so the Port Authority can restart its tax flows, and if it must be a "designed" 1,776-foot-high skyscraper, Mr. Childs's building is perfectly acceptable. But no, Ground Zero is first of all about one's politics now, so for the New York Times architecture critic, Mr. Childs's tall building "is an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power."

We've watched September 11 drift from unity of purpose to unhinged vituperation. The partisanship is easy to dismiss, but I believe the Bush team's deep disdain of a hostile opposition media has caused it to miss--until now--the need to organize a home front to support the remarkable sacrifice in Iraq. This failure may prove to be the one unforgivable thing.

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As to September 11's stern symbol--Ground Zero--its place is secure no matter what New York's politics dumps into the Port Authority's 16 acres. The only true memorial that will ever be--that huge hole in the ground, that zero, a filthy, ripped and awesome aftermath--has been there to see for more than 3 1/2 years.

This is what it means to visit the memorial there now. A steel fence is on all four sides. On two of them, the Port Authority has hung simple descriptions and pictures of what happened there, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. You can read a short history of the two towers. You can read the names of each person who died there that day. After people absorb these things, they get very close to the fence and stare into the open space. Then they take some pictures, and then they go somewhere else.

By now anyone with sufficient desire or need has come to Ground Zero. By now unfathomable numbers have seen that hole in its barest form. They have taken the experience home with them. I think September 11 is going to be properly remembered, no matter what happens in lower Manhattan now. It remains for this administration to do the same for the commitments already made to Iraq and in Iraq.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Let's get over it . . .

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent opinion piece about the silliness surrounding the allegations of Koran mistreatment going on at Gitmo. Here's a taste:

Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.

You should check out the rest.

And they call these monsters "freedom fighters"?

Recently, an insurgent hid behind a child in order to attack Americans. The tactic came as no surprise to the soldiers here. Terrorists routinely play wounded or feign their surrender in order to get close enough to launch an attack on Coalition or Iraqi Forces. In January I wrote about one bomber who grabbed the hand of a small child while she was playing on a sidewalk. Smiling, he walked with the child in hand, approaching some Iraqi police, and exploded. Americans standing close by were unharmed.

The rest of the post is here.

Major K in Baghdad

Major K has a very interesting blog that details (as much as operational security [opsec] allows) his experiences there in Iraq. He has a post dated 3 May 2005 that talks about the "Sunni Triangle", the insurgency, and IEDs. He sums the post up with this:

The most important thing is the will of the Iraqi people. The overwhelming majority here hate the terrorists, and their hatred grows with every IED.