Al Qaeda in Iraq calls for violence, destruction of 'American empire'

The Nazis tried it.

The Fascists tried it.

The Communists tried it.

Next...

This only serves to further prove the delusiveness of blaming the emergence of terrorism on the American 'imperialism' and the Western 'oppression' as a whole. Al-Qaeda makes it clear that even if the US pulls out of Iraq, the jihad is going to continue, only under a different pretext. As Robert has repeatedly argued, the excuses are always changing; only the jihad is constant.

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dolphin, CAGE co-founder.
http://www.acage.org

I think that Mona Charen said it best in her editorial of September 12, 2001. She wrote in her closing comments that in the "coming war" we would have to be prepared to be "merciless" in order to prevail.

I cannot forget those words. And we have not yet pulled our biggest, best weapons from the closet.

It's awfully close to the time for us to "take off the gloves" and start fighting this war like we intend to win it.

The question is - do we have the stomach to do it?

Robert once correctly said "while there are moderate Muslims, Islam itself is not moderate."

Tiny minority of extremists world map.

Adherents of militant Islam account for some 15-20 percent of the Muslim world, according to Daniel Pipes, an expert on the subject. This means that more than 150 million people are part of the problem. To make matters worse, they hide among the moderates. They don't wear uniforms and rarely identify themselves." http://www.meforum.org/article/168

"The call for jihad goes on until doomsday, whether there is an imam calling for it or not."

I am very pleased that Al Qaeda released this message.........will the Western people finally get it in their head that this is a RELIGIOUS WAR.

Also......it was interesting to see the other day how Muslims in Iraq had no problem going to the streets in mass protest against the new Iraqi Constitution......yet the western Muslim can't seem to find their WALKING SHOES to protest terrorist bombings....mmmmmmm

JohnnyDub,

Minor correction: Charen's article was September 14, 2001.

kwg1

"Adherents of militant Islam account for some 15-20 percent of the Muslim world, according to Daniel Pipes, an expert on the subject. This means that more than 150 million people are part of the problem. To make matters worse, they hide among the moderates. They don't wear uniforms and rarely identify themselves."

Yes: people who object that it's not all Muslims who are a terrorist problem but only a tiny fraction of the total Muslim population seem to forget the other factors that effectively make that fraction (however "tiny" or large it may be) virtually impossible to demarcate and isolate in order to fight it, and I would add a couple more to Pipes' list:

1) they don't wear uniforms and don't identify themselves

2) they hide among the moderates

3) the larger pool of "moderates" in fact includes many who are more or less passively or actively sympathetic to the terrorists -- this makes the "hiding" that much more effective

4) this fraction is furthermore drawing on the same cultural/religious matrix as the larger pool, and is in fact crystallizing its ideals more clearly and fervently, while representatives of the larger pool can't seem to ideologically distance themselves from the extremist fraction without, at best, getting into absurd tangles of double-talk and equivocation (and at worst seem to be engaging in elaborate deception in collusion with the terrorist ideals)

5) this fraction is not located in one or two or three easily identifiable localities, but represents millions of Muslims who could be anywhere -- from Tanzania to the Philippines to Moscow to Pakistan to Berlin to London to Marseilles to Casablanca to Paraguay to Tampa, Florida, and anywhere in between

and finally,

6) members of this fraction can arise at any given moment, any given day, in any given village, town or city of the world where there are Muslims --can arise out of the larger pool of so-called moderates, through some psychological crisis or emotional process that has lead them to focus all their resentment and hatred and new-found religious dedication and plug it into a ready-made ancient doctrine of cleansing all their sins through an ultimate martyr's sacrifice in the context of a jihad against all those amorphous forces that have (in their minds) made their lives so miserable and which threaten the tissue of that organism more important than their own body, the Umma.

Does anyone know?: How many adversaries of any government continue to tell those governments precisely what they intend to do, do it, and the governments at risk keep saying: "Ah come on you don't reallly mean that, most of you are just having a bad hair day that's all?"

Answer: I used to think all but Israel but after Gaza I am not sure even Israel is still awake.

Hopefully, as previously mentioned, the continued heart beat of : "We are going to kill you" will waken the world to the real situation we are in. Hopefully, column's like JHW and others will spread the word and be spread and spread until our government leaders wakeup, or they will die in their "sleep" from Islamist's terrorists once again attacking us at home because we chose rather than to fight to "feel their pain" and remain politically correct to our deaths.

kwg1

I don't believe for a second that this is a religious war, but if it WERE, then Bush and the Republicans lost Iraq:

Tehran, Iran, Aug. 26 – A senior Iranian cleric welcomed on Friday the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iraq and hailed the country’s new constitution as one based on “Islamic precepts.”
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads the powerful ultra-conservative Guardian Council, told worshippers in Tehran’s Friday prayers, “Fortunately, after years of effort and expectations in Iraq, an Islamic state has come to power and the constitution has been established on the basis of Islamic precepts.”

“We must congratulate the Iraqi people and authorities for this victory,” he said.

Jannati, who is a top confidant of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that all justice-seeking counties of the world “have no model other than the Islamic revolution in Iran to turn to.”

“Lebanese Hezbollah and the state of Iraq are not the only supporters of the Islamic revolution,” he said.

Referring to the West as Global Arrogance, the hard-line cleric said, “No matter how many stones they throw in our path, they cannot prevent the spread of the Islamic revolution in the world.” (emphasis added).

Orig source: http://tinyurl.com/8kf5a

For more go to: http://billmon.org/archives/002115.html

More in today's press on Bush's surrender:

Blog writeups:
where you can read this:

And still Bush has the unmitigated chutzpah to prattle on and on about "staying the course?" Since when was "the course" in Iraq an Islamist state, a rollback of women's rights, concessions to Saddam's supporters, and appeasement of the Moqtada? This is well past bordering on insanity.

Update: Juan Cole sums the absurdity of Bush's position here:

Poor Bush. . . now is reduced to pleading with a pro-Iranian cleric to please make nice with the ex-Baathists. And he isn't even succeeding in the plea!

As I said, that's some "staying the course." I don't recall seeing "we must stay in Iraq so I can beg the Islamists to make concessions to the Baathists" in any of Bush's speeches.

More here:
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1845

The most important statement in the document above is the last sentence in the excerpt below:

"We believe that those who follow these beliefs and the provisions of faith are true Muslims and anyone who denounces any of these beliefs and conditions is an infidel even if he still claims to be a Muslim."

It calls the Shiite faith 'a confession of polytheism and rejectionism.'"

With that last sentence, the view of Zarqawi, of every Sunni Arab in Saudi Arabia and of a great many Sunnis elsewhere, is expressed: the Shi'a are not true Muslims, for they believe in that worst of all things to believe in -- "polytheism" and are guilty of shirk.

Note that. Sunnis calling Shi'a, essentially, infidels, and as the text also says, someone can be "an infidel even if he still claims to be a Muslim."

Yet this stark hostility, hatred, denunciation of Shi'a as Infidels is something we are supposed to ignore? Should we not, rather, take away from it the two most important conclusions.

These conclusions are:

1) It is a quixotic task to build an "Iraqi" army and an "Iraqi" police that will defend this new "democracy" of "Iraq" on behalf of the "Iraqi people." Very few people in Iraq consider themselves "Iraqi people." They consider themselves Kurds or Arabs, Sunni or Shi'a. Why is it that the American government cannot understand that, and continues to hallucinate about the possibliities? And why does it further impose on its officers and men serving in Iraq the duty of trying to overcome a history, and attitudes, that simply cannot be overcome? It is cruel to force American soldiers to create out of Sunni and Shi'a (or Kurd and Arab) a "unified police unit." What will happen if Sunni and Shi'a police, supposedly working together, try to arrest some Sunnis for attacks on Shi'a -- or vice-versa? What will happen if Sunni and Shi'a army units together are sent to Ramadi, or Fallujah, to suppress the insurgency which is not, pace practically everyone, a "Sunni-led" insurgency -- it is entirely Sunni.

Some have been confused by the presence, and the nastiness, and the attacks on Americans, by the forces of that clown Moqtada al-Sadr, who look s like old Hollywood's idea of a mad mullah, seyes glowering behind an expression of a demented primitive, a tinhorn would-be Khomeini who has attracted los de abajo, the lowest, most easily inflamed, Shi'a poor -- who can be lead around by the nose, and that is what he is doing. Neither Sunni nor really Shi'a (he and the forces of what may be called "respectiable" or "middle-class" Shi'ism, while not friendly to the Infidel Americans, are at least thinking and acting on a higher plane than the troglodytic Moqtada al-Sadr). But he is a problem apart -- not so much a problem for "Iraq" as for the Shi'a of the Sciri and Dawa Parties, and for al-Sistani.

2) The hatred of Sunnis for Shi'a is not a passing phenoomenon. It is not something concocted in the last few years by those in the Sunni "insurgency." It reflects not only the past 80 years of Shi'a opposition to being included, as the former vilayet of Basra, in a political unit where they would be dominated by the Sunni of the vilayet of Baghdad. In 1920 there was a Shi'a revolt against being incorporated into a Sunni-run state. The British put it down. For their efforts they got nothing in return, and eventually had to leave Iraq themselves, in 1932, hoping that things would work out -- whatever that phrase "work out" might mean.

The Shi'a cannot forget the 15 years of murder and mayhem brought upon them by Saddam Hussein's largely Sunni forces. They cannot forget the eight years of war (1980-1988) with Iran when they were whipped up, or at times simply whipped, into battle by their Sunni (Ba'athist) masters and overlords. They cannot forget the 80 years in which the Sunnis ran things, and took the money from the oilfields north and south and did not share it with the Shi'a villagers.

And they cannot forget the 1300 years of Sunni persecution of Shi'a, a persecution that goes way back, and can be seen today in Pakistan, with attacks on Shi'a mosques, in Saudi Arabia (with the Shi'a of the oil-bearing Hasa Province), and elsewhere, including Yemen where the Shi'a and Sunnis are about evenly matched, and constantly near to open hostlities.

This Sunni-Shi'a hostility is either being ignored or, still worse, is treated as if it is something to overcome, and that the duty of Infidels is to unify the Sunnis and Shi'a of Iraq. Why? For no good reason -- merely to justify the Administration in some of its ill-thought out post-war policies, and in the positively hallucinatory ideas it has about the nature of the people in Iraq, what they are capable of, and what they want.

This hostility should be exploited, with nothing done to limit or diminish it.

Will it? Only when the Administration and its loyal supporters (see Victor Davis Hanson) forget about the simpletons and idiots who call for an American withdrawal from Iraq, and instead listen to the non-simpoletons, and non-idiots, who call for what seems -- but only seems -- to be the same policy, but in fact is based on entirely different considerations and plans.

The war to defend all Infidels is too important for a continued misallocation of resources -- men, materiel, money, and morale. It would be terrible if someone whose previous statements have shown a willingness to misunderstand Islam, and to appease Muslims, even greater than those we have seen -- a man such as Senator Hagel, whose reasons for urging that American forces be withdrawn are entirely different from my own, and would not be accmpanied, or followed by, the series of acts that must necessarily accompany or follow such withdrawal if it is to be interpreted properly by the Muslim enemy, and by Infidels as well -- not least in Europe.

I disagreed with the invasion in 2003 because I didn't think we could ever build a democracy there.

Bush has to figure out what our objectives are in Iraq. I am not sure why a constitution and democratic elections should have been an objective when we got in. Either we had to overthrow Saddam or we didn't. In some ways, there was a fear that Saddam was going to get back at the U.S. and the Gulf States as a result of 1991. But he's out now.

I think the constitution and the democratic elections have just completely added to the stress level over there. Suppose the council had appointed Allawi to a 3 year term and hadn't tried to resolve the major issues permanently.
Bush's moves to free the economy in Iraq haven't helped. What you want in this type of situation is control. Every Arab dictator keeps control of the economy. A major reason why they have been successful in maintaining power.

Anyway, Bush has to rethink what we are trying to do over there. At this point, maybe we should just try to be the deciding warlord in there and take home most of the troops.

Hugh,

Nice post. Did you read Wesley Clark's op-ed in WaPo yesterday? I don't think any major politicians now are calling for withdrawal, so I suggest you are indulging in a strawman there, but on the whole I agree. About the ignorance of current admin, remember Wolfowitz's claim that Iraq did not have a history of ethnic strife? Context was why US would have a smooth time of holding country together.

DavidE said: "Anyway, Bush has to rethink what we are trying to do over there. At this point, maybe we should just try to be the deciding warlord in there and take home most of the troops."

So when we don't have enough to control the place, we are supposed to stay topdog with FEWER?

Work continues on building 14 permanent military bases -- a point studiously ignored by the press. But if RPGs can bring down the supply helicopters... can they be supplied indefinitly in a hostile land?

"Work continues on building 14 permanent military bases -- a point studiously ignored by the press.."
-- from a posting above

Unless those bases are in Kurdistan, they are a complete waste of money. Wheelus in Libya, the airbase in Morocco, the bases in Saudi Arabia, the CENTO alliance (Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and the U.S. and U.K.), the Defense Pact of 1954 between the United States and Pakistan --it's all gone with the wind, those days of wine and roses, or rather, fruit juice and roses from Gulistan.

To update the soundtrack -- when will they ever learn? For godsake, all we are asking is -- Give War A Chance. Let those Sunnis and Shi'a do whatever they will do, while we stand back and watch, or covertly supply the Kurds.

That's it. No nation building. No nonsense about democracy. Give War In Iraq A Chance. It will do more to divide and demoralize Islam -- and to keep Iran occupied and preoccupied while the American government spoils the Iranian government's little Intel Science Project.

Please, Give War a Chance.

"Give War In Iraq A Chance. It will do more to divide and demoralize Islam -- and to keep Iran occupied and preoccupied while the American government spoils the Iranian government's little Intel Science Project."

It could do as much to divide and demoralize over here. If this little experiment in nation building does not work, I fear we will eventually see the nukes fly...after a few have been detonated here in the US.

But that may happen no matter what.

"It could do as much to divide and demoralize over here. If this little experiment in nation building does not work, I fear we will eventually see the nukes fly."
--- from a posting above

Why would removing American troops, all the while pretending to do it with some reluctance, repeating something to the effect that "we have done all we can, we can do no more, and we wish the 'Iraqi people' well," cause division and demoralization "over here"? Those who support an all-out campaign to contain Islam and its supporters, and assorted fifth-columnists, will be grimly pleased. MoveOn.org, Jane Fonda, Juan Cole, many political figures, will have to applaud the measure -- they cannot insist that the American soldiers remain, though some will get wind of what is really going on and, alarmed, begin to demand that "we keep troops there for Reconstruction" because "we can't just abandon Iraq which had been such a functioning state and now look at it" and "we broke it, we fix it" -- but all of that is so self-evidently idiotic that few will listen, and all those who have no clear views, except that they want American troops home, and American money no longer squandered, will be glad to support that new policy. And aside from the obstinate cheerleaders of Nation-Building and Democracy-Is-On-the-March among the Bright Young Conservatives, many will sense the change in the policy and in the air, and get with the program -- the very program that has been suggested here, nearly two years ago, and has been endlessly repeated, often deliberately verbatim from previous postings (for pedagogic reasons).

"If this little experiment in nation building will not work" -- well, it hasn't worked. It won't work. It ignores the nature of Iraq. By now the learning curve should be steep enough for more people to see this, and to begin to understand that this is not a "Sunni-led" insurgency -- it is, as stated above, a Sunni insurgency, designed to keep Sunnis from losing power (the main interest of the former supporters of the regime among the Sunnis) and to destroy the Infidel Shi'a (the main interest of Zarqaqi, once he has -- as he sees it -- removed their protector, the American soldiers).

"If this little experiment doesn't....I fear we will eventually see the nukes fly." Where is the logical link here? Why would war between Sunni and Shi'a, or an independent Kurdish state (promised back in 1920 or so, and only still-born because of the desire of Western powers to placate Turkey in 1924), make it more likely that "nukes would fly" in this country? In fact, this permanent fault-line, running through Iraq, separating Shi'a and Sunni, would be a wonderful thing for the Infidel world, and the more money and men and attention it attracts from Muslims outside, the better.

Let Iraq be their tarbaby -- not ours.

I don't want us to play the part of Brer Bear much longer. It's exhausting.

al Qaeda calls Americans in Iraq occupiers of Islamic land. I seem to remember that the original inhabitats of Iraq were Assyrian Christians.

Another "land" conquered and decimated by Islam.

To quote George Bush, "Bring 'em on, Allah"!

A lesson in Geopolitics:

It isn't about Iraq. It is about Saudi Arabia, and
they never believed that someday we would have "boots on the ground" next to them in a position to pressure them.

Saudi Arabia is the major source of funding for Islamic terrorism.

KWG1:

Thank you. I stand corrected.

"It isn't about Iraq. It is about Saudi Arabia, and
they never believed that someday we would have "boots on the ground" next to them in a position to pressure them.
--- from a poster above

The poster above apparently believes that remaining in Iraq is a goood thing, despite all the lives lost or the men wounded, or money spent, or equipment desert-degraded, or morale in what thoughtful officers and men have learned, however brave a face they put on it, however loyally they express themselves, is an impossible undertaking -- creating out of people who do not merely dislike but actually hate each other, and some of whom will never willingly surrender the power they once possessed (the Sunnis), others who will not after having experienced massacres and 80 years of dominance and 1300 years of persecution and murder and being regarded as Infidels permit themselves to be so dominated (the Shi'a), and yet another group that, never having been granted the indpendence it was promised after World War I, and having experienced autonomy for the past 14 years, is not going to accept anything less than that full autonomy, and if it can, will seize the moment to fight for independence and the oil wealth that, after all, has been stolen from the Kurds for the past 60 years by the Arab masters of Iraq.

To hear the usual conspiratorial antisemites talk, it was Israel that was the chief beneficiary of the war against Saddam Hussein. Nonsense. Anyone who goes back and reads all the reports will find that the Israelis kept warning that Iran was by far the more important threat, and that nothing should be done to take the Infidel eye off that particular ball.

In fact, it was the Saudis who were delighted with the removal of their chief enemy and menace, Saddam Hussein. It was Prince Bandar who was privy to the invasion plans, and allowed to see things that no other foreigner or foreign government was allowed to see in advance. The Saudis are delighted that Saddam Hussein is gone.

What difference does it make if those famous "boots" are "on the ground" in Iraq? They have already been on the ground for years, at the invitation of the Saudi government, at several airbases, where our airmen are treated with contumely by the o'erweening Saudis, but also as necessary guarantors of the safety of the corrupt Al-Saud, as before they were regarded as protectors against an Iraqi attack. And the American soldiers do not have to be in Iraq to be close by -- there are American bases in Qatar, and one in Kuwait. Indeed, the smaller sheikhdoms of the Gulf are not in any sense pro-American, but they know that the big bully of the Gulf is Saudi Arabia itself, and so just as the Saudis had the Americans come in to protect them from Iraq, Qatar (and Kuwait) have allowed the Americans to build bases to guarantee them against aggression, either from Iran or a new regime in Iraq, or most likely, from Saudi
Arabia.

They have not forgotten that the Saudis seized part of Abu Dhabi (the Buraimi Oasis). They have not forgotten that the Saudis have consistently meddled in the politics of Yemen, and supported one side against the leftists supported by Nasser's Egypt. They have not forgotten that the Saudis supported the Dhofar Rebellion in Oman. No, Saudi Arabia has always been a threat, and remains it -- and that is a main reason for some of the smaller sheikhdoms, much as they despise Infidels, are willing to have American troops there -- to guarantor assorted Al-Thani and Al-Sabah families from assorted Al-Saud depredations.

We are not "pressuring" Saudi Arabia. We should be reading them the riot act. We should be helping to inflame the Shi'a in Hasa (the oil-bearing region, which might, if suppressed by the Saudis, and in order to prevent the loss of Saudi oil the American forces just might have to seize those oilfields and keep them running and, oh yes, nicely distributing the wealth not to a thieving ruling family of princes and princelings, but to a far wider slice of Saudi society, and perhaps to poor Arabs elsewhere (would they, could they, object?), and then taking a certain amount as repayment for the job of securing those fields and producing that oil. And, oh yes, I almost forgot -- we need to be paid back for all the expenses incurred because of the Saudi-financed and Saudi-supported terrorist attacks, such as that of 9/11, and for the cost of monitoring Saudi-financed mosques and madrasas that have been steadily preaching hatred and warfare against Infidels, all over the United States and the Western world. So just how much of that oil revenues will we take? Well, enough to pay for our annual Homeland Security Budget, and for similar past expenses -- perhaps $50 billion a year would do nicely, for a start.

But we don't have to stay in Iraq to scare Saudi Arabia. And staying in Iraq does not scare Saudi Arabia. What would really scare them would be if we left, and left a situation of Sunni-Shi'a warfare that would threaten Saudi wellbeing if those Shi'a were to win. We can keep playing the sides -- first egging on one side, then perhaps the other. We want that Sunni-Shi'a split to go as long as the Iran-Iraq War should, from our point of view, have gone on -- that is, forever.

...."So just how much of that oil revenues will we take? Well, enough to pay for our annual Homeland Security Budget, and for similar past expenses -- perhaps $50 billion a year would do nicely, for a start.'

Hugh:

Are you American ?

You should run for president...!!

Hugh suggests an honest-to-gosh old-fashioned Kissinger-type REALPOLITIK. It's an approach you almost never hear mentioned, let alone actually discussed in the detail he gives.

The problem with that approach is that it's not 1969 anymore. Kissinger actually has to fear getting hauled before a court if he sets foot in certain countries.

Invading Iraq to turn it into a chaotic warring area would only add to the criminal charges the Cheney administration may face. True, a conviction would be difficult to obtain because they can always claim ignorance and incompetence (gosh, we never guessed it could turn ugly!), but inability to convict still leaves the real threat of indictment and incarceration during trial. There is the precedent of Pinochet, sort of.

But to give a 1969 REALPOLITIK perspective, turning Iraq into a briarpatch might not keep the US out of the tarbaby. There is no guarantee that the US would be able to keep a no-win balance of power between forces there, because of the genuine popular forces backing certain clerics. Al-Sadr managed to turn out 100K supporters in various cities last week, and who knows what would happen in a year or two. My point is that in a multi-faction popular conflict, the US can't just back two sides with weapons and intel to be guaranteed some control on the situation, and whole cities could wind up as fiefdoms. The REALPOLITIK approach looks feasible if your mindset is that wars have 2 sides, but if a civil conflict involves 4 or 5 (completely likely in Iraq), with regional variations, I do not believe the US could maintain control. The Kurds will put up walls, the Iranians will be able to aid Shi'ias in a thousand invisible ways...

So apart from the legal issues, I don't think Hugh's idea would work. Refreshing change from the crazed ideological fantasies of the neocons, though...

"The Kurds will put up walls, the Iranians will be able to aid Shi'ias in a thousand invisible ways..."
--- from a posting above

There is an assumption here, and in postings by others, that if the Americans leave Iraq, and a Suinni-Shi'a conflict of indeterminate scope and duration becomes larger than what it already is, and has been for some time, that the Iranians will help the non-Persian Arab Shi'a, that this help will be welcome and decisive. But in fact it is the Sunnis, with more extensive military training and experience, and far more ruthless, who will benefit from aid -- financial aid above all, which translates into military equipment, but also volunteers -- from surrounding Sunni countries.

Iran today is not the Iran of 1980, when volunteers, and especially the Basiji, went off to fight the foreign invaders. Few intelligent Iranians wish to help preserve the Islamic Republic of Iran -- and that includes veterans, willing and unwilling, of the Iran-Iraq War. Iranian intervention by the most determined supporters of the regime will be seen off -- not with cheers but jeers (or rather, with secret cheers, and the secret hope that the regime's stalwarts will be killed off, or at least distracted, by a campaign in Iraq).

What could be better, really, for both those who wish the Islamic Republic in Iran ill, and those who wish Saudi Arabia ill, and those who wish to divide and demoralize Islam, not only among Infidels (who need constant reminder of how primitive and violent these people are, not sometimes, but as a matter of course) but among Muslims themselves, so that they may see for themselves that much as the Infidels tried to bring stability and order and progress and benefits of every kind, it was the "Iraqis" -- i.e., the Sunnis and the Shi'a, the Arabs and the Kurds -- who in the end were responsible.

The Americans did not "lose Iraq." It was never theirs to win. Iraq does not exist, and "Iraqis" do not "love freedom." Shi'a voted in the elections as their leaders told -- as obedient members of a group, or subgroups, not as individuals, not as citizens, not as members of a polity that over generations had slowly been developing the attitudes that a democracy worth having requires -- only because they constitute 60% of the population. If the Shi'a constituted 20%, it is they who would have boycotted.

The failure of the Administration to understand the tenets and attitudes of Islam, and to believe -- quite incorrectly -- perhaps prompted by the authority of Bernard Lewis, who in the last two years has done a complete about-face from his previous insistence, over many years, that Islam was an obstacle to democracy, and who recently, apparently excited by the prospect of remaking Iraq and hence the Middle East, has allowed himself to make all sorts of ludicrous remarks that contradict his own words, from his rewriting of Iraqi history, to his political advertisement for his patron and friend Prince Hassan (who though carefully unnamed, is clearly meant), which appeared in the Wall Street Journal as an Op/Ed jointly signed by Lewis and James Woolsey, the completely ludicrous idea that a new Hashemite monarch would do wonders for Iraq. This only showed that Lewis has no idea of the scope of Iraqi Shi'a resentment of the Sunnis, and that his understanding of practice, as opposed to theory, is strangely lacking. Note as well that Lewis -- do not forget -- was a tireless enthusiast for the Oslo Accords, which anyone who understood Islam, and the nature of the malevolent, permanent, unappeasable Jihad against the Infidel state of Israel could not possibly promote. There is something very strange about Lewis, about his self-contradictions, about his unwillingness to assimilate, much less endorse, the scholarship of Bat Ye'or. One wonders what he will say when confronted with the material -- much of it by Orientalists who, unlike those today, are at least as learned as Lewis -- collected by Andrew Bostom in the soon-to-be-released "The Legacy of Jihad."

It is hardly certain that Iranians will go to war in Iraq against Sunnis successfully. Some will, no doubt, and some Iranian money will flow in -- money that might well be spent on the famous sciene project, or to buy weapons for Hezbollah, or some other malevolent project. Why not welcome such a diversion of funds, of Basiji, of Ahmadinejad's attention and that of his sinister crew? Why not?

And meanwhile, let the Saudis be supplying the Sunnis. And the Kurds, though Sunni, will poerhaps take the occasion to boot out still more of those largely Sunni Arabs who over the past decades have been deliberately relocated to arabize Kurdish lands. And this will help them in establishing their state, which they not only deserve, but which, more importantly, will serve the interests of all Infidels as an inspiring example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab supremacist yoke.

This is how one can achieve, not "victory" for there is no "victory" over Islam, just as there is no "solution" to the Jihad against Israel, but "something-like-success" over "something-like-failure." That's it -- a little more success, and a little less failure, brought about not by the further misallocation of resources, but by bringing those men and tanks and Humvees and money lavished on those "Iraqis" home, home, home.

And then as you turn on the evening news, you will hear of this or that battle between Sunnis and Shi'a -- and who cares who wins or who loses? We win. We cannot lose.

Hugh,

Laissez-faire wouldn't work. The US involvement is about 10 times too large, overt, and long, and the objectives about 10 times too ambitiously, and loudly and bombastically declared.

But even apart from the considerations of international justice or domestic politics, there's nothing in your post to indicate why the outcome -- and eventually all wars wind down or end -- would be favorable to the US. Even if the Sunnis get lots of outside support, eventually borders would be approximated, regions defined by a purity left after ethnic cleansing, whatever.

And large oil reserves would likely be under control of an Iranian-friendly regime.

Still, it's an interesting thought-experiment. Too bad you left out the part where major portions of the current administration are hauled up on war crime charges when traveling abroad.