Our Congress is still living in another reality. Our military commanders strike me as being on a leash.

In other words: we are in big trouble and the future is going to make today look like a tea party.

Posted by: Foehammer at September 10, 2007 5:12 PM

YAWN

Are people still talking about this??? At the end of the day, American troops cannot stay there forever. After a phase out or even total anihalation of AlQaeda, the clans will reform, regroup, make new alliances and continue to terrorize the people of their nation state (and the West).

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN!!

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:13 PM

I agree with Hugh:

Why don't we GTFO of Iraq and focus our depleting resources on more advanced weaponry, securing our borders, and whatever deemed necessary to shift our foreign policy in a different direction.

As it stands now, we're bleeding our finances dry, losing American lives, and no LASTING good will come out of this war. We should have never intervened in the first place.

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:18 PM

Lets hope the policy of never identifying the source of Islamic terrorism doesnt have devastating consequences,It seems that is the only one that is firmly fixed.

Posted by: KAOSKTRL at September 10, 2007 5:21 PM

Do what I've been saying to do for years now: smack the crap out of Iran to cripple its military so that it cannot take over Iraq without insane amounts of resources expended. Move all American and Coalition forces out of Iraqi urban areas. Guard the oil fields. Move most of our people home to get some well-deserved R&R. Build up our military over the next decade and be ready to react to the Islamic onslaught.

Shut our borders to Muslim immigrants and shut-off the flow of dirty Saudi oil money to the United States in every way, shape and form possible. No madrassas being built in NYC or anywhere else.

Elect a new President that actually understands the real threat -- do any of them?

Then start holding Congressional hearings on ISLAM and the real source of the terror after the 2008 elections, Islamic reformation, deportations and more.

Seriously, why the hell do more Americans need to die because of the continued stupidity and cowardice of our so-called leaders. Most of these Congressional leaders are sycophantic, cowardly opportunists and pseduo-intellectuals that tapped into Mommy & Daddy's money all the way to Washington, DC.

Am I completely over it all? You bet. Beyond it...

Posted by: Foehammer at September 10, 2007 5:26 PM

'In his professional judgement' what religion are we concerned about that will induce 'devastating' consequences?

The common denominator is not the 'people' it is the 'religion'.

'In his professional judgement' will Iraqi's ever be 'out of harm's way' with muslims?

Posted by: alaskan1000 at September 10, 2007 5:36 PM

In reviewing some notes I made in the early 1980s, our country’s infrastructure—roads, bridges, dams, sewers, subways, waterways, etc.—was considered to be in such poor shape (even way back then) that it was projected to cost $2.5 trillion (about $5 trillion in today’s prices) to make the necessary repairs and maintenance. More than two decades later, in 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our country’s infrastructure an overall grade of “D,” with not a single individual component (e.g., bridges) earning a grade above “C+.” Now, an important bridge—a part of the crown jewel of our national road network, the Interstate Highway System—has crumbled into the Mississippi River.

Front Page Magazine quote from today

What bothers me is that even if the military could wipe out the Al Qaeda over there, terrorists of all kinds could still infiltrate the southern border. Hence, even if they could destroy all the terrorist (which they can't), it wouldn't matter because the damn borders are so porous. They can maneuver on in from all different parts of the world anyway. Almost $1 TRILLION dollars spend and no LASTING good will come from Iraq; temporary maybe, but not lasting.

Meanwhile, major pieces of infrastructure are crumbling and the gov. can't afford to fix it.

Meanwhile, more & more people have to pay toll-roads, with the profits going to foreign companies, because the gov. must outsource to the private sector to keep them maintained.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:38 PM

"At the end of the day, American troops cannot stay there forever."
-Triumphant_Paladin

The key (sword) to solving the Gordian knot problem that for us is Iraq cannot be found within Iraq.

It requires thinking outside the box that we have drawn around Iraq.

Outside Iraq lies Saudi Arabia that supplies "foreign fighters" (along with Jordan and the "Palestinians")that are against us, Syria that affords these "foreign fighters" passage into Iraq, and Iran that stands ready to fill the vacuum in Iraq as soon as American (Coalition) forces leave.

Only by engaging these countries outside but abutting Iraq can the problem that is Iraq be solved.

Engage them? But how?

By seeing that these countries become more concerned with their own continued safety and existence than with meddling in Iraq.

I have not much hope for diplomatic solutions. Economic and military pressure--at much higher levels than dared to be imagined, at least publicly--is necessary.

Posted by: unicorns62000 at September 10, 2007 5:41 PM

Hugh always -- ALWAYS -- says it best.

Here's just one of his many superb posts on our idiotic venture in Iraq:

"One would love to know when Bush, when Rice, when all the rest of them first began to realize that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein meant, inevitably, that the Shi'a would take power, either over all of Iraq or over the southern part with the major oil resources and the only port. When did it occur to them that perhaps the sectarian split would not be overcome in the general "joy at liberation" (the joy in Baghdad will make the celebrations in Kabul seem like a "funeral procession" -- Bernard Lewis, 2002)? When did they figure out that the Shi'a resentment of the Sunnis, and Sunni contempt for the Shi'a, long preceded the regime of Saddam Hussein and that those who kept assuring them otherwise had their own fish to fry -- especially all those thoroughly-westernized Shi’a exiles who either ignored, or simply forgot, what the real Iraq, and the real Iraqis, were really like? And while Allawi, Chalabi, and Kanan Makiya were secular Shi'a, who themselves may have wanted to downplay, for the Americans, the real nature of Iraq. And, in their long Western exiles, where some of them became, centaur-like, half-Western men, they may have forgotten as well the craziness and violence of their own countrymen, with the centuries-old resentments reinforced by the last few decades of Sunni despotism, and with that widespread susceptibility to rumor and conspiracy theories which come naturally to those raised up in a belief-system that discourages free and skeptical inquiry. And even that survivor, the Baghdadian Vicar of Bray, the Sunni manipulator described formulaically and much too charitably as an "elder stateman," the famously louche Adnan Pachachi (a member of the Sunni elite and member of even a pre-1958 government), who claimed the other day, in an interview in the Corriere della Sera, that there is not, and never will be, a "civil war" because the Sunnis and the Shi'a have always gotten along famously, and in fact Shi'a were prominent in Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Now the Administration is said to be "worried" about "civil war." The thing to worry about, if you are not in the Administration, but simply an intelligent Infidel, is why anyone in the government of the United States expresses "worry" about sectarian violence between different sects of mujahedin, who otherwise would be devoting their energies to our destruction.

"And still worse, why do they "worry" about this sectarian violence "spreading" elsewhere in the Middle East and in Muslim lands further away?

"I understand why the Al-Saud family should be worried. I understand why the Ruler of Bahrain (oh, did he promote himself to king yet? I can't remember) should be worried. I understand why the government of Yemen should be worried. I understand why the Sunnis and Shi'a in Lebanon might be worried. I understand why some Shi'a and Sunnis in Pakistan and Afghanistan might be worried.

"But why, exactly -- please explain so I can get it through my thick skull -- should the Infidels in charge of the non-Muslim government of the non-Muslim (in everything which made America America) United States "worry" over the "threat" of Sunni-Shi'a civil war?"

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/010396.php

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at September 10, 2007 5:42 PM

As it stands now, we're bleeding our finances dry, losing American lives, and no LASTING good will come out of this war. We should have never intervened in the first place.

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:18 PM

Bingo! I second that! Removing Saddam was US charter, not 'rebuilding' Iraq. Frankly, we should have left Iraq right after Saddam was captured / hanged. After that, it is only a waste of American blood and money. Oh.. just leaving Iraq is not enough. Deporting illegal immigrants, monitoting / closing mosques, shutting down CAIR and US borders is a MUST. You see, there is a lot of house-cleaning to do as well.

Posted by: Alert at September 10, 2007 5:43 PM

In reviewing some notes I made in the early 1980s, our country’s infrastructure—roads, bridges, dams, sewers, subways, waterways, etc.—was considered to be in such poor shape (even way back then) that it was projected to cost $2.5 trillion (about $5 trillion in today’s prices) to make the necessary repairs and maintenance. More than two decades later, in 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our country’s infrastructure an overall grade of “D,” with not a single individual component (e.g., bridges) earning a grade above “C+.” Now, an important bridge—a part of the crown jewel of our national road network, the Interstate Highway System—has crumbled into the Mississippi River.

Front Page Magazine quote from today

What bothers me is that even if the military could wipe out the Al Qaeda over there, terrorists of all kinds could still infiltrate the southern border. Hence, even if they could destroy all the terrorist (which they can't), it wouldn't matter because the damn borders are so porous. They can maneuver on in from all different parts of the world anyway. Almost $1 TRILLION dollars spend and no LASTING good will come from Iraq; temporary maybe, but not lasting.

Meanwhile, major pieces of infrastructure are crumbling and the gov. can't afford to fix it.

Meanwhile, more & more people have to pay toll-roads, with the profits going to foreign companies, because the gov. must outsource to the private sector to keep them maintained.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:44 PM

Turning over Iraq to the most fanatical elements in the Muslim world - Iran and/or Al Qaeda - is certainly NOT the answer. I've been arguing the point all along.

Should we withdraw prematurely and the Iraq subsequently implodes, we can anticipate any or all of the following contingencies....

1) A flood - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of Iraqi refugees pouring into America as our guilt-ridden policy-makers try to save everyone associated with the US presence there (and of course their family members)

2) the re-emergence of a radical Kurdish entity in Iraq's north (ala 'Ansar al Islam') - backed by Iran, as a harbinger for the destruction of Iraqi Kurdistan's remarkable stability and moderation

3) the toppling of Jordan's King Abdullah and the establishment of a pro-Syrian, rejectionist state there

4) A significant loss of American prestige in the region....with repercussions such as perhaps the loss of US military facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere...and a reorientation of Saudi foreign policy - not to mention its oil commerce - away from America and towards China...as part of the Kingdom's search for a credible alternative to check Iranian regional hegemony

Posted by: Cornelius at September 10, 2007 5:46 PM

Oh yes...

5) The collapse of Coalition efforts in Afghanistan

Posted by: Cornelius at September 10, 2007 5:49 PM

I think the larger picture is being missed by our liberal element, as well as a few conservative folks.
#1
Unless we are willing to become 100% isolationists. Leaving Iraq now would be a huge mistake.
#2
If we are going to stay until the Iraqi's become an ally and a beacon of freedom in the Muslim world, we better be ready to stay a LONG time.

Option one is fine with me, but our allies, such as Israel, Europe and every other little country that depends on our military, financial and humanitarian aid would be left with a choice. China, Russia, or other Muslims countries to take over where we quit.

And it would send a terrible message about American resolve which would embolden our enemy's.
Those that say NO it wouldn't, look at history.

option #2, Not going to happen
Our worthless liberal element will not allow a total victory in Iraq, it doesn't go well with their political aspirations. They are perfectly happy about losing American lives as long as it results in a Democrat for President.

So where are we after Patreus's report?

Square one, Democrats want to surrender to Islam, Republicans want to fight. The Islamic cult, is a winner, as long as there is a democrat in congress they have a voice in our government.

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 5:51 PM

I don't believe every arab, or every muslim is orthodox in their beliefs. In fact, it is more likely that the majority of Iraqis, though identifying themselves as believing muslims, do not live in accordance to sharia, and are rather secularized. Sort of like my fellow catholics here in Massachusetts. They go to church, at best, once a week, but that's it. No sacraments, frequent pre-marital sex and divorces, liberal views on abortion ect. Its just the way people are.

I believe that a democratic, pacified Iraq will, in the long term, enable these secularized Iraqis to obtain political power through voting (instead of the most brutal, ruthless Islamist taking power by fear) and therefore Iraq will be able to persecute global jihadists, rather than enable or support their supremicist aims.

This is more of a hope than a belief, actually.

Posted by: Jimmy the Dhimmi at September 10, 2007 5:53 PM

We will have spent a TRILLION dollars at best to make Iran a major power.

Posted by: poetcomic1 at September 10, 2007 5:55 PM

I love Hugh, but we have to attack Iran before we get out of Iraq. I won't ever budge on that issue, and if we don't do it, all the lives spent up until this point in Afghanistan and Iraq were cheapened by our U.S. government's insanely dangerous inaction in the face of open hostility from a nation (Iran) that has been at war with us ever since 1979 and plans to become a worse threat if left alone.

The bastard mullahs were even behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed our Marines.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/902040.html

Posted by: Foehammer at September 10, 2007 5:55 PM

I think the larger picture is being missed by our liberal element, as well as a few conservative folks.
#1
Unless we are willing to become 100% isolationists. Leaving Iraq now would be a huge mistake.
#2
If we are going to stay until the Iraqi's become an ally and a beacon of freedom in the Muslim world, we better be ready to stay a LONG time.

Option one is fine with me, but our allies, such as Israel, Europe and every other little country that depends on our military, financial and humanitarian aid would be left with a choice. China, Russia, or other Muslims countries to take over where we quit.

And it would send a terrible message about American resolve which would embolden our enemy's.
Those that say NO it wouldn't, look at history.

option #2, Not going to happen
Our worthless liberal element will not allow a total victory in Iraq, it doesn't go well with their political aspirations. They are perfectly happy about losing American lives as long as it results in a Democrat for President.

So where are we after Patreus's report?

Square one, Democrats want to surrender to Islam, Republicans want to fight. The Islamic cult, is a winner, as long as there is a democrat in congress they have a voice in our government.

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 5:56 PM

Cornelius,

America will not be able to prevent any of what you mentioned from happening unless you become occupiers. How exactly is it geographically possible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to wash up on American shores without your military presence??

The moslems use Taqiyya and deception to bleed sympathy and aid from your coffers; but rest assured, they will cut your neck at their earliest possible convenience.

Let the chips fall where they may. Let's pull out and focus on a different foreign policy.

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 5:58 PM

Turning over Iraq to the most fanatical elements in the Muslim world - Iran and/or Al Qaeda - is certainly NOT the answer.
--posted by Cornelius

I thought we were turning the country over to the duly elected representatives of the Iraqi people. Didn't elections happen?

Cornelius, should we give the Sunni and Shia another 1400 years to make nicey-nice and then leave?

20 Billion Dollars (yearly war expense) x 1400 =

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at September 10, 2007 6:01 PM

"Devastating" for whom? Not for us. For the Camp of Islam.

Google, among many such articles to be found above, "Victory Lies Shining Before Us." Or another dozen articles, and a thousand postings, making the same point, in ways that deliberately repeat, but also ring changes on -- I have to stay awake, after all -- the same theme.

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:02 PM

The biggest congressional hearing of probably the decade and the Federal government couldn’t even get the microphone to work.

Made it about half an hour into the hearing and had to go for a drive. Picked up another 25# of flour and a couple of hundred more 9mm rounds. Next off to Borders, where one of Robert’s books was relocated from a back shelf to the Islam section. It was therapeutic.

Posted by: pez at September 10, 2007 6:04 PM

Fitzgerald: Six questions about victory in Iraq
I have posed the questions so many times before.

But here they are again:

1) Should a "victory" in Iraq be defined as anything other than an outcome which will definitely leave the Camp of Islamic Jihad weakened?

2) If the answer to #1 is, as I hope it will be, "No," then why is it better to prevent the sectarian fissures within Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'a? These fissures are not limited to Iraq. They can be observed in a half-dozen countries, and what's more, they have the ability to set Sunni regimes against the Shi'a who stand to inherit The Land of the Two Rivers, that is, Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, of course, was the center for 500 years of the Abbasid Caliphate. For the first hundred it was centered in Samarra, and for the remaining four hundred in Baghdad, madinat al-salaam, the fabled city of Haroun al-Rashid. It will also set those Sunni regimes against the Shi'a in their midst, or, to put it another way, they will not be willing to allow the "Persian" Shi'a, those "Rafidite dogs," to inherit that part of the Arab land that is considered to be the place where its (much exaggerated) "glorious history" was made, and where its capital city, "glorious" Baghdad, was the center of that history.

3) If the answer to #1 is "No," and if it is clear that 80% of the world's Muslims are non-Arab, but have in various ways and to various degrees (with the Kurds and black Africans of Darfur, mass murder; with the Berbers, denial of their right to use the Berber language or preserve and disseminate the Berber culture) been the victims of Arab cultural and linguistic and economic and political imperialism, why does it not make sense to encourage the Kurds to obtain independence? For this will raise, in the minds of many non-Arab Muslims, the very thought that it might be possible to throw off the Arab yoke. And this in turn is likely to cause all kinds of dissension within the Camp of Islam, even possibly driving some non-Arab Muslims, whose ethnicity works against rather than reinforces their Islam, to leave Islam altogether.

4) If the answer to #1 is "No" (as I hope it still is), then do we not wish that the co-religionists of Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq will send aid from outside? Such aid is likely to use up their men, their money, their materiel, their attention, and especially to force the two most sinister and powerful Islamic states, Iran and Saudi Arabia, for reasons of prestige, to necessarily ensure that "their side" does not lose. And since in Islam (as the Americans refuse so far to recognize) one does not compromise but ends either as Victor or Vanquished, such a low-level war is liable to go on forever.

5) There is so much more that might be said, including my oft-repeated argument that Turkey can be made to accept an independent Kurdistan, with American guarantees that such a state will not make territorial demands on Turkey, but will direct its efforts to Iran and Syria. And in the case of Iran, such a Kurdish state can have effects not only in the Kurdish areas of Iran, but among its other non-Persian minorities. One wishes, for example, for continued unrest among the Arabs in Khuzistan, and Iranian repression, and then renewed unrest, just as one hopes that the Shi'a in the oil-bearing Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia will become more and more disgruntled, and that the Shi'a in Bahrain, to which an Iranian official has just renewed Iran's longstanding claim (sending shudders down Arab spines), will behave in similar fashion.

6) If you answered "No" to #1, but find fault with my #2-#5, then tell us please how the Bush strategy, the one to bring "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" and to sacrifice Americans, and American money, to prevent those sectarian and ethnic fissures from widening, and doing everything possible to tamp them down, will lead to a good result, to that "victory" I defined in #1 above.

I'll wait right here. Tell me. Tell all of us.

Be detailed. No vagueness, no "we just can't do this" or "it wouldn't be right to do that." Go ahead.

[Posted by Hugh at August 28, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:05 PM

Robert (I don't mean Robert Spencer, I mean the commenter on this thread called "Robert") -- your choice of name might mislead the occasional new visitor into thinking your comments are made by Robert Spencer...maybe if you added the initial of your last name, to distinguish yourself more clearly, that would help?...Also, people on these threads often address "Robert" and mean Robert Spencer, so it could become a little confusing, if you see what I mean.

Posted by: traeh at September 10, 2007 6:06 PM

Fitzgerald: Why the stated goals for "victory in Iraq" make no sense
The stated goals for "victory in Iraq" make no sense. Should the goal of Americans and other Infidels be to create a functioning state (with cigars passed around for the final birth of a happy, healthy, baby boy, after such a difficult pregnancy)? In any case this is impossible, with Allawi or Jaafari or Maliki or anyone at all, given that Islam itself is what prevents compromises and encourages continued aggression between Sunni and Shi'a. Both have taken from Islam the lesson that there can only be, after any conflict, only two possible conditions: that of Victor and that of Vanquished.

"Victory in Iraq" properly defined means a situation that justifies the expenditure of some $880 billion dollars (including in that figure the lifetime cost of care for the wounded veterans, and other expenses not yet factored in even by those, such as General MacCaffrey, who are critics of the war but inattentive to the real cost). That is more than the cost of all the wars, save World War II, that the United States has ever fought, in 2007 dollars. It must also justify the deaths of 3,700 soldiers and the severe wounding of 25,000. Bush's notion that the outcome of a unified Iraq is a better one for the United States than one in which Sunnis and Shi'a, at one level or another, continue to fight, is unfounded. Who knows? Who can predict exactly how they will or will not handle one another once the Americans leave? What's more, who can say what will happen when co-religionists on both sides line up behind their fellows in Iraq? That means primarily Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Sunnis cheerfully waved off by the Alawite rulers of Syria, on the Sunni side, and on the Shi'a side, the grim Islamic Republic of Iran, with its Al Quds Revolutionary Guards, and of course its handmaidens in Hizballah, whom all kinds of sensible people in Lebanon would love to see stream off as volunteers, screaming their devotion to Allah, to Iraq to defend their own faith from those terrible Sunnis.

And in the same way, would not greater Kurdish autonomy, or ideally a Kurdish state, be a threat to Iran? For it would hearten not only Kurds in Iranian-held parts of Kurdistan, but others in the area -- Arabs in Khuzistan, Baluchis to the east, Azeris in the north -- to bethink themselves, to wonder if they too, the non-Persians who make up half the population of present-day Iran, must forever be subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran. And another potential threat is to Syria. As for Turkey, the Americans could make clear that Turkey is no longer regarded as an indispensable ally, or even conceivably a reliable member of NATO, to the extent that it "returns to Islam" (as it is, steadily, day by day, under the guiding hand of Erdogan and many little erdogans), but that, in any case, the Americans will act as guarantors to insure that whatever pressures from this Kurdish state are made on Iran, or Syria, no such pressure will be put on Turkey, for the Americans, as the sole suppliers of military aid to Kurdistan, can guarantee their cooperation. And furthermore, it can hardly have gone unnoticed that economic cooperation between Turkey and Kurdistan is already in the works, and that the Turkish government might take an entirely different view of an independent Kurdistan, as not increasing outside pressure on it, but serving to decrease it -- for if Kurds in Turkey feel that they need an outlet for political expression other than the Turkish state, they are now welcome to move to an independent Kurdistan, and for all we know, some might take up the offer. And I have not even reached here the emulative effect the spectacle of one non-Arab Muslim people, the Kurds, throwing off the Arab yoke, would have on other non-Arab Muslims, such as the Berbers.

Finally, along with the sectarian (Sunni-Shi'a) division inside and outside Iraq, there are possible further unsettlements and sectarian strife in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia (the oil-bearing Eastern Province), in Lebanon, in Bahrain, even in Yemen. Instead of being welcomed -- since when does one attempt to prevent division and demoralization in the camp of one's enemies? -- these are actively being deplored, in warnings from the Great and Good, that an American withdrawal will bring, could bring, might bring, that deplorable thing called "chaos" to the Middle East. Nonsense. Not "chaos" -- not with those kinds of despotisms willing to use their kind of force with their kind of secret police. Not chaos, really, but perhaps a using up of men, money, and materiel, and attention -- but this time they would all bear the initial adjective "Muslim" rather than "American," and that is a highly desirable change.

[Posted by Hugh at August 28, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:07 PM

WTH??? Sorry about the dual post... I have learned from my mistakes and I am sorry for the harm it caused.
I will be checking into rehab in the morning and I've found Jesus....
I hope I can be forgiven for my misdeed.

Does that about sum up a celebrity apology?

LOL

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 6:08 PM

August 9, 2007
Fitzgerald: This war is too important to be left to mere generals

"The United States has spent $19.2 billion trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, the GAO said, including at least $2.8 billion to buy and deliver equipment. But the GAO said weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq." -- from this article

The whole worshipful cult of Petraeus, as the Great Uniformed Hope, is utterly misplaced. It is he who seems to take seriously, or perhaps even originated, the utterly unhelpful idea that "in general, insurgencies last ten years." This is a pointless, even silly, notion, for it ignores the nature of insurgencies. When they are directed at, say, a colonial power (the MauMau), or against the local government because of its perceived injustice (the Greek Communists), and there are ways to satisfy demands at the same time that military defeat is inflicted, then insurgencies may last ten years. Jomo Kenyatta came to power -- in other words, the English gave up. In Greece there was, presumably, some attention to winning the hearts and minds of the impoverished who might be most vulnerable to Communist propaganda. But in Iraq there is not one insurgency, but many, and while they are all conducted by various groups of Muslims against each other, they are also -- to varying degrees depending only on what temporary use they may have for the Infidel Americans -- all hostile, permanently hostile (temporary smiles and wiles are transparent, or should be) to the Infidels.

What would you think of me if I were to write an article, or promote a doctrine, in which it was maintained that "in general, civil wars last 6.7 years"? A pointless, silly notion, isn't it? You would make fun of me for such a thing. You would say, that such a statistic has no ability to help us in a particular situation. Why then do we applaud Petraeus, whose previous term as a supposedly successful "trainer" of Iraqi forces did not train up a great many loyal, true-blue Iraqis? Nor did the area he supposedly pacified remain pacified.

Of course he is of thoughtful mien. Of course he is very brave, and not only brave but mediagenic. But so what? Someone who starts using the pronoun "we" to include Americans and Iraqis as one group, with identical interests is not someone whose thoughtful demeanor and bravery (shot in the stomach in an accident during training, insisting on going right back to active duty as soon as he could, etc.) should cause us, however desperate we are for a hero on a horse, some General Beranger, to put Petraeus on a pedestal or pediment. Infidels and Muslims do not have, anywhere, identical interests. Furthermore, he has continued to think that "hearts and minds" matter.

Furthermore, he has not dropped any hints that he understands that the larger Jihad will not be affected in the slightest by bringing some kind of temporary harmony to Iraq. The larger Jihad is the one which consists of all the local Jihads (which cannot be reduced to merely "local" and "non-Islamic promptings, as either he, or possibly Kilcullen, or possibly both, seem to think). It is the one that relies mainly on the Money Weapon, and campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest, and whose theatre is now Western Europe.

It would be far better to let Iraq be a source of constant internal strife within the Camp of Islam and Jihad. But how can a general possibly turn himself into a real strategist, a Halford Mackinder, who sees just how trivial Iraq is in the larger scheme of things? His entire effort is spent in fulfilling this or that task. He does not see beyond that hideously difficult task to ponder why the task itself, and its fulfillment, makes no larger strategic sense. Iraq is trivial except as a place where American lives, and money, and war materiel, have been and are being squandered for all the wrong reasons. They are being squandered for a policy based on a lack of understanding of the forces at play in Iraq and potentially outside Iraq. Most of all, there is a lack of understanding by most of those who love Bush and by most of those who hate him, of Islam: its texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics, that guarantee that there will never be a settlement between Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq that will look anything like what Infidels would think is possible. That is, there will never be a settlement that people of reason might arrive at -- people who are used to compromise and who are not schooled up in a victor/vanquished view of the universe as are Muslims, with the victors being the Believers, and the vanquished being the Infidels. That attitude carries over to the Sunni view of Shi'a and, to some extent, vice-versa.

It won't happen in Iraq. And if it did, it would be of no help in weakening the Camp of Jihad.

Does Petraeus even think in such terms? Has he realized what the demographic conquest of Western Europe would mean -- first for a change in foreign policy, then to the weaponry of NATO, and then to the very nature of the societies that form, along with North America, the heart of the West?

Does he? Or is he merely a general? Because this war is too important to be left to mere generals. Even quiet, mediagenic generals such as David Petraeus.

[Posted by Hugh at August 9, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:09 PM

option #2, Not going to happen
Our worthless liberal element will not allow a total victory in Iraq
--posted by Robert

total victory in Iraq?????

WTF would that be?

Hmmmmm.....let's see. Option 1)The Sunni and Shia and the Kurds all get together, sit down, make up, and henceforth respect the voice of democracy????? They haven't done that yet after four years. Matter of fact, they haven't done that in 1400 years. So how much longer would you battle on to achieve that "Kumbaya" moment when everyone hugs each other and these muhammadans begin to behave like ordinary moms and dads who just want to live peacefully, in a tolerant, non-sectarian state?

Or do you promote option 2) "Just drop the bomb and kill all of them???"

Assuming you have an I.Q. larger than my shoe size, you probably realize that these two options are unrealistic.

Do you have a third?

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at September 10, 2007 6:11 PM

Fitzgerald: The Iraqi policy is sure to fail
A fledgling group of Sunni and Shiite religious leaders met for the first time in Baghdad last week to condemn sectarian violence in their country, a move US military officials framed as a first of its kind and a small step toward broader political reconciliation. -- from this article
Why are they even attempting this? Not only is it likely to be fail, but it is part of a policy that is likely to fail. That policy involves the attempt to make Iraq into a unified state, with a civic-minded and informed and intelligent citizenry, full of the hardworking and the prosperous. Iraq will therefore offer Sunni Arab states a model of how to be, and everyone will be happy. For the first time in 1350 years, Muslims will take no interest in much of what Islam teaches, though as never before in history, despite their clear military inferiority to Infidels, Muslims are now capable of conducting the Jihad to spread Islam until it dominates and Muslims rule, in large parts of the non-Islamic historic West, through other non-military means, through utilization of the Money Weapon, well-financed and carefully-targeted Campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

Meanwhile, the great cost continues to mount. It begins with the $880 billion spent in Iraq. That is more than the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, that the United States has ever fought. But the cost also includes loss of life and of limb that might be acceptable even at far higher levels, in a war such as World War II, a war that made sense, but enrages because the war in Iraq, for the goals stated, not only does not enhance American security and that of its true allies, but worse, it actually requires the American soldiers to work to attain goals that, were they to be achieved (they won't be), would hinder rather than promote American security.

The exploitation of the sectarian and ethnic fissures within Iraq, if not opposed by the Americans, would inevitably lead to further divisions and demoralization within the Camp of Islam, and that, in turn, can only help the Americans and other Infidels in their own war of self-defense -- not a "war against terror" -- against the Jihad that is a permanent feature, not a temporary one (there is no "after Jihad," pace Noah Feldman, and Gilles Kepel, both of them as misguided guides to Islam as can be imagined), of Islam.

What is described in the article above shows the failure by those in Iraq to think beyond Iraq, to think of Iraq only as one theatre in the war of self-defense against the Jihad. The United States has no stake in bringing together Sunni and Shi'a. The Bush Administration, unable to recognize its mistakes about Islam and about Iraq, appears determined to continue to invest more and more, of money and materiel and men's lives -- to pursue a wrong course. In this respect it reminds one of the stubborn, crazed policy pursued during the hideous trench warfare of World War I, for no reasons that made sense, but because, once the thing started, no one could figure out how to stop it.

The generals who have opposed the war for the right reasons (not the zinni-ish line of appeasement, but because the war aims in Iraq make no real sense, the "mission" cannot be articulated by Bush because even to try to do so would show up how misguided the whole thing is) should speak up. And those who are with tunnel vision thinking only of the "job we have to do" right here in Baghdad are not serving the country well.

As for those who say things like "on average, insurgencies last about ten years," to them one can only reply: what would you think of someone who self-assuredly proclaimed that "on average, American wars last an average of 2.1 years" or "on average, wars around the world since 1500 have lasted about 13.16 years" or "on average, civil wars last about 3.7 years"?

You would see right away how vacuous and jejune are such remarks. But for some reason, those "counterinsurgency experts" who make such statements, and then as well think they are little-lawrence-of-arabias with their knowledge of the "Sunni tribes" and their ability to really get to know those sheikhs because they are aware of how to sit, and which hand to use, and what formulae to utter, and how to listen patiently as the local Arab, continue to utter them. Yet that local Arab knows exactly how to manipulate the American army officer who is under the impression that it is he, the American, who is doing the manipulating. He presents his wish-list for still more money, still more of those nice advanced American weapons and, oh yes, some more raids by American soldiers on that particular sheikh's particular enemies, whether or not they belong to Al Qaeda, which is not, pace Patraeus and Bush, the only problem -- for there are a dozen different, mutually hostile, constantly shifting in their allegiances groups in Iraq, but all of them, in the end, consist of Muslims, and therefore none of them, in end, can conceivably be won over, not their hearts, and not their minds, to be real, as opposed to temporary and feigned, friends of American Infidels.

The article above makes one furious, and sad. Furious at the stupidity. Sad for the troops, sad for the soldiers being asked to be there, fighting for something, trying to do something in Iraq, that makes no sense -- none.

[Posted by Hugh at June 25, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:18 PM

traeh, I never really thought about that, Good point. I'll send the site admin an email. or re-register.

Sorry about the confusion, please see my last post and apply that apology.....

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 6:18 PM

July 15, 2007
Fitzgerald: The dismaying General Petraeus

In an interview published in the Christian Science Monitor dated July 13, General Petraeus declares:

"If we pull out there will be greatly increased sectarian violence, humanitarian concerns.... You don't know what could happen in terms of dangerous conflicts, what could happen along the Kurdish/Shiite/Sunni fault lines, or how [Iraq's] neighbors will react."

What is wrong, from the point of view of the American and larger Infidel interests that are now engaged in a largely-unrecognized war without end, with "increased sectarian violence" in Iraq? What is wrong "in terms of…what could happen along the Kurdish/Shiite/Sunni fault line"? Why should it matter? Would we not find that the Camp of Islam would be weakened if Iraq dissolves into something like its original constituent parts, those three former Ottoman vilayets -- Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra (more picturesquely, Bassorah) -- roughly corresponding to the Kurdish, Shi'a, and Sunni areas at present, with the Christians possibly to find an American-sponsored haven in the existing Assyrian villages in the north in what would then be a completely autonomous, possibly independent, Kurdistan?

Sunnis inside and outside Iraq refuse to acquiesce in the new arrangement. They cannot conceivably accept the idea of permanent Shi'a dominance of fabled Baghdad, a place that is so important to their history-haunted view. Their view of the world depends so much on what happened, or rather what they think happened, more than a millennium ago. In that quasi-real quasi-mythological past, Baghdad was the first city of Islam for four hundred years (and the Abbasid Caliphate of Iraq, its capital first in Samarra and then in Baghdad, the most important in Arab history). It is impossible for the Sunnis to see the Shi'a, those "Rafidite dogs" whom many Sunnis have always regarded as heretics, quasi-Muslims, in control in Baghdad. For many in Al Qaeda in Iraq, and as Al-Zarqawi clearly believed, the Shi'a are worse than regular Infidels because they are more treacherous.

And how can the Shi'a, on the receiving end everywhere of Sunni aggression, not least in modern Iraq, ever give up what they have gained? After all, when the Americans were inveigled into removing Saddam Hussein, it was Shi'a in exile who did the inveigling. Some of them were no doubt like Al-Maliki, deliberately deceiving the Americans about their intentions, as someone who knew Al-Maliki in Syrian exile said. Others, such as Kanan Makiya, no doubt were naïve. They were naive about the nature of their own countrymen and country, because in their Western and secularized and cossetted world they had forgotten what Islam, what societies and peoples suffused with Islam, are like. They actually did think there was hope for Iraq under benevolent American tutelage and sway.

It can't happen. And General Petraeus should be more than a mere "counter-insurgency expert." He should look outside the narrow confines of Anbar Province, with those tribes that are for turning, and outside Baghdad and the damned "surge," and think clearly. Bush doesn't. Rice doesn't. No one at the civilian top is doing so, which means that the generals must do so. They must begin to analyze and then question and then see right through the damn "mission" -- and realize that the best thing he can do, the best way to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad, is to work for the immediate withdrawal ("immediate" will take months, in any case) of American forces, so that exactly those things he now deplores, because he now does not understand their value, will come to pass. But this requires General Petraeus to be more than he has so far been. He needs to remain unaffected by this or that local Iraqi, of the winning Gunga-Din variety, and think more coldly about this war. It is not a "long war," not a "war that will last several generations." Rather, it is a war that will last as long as Islam exists, with that central duty of Jihad, Jihad to spread Islam until it dominates everywhere and everywhere Muslims rule. This duty does not disappear, but sometimes subsides when Muslims are too weak. It always remains ready to be implemented, in whatever way is possible, at any time.

At the moment Muslim states cannot engage in outright warfare; they are too weak. The chosen and effective instruments of Jihad, along with the greatly-exaggerated "terrorism" that Bush seems to regard as the Enemy (the "war on terrorism"), are the Money Weapon (which pays for mosques, madrasas, influence of all kinds), campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. When there are not twenty million Muslims in Europe, but fifty million, or one hundred million, how easily will the people of Western Europe make their own domestic and foreign policies without fear of Muslim reaction? How easily do they do it even now? How easily will they resist Muslim demands for changes in their own legal and political institutions, and social arrangements? How easily do they do it even now? Nothing good can possibly happen if the peoples of Europe continue to admit Muslims, and continue to support, through Infidel-paid welfare systems, large Muslim families. Nothing good can come of allowing the Saudis and other rich Arabs to pour money in to pay for an ever-expanding number of giant mosques and madrasas -- and to subvert, through all kinds of bribery, various influential Westerners. That includes those who are supposed to study and instruct us about the nature of Islam.

These are the kind of things that General Petraeus may not realize in the hectic vacancy of daily trying to create an alliance here, a compromise there. Those temporary compromises and local victories mean, in the end, very little. For if they were to help fulfill the "mission," when that "mission" makes no sense, makes the opposite of sense, they would merely harm American interests by helping the Camp of Islam to avoid the kind of sectarian and ethnic strife that one should see not as damaging but as promoting the cause of the Infidels. When General Petraeus expresses worry about that "Sunni/Shia/Kurd fault line" and about what Iraq's "neighbors" may do, he simply alerts us to his failure to grasp the larger picture. And he is hardly alone. But he has gotten such a press, such a buildup, and is clearly more intelligent than Bush -- so this, yet one more sign of the limits of his understanding and therefore of his usefulness in the war of self-defense against the Jihad, dismays.

[Posted by Hugh at July 15, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:19 PM

“In my professional judgment…”

I’ve never had much luck with two categories of people:

1. Businessmen who refer to you as ‘buddy’.
2. Professional men who refer to themselves as ‘professional’.

Posted by: pez at September 10, 2007 6:21 PM

Fitzgerald: Maliki in the Wall Street Journal
Though supposedly a translation from al-Maliki's Arabic, there is nothing about this article -- nothing at all - that reminds one of Arabic style, in thought or language. How stupid do the American propagandists who concocted this kind of thing think we are? And are the grotesque and obvious echoes of Lincoln meant to fool us?

This is of a piece with the efforts of Condoleeza Rice and George Bush to convince us that the new "Iraqi Constitution" --the one that tells us that no law can stand that violates Islam, and which makes the highest law of the land not that same Constitution, but rather the Shari'a, as embodying in law the meaning of Qur'an and Sunnah -- was just like the American Constitution, and the framers of that Constitution (thrusting young academic Noah Feldman flauntingly among them) just like the Framers in Philadelphia.

No analogy between the greatest figures in American or Western political history has been too grotesque for this desperate Administration. It appears to be unable to think clearly, because it refuses to go back and study Islam, and from that study to proceed to study the real Iraq, the Iraq whose history has been one, as Elie Kedourie has noted, of uninterrupted violence and aggression, and palace coups and plots.

The Shia now run Iraq. Or rather, they run Baghdad, they run Basra, they run the entire south. They don't need Anbar Province. They don't need the Sunnis. They have been steadily emptying Baghdad of Sunnis -- the Sunni Arabs who constituted at least one-third of the population of Baghdad just four years ago are down to 15%, and falling every day. Baghdad, the most important center of High Islamic Civilization, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for 400 years, from roughly 850-1250 (for the first 100 years the capital was in Samarra, 60 miles to the north on the Tigris, with its celebrated, guggenheimish Mawliye), is now, and forever will be, Shi'a-controlled. This is something that the Sunnis will not "get over" -- as Rice famously said about the enmity between Sunnis and Shi'a: "they'll just have to overcome it." This is a remark similar to that sometimes made, in ignorant exasperation, about that Arab-Israeli matter. Yet that too is not, I'm afraid, a question of "getting over it," for the Arabs will never ever "get over it." They, can, however, be held in check. That is a different thing. They can be held in check while the Infidel world, far beyond little Israel, and for its own purposes, works steadily to chip away at the economic and military power of Islam.

This article by Maliki is so comical a production that one should not be angry, but rather pleased, that it has been put up. It invites ridicule. And it will get it.

And amid that ridicule, do not forget: again and again Maliki has shown an indifference to American desires. He was preparing some months ago to offer amnesty to those “insurgents” who had killed "only" American soldiers, until an outcry in this country forced the Bush Administration to tell him he couldn’t do it. He expects the Americans to fight and die for his regime, a regime like the previous one prepared to soak the Americans for all they are worth, all the billions they can provide. And how many former high Iraqi officials siphoned off how many billions, paid for by American taxpayers, most of whom will never know the high life now to be enjoyed for the rest of their lives by those “Iraqi” patriots who made out like gangbusters on American aid, and are now living it up outside Iraq, or in Europe, possibly attending the same defiles on the Avenue Montaigne as Suha Arafat?

Maliki is not, and cannot be, a “friend of America.” He is willing to endure the American presence only so long as it strengthens him, and weakens the Sunni insurgents. And the Sunnis, in turn, or those not in the immediate “insurgency,” may now want the Americans to stay for the same reasons – in order to protect them from the full force of the Shi’a. That’s it. The Administration refuses to understand this, and keeps making policy based on hope, and on all the Unrepresentative Men (Chalabi, Allawi, Makiya, and the tiny group of semi-decent mid-level former Iraqi officers who have unduly impressed American officers, and thus lead them to all kinds of rosy misconceptions and hopes, but are in fact the rare exceptions, not the rule) that were in exile, or have tried with this or that group of soldiers or policemento do the impossible in Iraq, which is to make them drop their sectarian and ethnic and even tribal allegiances. Simply cannot be done.

Why is this hard to understand? What is so complicated about it?

[Posted by Hugh at June 14, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:25 PM

May 29, 2007

Fitzgerald: The Iran/Iraq War, Sunni/Shi'a hostility, and D'Souza

The war between Iran and Iraq, of course, could not have been openly presented by Saddam Hussein as a Sunni-Shi'a war, for obvious reasons. But that is not the same thing as saying that it had nothing to do with the initial fear and hatred, felt by those who ran the Sunni Arab despotism (disguised behind "Ba'athism") of Saddam Hussein for the mad-dog Shi'a, as they saw it, of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In that war, Saddam Hussein referred to battles from early Islam between Arabs and Persians, and played up -- as other Sunnis have more recently done -- the "Persian" business. Some, such as Al-Zarqawi, and his successors, have reinforced the resentment of Sunnis at losing control of Iraq to the Shi'a by describing those Shi'a, inaccurately, as "Persians," or mere collaborators of the "Persians."

One of Bernard Lewis's most useful books is The Multiple Identities of the Middle East. One is not only a Shi'a Muslim or a Sunni Muslim. One can be more than one thing. One can be an Arab and a Muslim. One can be an Arab and a Sunni Muslim. One can be an Arab and a Shi'a Muslim. One can be a Berber, and a Muslim. One can be a Kurd, and a Muslim. In the case of Arabs, so strong is the identification of Islam and "Uruba" or Arabness, that even among some of the Christian Arabs (above all among those we have been carefully taught to call "Palestinians") the identification with Islam is intertwined with "Arabness," and a need to be able to identify with permanently threatening Muslim Arabs (as a way to fit in, as a way to win them over). One thus finds the phenomenon of the "islamochristian," which is much less common among more numerous, self-conscious, and historically less cowed communities, such as the Maronites of Lebanon, or even the Copts, especially the Copts once they leave Egypt and can think, feel, speak freely about Islam.

All this escapes Dinesh D'Souza. He's too busy. So many books to sell, so many CDs to flog. To flog, flog, flog. Step right up. Get your latest Dinesh D'Souza here. Just for today, at No Extra Cost, a Guide to Absolutely Everything.

Who is most likely to shout that there never has been a Sunni-Shi'a divide, and that therefore whatever trouble there is in Iraq of what is demurely described as "of a sectarian nature" (you know: those bombs that blow the gold-tumanned roof off of venerable Shi'a mosques, those revenge drillings into live flesh by the Shi'a militias in return) is the responsibility of the Bad Old Infidels, the Bad Americans?

One group consists of those who will find a way to blame America for the inability of the people in Iraq to engage in sensible political compromise, or to refrain from violence as their main means for obtaining their goals. This group cannot see the world through other than Muslim lenses, with the inculcated violence and aggression that comes with those lenses. They understand that there are only two categories -- the Victors and the Vanquished -- which is exactly what Islam teaches them as the right way to think of Believers and Infidels. This lesson is not lost on them when they begin to think about other kinds of enemies.

The second group, of course, consists of the Bush loyalists, the people who thought that it made sense to remain in Iraq for Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations purposes. But no one, even those of us who believed the Administration's information about WMDs, should have thought it wise for the Americans to remain in Iraq beyond early 2004. Why then? Why not, say, November 2003? Well, because it was important to be assured both that the country had been scoured for WMDs, and that Saddam Hussein, his two sons, and the face cards in that famous pack used by the Americans in their imaginative game of Fifty-Two Pickup, were either killed or captured. But that was it.

The removal of the regime set in motion what was inevitable: the transfer of power to the Shi'a and the loss of power by the Sunnis. The Sunnis do not and cannot, inside or outside Iraq, accept this loss. They are unwilling to acquiesce in the obvious fact that the Shi'a of Iraq have won and have no intention of giving up power. What can the Sunnis do? The Shi'a don't need Anbar Province, and they have been quite able to empty Baghdad of many of its Sunnis. They are quite prepared, if need be, to continue that particular operation until the madinat al-salaam, the fabled first city of Islam, is almost entirely in Shi'a hands.

But Bush loyalists cannot admit that. They cannot admit that history demonstrates the depth and duration of Sunni-Shi'a hostilities goes far beyond Saddam Hussein's mistreatment of the Shi'a. They cannot accept that these hostilities go far beyond the history of modern Iraq, or even the history only of Iraq, but can be found wherever Sunnis and Shi'a are mixed together in sufficient numbers for the latter to be noticed and discriminated against, or attacked, or persecuted.

They ignored history, and now they have a stake in rewriting history, because of what they should have known, but did not bother to find out. And were any of the smiling westernized secularized Shi'a in exile going to inform them about the likelihood of a Shi'a takeover, and a Sunni refusal to acquiesce? This history continues to be ignored in presentations by Bush, by Cheney, by Rice, and by all those so-called "conservative" commentators whose reputations should suffer for their blind and late-in-the-day seeing of the light, where they do, or must pretend to, about Iraq.

Dinesh D'Souza apparently thinks that because many of the conscripts in Iraq's army were Shi'a, then Saddam Hussein could not have been prompted to declare war against Iran as a Shi'a state. But that is exactly why he declared war (see the "Encyclopedia Britannica" entry posted by Robert Spencer here). He understood that the secular Shah did not appeal to the devout Shi'a of Iraq, and that whatever his differences with Iran under Shah Reza Pahlevi, the Shah's regime was not for Saddam Hussein life-threatening.

But Khomeini, the militant Shi'a cleric, was a different matter. He had been kicked out of his exile in Iraq, was stupidly offered asylum by the French, and from his perch at Neauphle-le-chateau launched the revolution against the Shah. Had the French government been better informed, it would have cooperated with agents of Savak and had Khomeini done away with while he was in France.

It was because of Khomeini and his revolution that Saddam Hussein attacked Iran -- or rather, attacked the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran which, he understood, was a mortal threat to him because of its dangerous appeal to the formerly cowed ("quiescent") Shi'a of Iraq.

Dinesh D'Souza appears to believe that the army of Iraq was "60% Shi'a." That is, he thinks the army of Iraq reflected exactly the percentages in the general population. But of course the army was Sunni-officered, strictly Sunni-controlled. He, Dinesh D'Souza, appears not to realize how police states can stay afloat, when they set their diabolical minds to it. What percentage of the officer corps in the Syrian army, for example, in a country where only 12% of the population is Alawite but the country is run of, by, and for Alawites, does he think is Alawite? 12% exactly? Or 50%? Or 80%?

What naivete. Does he really think that the Sunni despots who have run Iraq ever since the British left, even though they were always a distinct minority (and have become more so over time), would do so without total control of the army? Can he not imagine how those Shi'a conscripts would have been pushed forward, fed whatever anti-"Persian" propaganda could be fed them, and then at the first sign of any recalcitrance, executed on the spot? He is lacking in the imaginative faculty.

In the imaginative faculty. In general knowledge. In specific knowledge about Islam, a subject he presumes to know enough to write a book about. The Hoover Institution should not be mocked. It no doubt is mortified that he is still there, and no doubt looking forward to getting rid of him at the earliest opportunity. He will find some other place to exploit for his own self-promotion, though no doubt he will be sorry not to be able to wave around the phrase "Hoover Institution" and bask in its reflected prestige. He'll do fine, somewhere. People like that always do.

[Posted by Hugh at May 29, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:28 PM

May 22, 2007
Fitzgerald: What is to be done

The Administration, and the generals who remain true believers in its policy appear to be suggesting to us two entirely opposite things. (There are generals, and many many officers below that level, who have slowly or quickly come to dislike the Iraq venture and to see, in varying degrees, that the "mission" itself is unattainable, and furthermore, makes no sense.) They tell us that if "we leave" (formerly this was phrased as "if we cut and run," but that phrase is becoming a bit embarrassing) then it doth follow as the night the day that "chaos" and "catastrophe" will come upon Iraq, the entire Middle East, nay the entire world. For we will have what one sudden expert on Islam (Gunaratna) obediently calls a "terrorism Disneyland," and other American-government-contracting "experts" chime in with similar views.

And the Administration goes further. It tells us two things. First it tells us all about Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, you see, is the only problem, or the main problem. An Administration that understood things aright would realize that is silly, that Al Qaeda is only the best known and so far most successful group in conducting sensational acts of terrorism, but there are a hundred or a thousand groups, with more formed every day. (Did you hear, before last week, of "Fatah al-Islam" in Lebanon? Of course you didn't).

The Administration offers up every conceivable argument, plausible or implausible, to explain why we cannot, just cannot, leave Iraq to its own sectarian and ethnic fissures. (Those fissures will use up, it has long been maintained in a series of posts here, the men, money, materiel, morale, and attention of co-religionists on both sides of the sectarian divide. And in the ethnic struggle of Kurds to become independent, those fissures will encourage other non-Arab Muslims, such as the Berbers, to demand autonomy or more).

The latest version is the "test of wills" business that Bernard Lewis offered the Wall Street Journal the other day. He offered up a highly tendentious account of why America has been treated so badly, and Russia so well, by Muslims. Ephraim Karsh publicly dissected his account, as a matter of history, subsequently in this article in "The New York Sun." Lewis then went on to repeat the party-line about Iraq as a "test of wills." That is, if the Americans leave, Al Qaeda and not merely Al Qaeda, but the whole Muslim world, and not merely the whole Muslim world, but the whole wide world, will see it as an American "defeat." But will it? Will it if, at the same time, or shortly thereafter, the American administration announces a series of measures that show a better understanding of the Jihad?

What if, for example, the Administration announces a huge new tax on gasoline, and then on other uses of oil, and deliberately lets it be known that such measures should have been undertaken long ago, but that in the past we had been "not sufficiently understood either the threat of anthropogenic climate change, nor the threat of the worldwide Jihad, the chief weapon of which is the Money Weapon -- some ten trillion dollars since 1973." What a shiver down Saudi spines then. What a salutary bit of marching-order rhetoric.

And what if, at the same time, the Administration were to announce that a few thousand troops, backed by air power from the sea, or from bases, perhaps, in Ethiopia (the place of the Christian kingdom of the mythical Prester John), would now protect the black Africans of Darfur, and the black African Christians and animists of the southern Sudan? It would announce that they would hold this area "until such time as a referendum, under safe conditions, free from the intimidation and murder from the Sudanese government itself, can be held to determine the wishes of the black Africans who are clearly being robbed of their wealth and mass-murdered.” That robbery continues, whether the wealth be that of the oil that lies under the land of the black Africans in the south, or the potential wealth of the land itself if seized from its black African inhabitants so that the Muslim Arabs can push their own steady, ruthless, inexorable attempts to destroy the livelihoods of the non-Muslim, and non-Arab Muslim, populations so wrongly left under their control, long ago, by the British.

And since that "referendum" would necessarily lead to a separation of both parts of the country, Darfur and the south, from Arab Muslim control, and the Arabs will recognize this at once, the shrill cries that go up will show them that the American government will at long last cease its futile and absurd efforts to "win the hearts and minds" of Muslims in Iraq or elsewhere, and is from here on out going to do what it can to divide, demoralize, weaken, push back the Camp of Islam and Jihad.

And there are so many other things -- suggested right here, over the past 3 1/2 years, that could and should be done, including calling a meeting of NATO to discuss the "internal security threat" posed by "the Jihadists, present and potential, in our midst." And then there should be changes in both the immigration and naturalization laws of the entire Western world, to keep out, or to push out, those in whose mental baggage remains undeclared a permanent hostility to the legal and political institutions, and social arrangements, of Infidel nation-states, and of Infidels themselves.

If this is done, if this is seen to be done, how can one believe that the ululations of triumph by Al Qaeda will last more than a month or two? Is it beyond the wit of the American government to regard the withdrawal from Iraq as anything more than a defeat? (Google, for more, the various discussions here about what constitutes "victory," rightly defined as an outcome that will divide and demoralize, and thereby weaken the Camp of Islam, starting with "Victory Lies Shining Before Us".)

But if the Administration keeps telling us that Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda will "win" if we leave. It calls in everyone it can (Gunaratna, Lewis et al.) to do their stuff, to warn as direly as they can, each in his own way, so as to promote the policy that has failed, is failing, will fail. Yet they at the very same time tell us that if we withdraw (and in this the Sunni Arab rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia help to support, even to pay for, the chorus) then the "Shi'a crescent" that threatens "the entire Middle East" (i.e., threatens the Sunni Arabs), will solidify, will enlarge from a crescent to a full and threatening moon consisting of wicked Shi'a taking over from those Infidel-friendly Sunnis who have done so much for us.

But how can this be? How can an American withdrawal be both an absolute triumph for Al Qaeda, the same Al Qaeda in Iraq that has preached fervent hatred of Shi'a Islam, that considers the Shi'a to be "Rafidite dogs" and the worst sort of Infidels, and at the same time have the same Administration warn direly that if we withdraw, why then it will be a triumph for the Shi'a of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

It is true, of course, that both sides wish us out. Why is that? Why do you think that both the hyper-Shi'a of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the hyper-Sunnis of Al Qaeda, mortal enemies each to each, wish us at this point out? Why would that be?

Well, here's why it could be. Each side is utterly convinced that it can inherit what it wants in Iraq. They can't both be right. They may, in fact, both be wrong. But the very idea that the American government should keep 150,000 troops tied down (with morale plummeting, and young officers leaving whenever they can, day by day) in Iraq, and keep the American public misinformed about Islam, is madness. The Administration is ignoring the many ways in which the jihadists are fighting this war: through economic warfare (and here Bin Laden has had a smashing success -- the $880 billion spent so wrongly in Iraq is more than the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, ever fought by the United States) and education/propaganda, education of Infidels (including potential converts) about Islam. By ignoring all this, they are losing an opportunity to fight and win this war the way the Cold War was fought: with propaganda directed at Muslims intended to split or weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad. In that regard, several lines of attack should be stressed:

1) For non-Muslim Arabs, Islam should be seen, correctly, as a vehicle for Arab imperialism. Berbers, Kurds, black Africans in Darfur should be made to recognize the arrogance of the Arabs who treated with such contumely local non-Arab Muslims in both the Balkans and Afghanistan. All this provides the evidence that Islam is an Arab vehicle, as do the texts and tenets of Islam, and the clear attitudes of Arab Muslims -- which can be seen even during the hajj.

2) For Infidels, Islam should be seen, correctly, as far more than is described in the word "religion." Rather, it should be seen as a Belief-System that includes a politics and a geopolitics, and that is based on a severe and uncompromising division of the world between Believers (to whom all loyalty is owed as fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya) and Infidels (to whom nothing is owed, no matter what kindnesses or help is extended by those Infidels).

3) For Infidels and Muslims alike, the connection must be intelligently made between the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Islamic societies and peoples, and Islam itself. Islam is a collectivist belief-system in which the Individual has no rights if those rights (freedom of conscience, freedom of speech) are held to harm Islam. Islam is a system which promotes submission to despotic rule and flatly contradicts, in letter and spirit, the moral basis of advanced Western democracies. Islam is a brake on economic development (inshallah-fatalism), Islam is a moral failure (the unequal treatment of non-Muslims and women), Islam is an intellectual failure (the habit of mental submission, necessary for Islam's wellbeing, that also prevents free and skeptical inquiry without which the enterprise of science is lost). All that should be stressed, along with those narrow limits on artistic expression: sculpture, representations of living creatures, and even music is banned under those strictly following, in the Taliban manner, the rules of Haram and Halal.

4) It should be pointed out to the oil-poor Arabs that despite the supposed loyalty of the members of the umma each to each, the rich Arabs, although they are happy to pay for mosques and madrasas and boughten academics and armies of Western hirelings to promote their interests, are remarkably selfish when it comes to actually aiding their fellow Muslims. They prefer to insist that the Infidels do it. And the Infidels have been doing it. While Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar and the U.A.E., with tiny populations, take in billions every day, it is left to the long-suffering Western Infidel taxpayers, pushed around by their own ignorant and clumsy governments (wishing to buy temporary or feigned, or temporary and feigned, "goodwill" from Arabs and Muslims), to keep shelling out money to those petty despots and regimes -- $60 billion in American aid alone to Egypt, $10 billion to Jordan, $28 billion since 2001 alone to Pakistan, and so on. That aid should come, if it comes at all, from Saudi Arabia, from the U.A.E., from Kuwait.

The third great fissure, along with the sectarian and the ethnic ones by now so evident to all but some in the Bush Administration, is economic. And here there may be a certain nervousness about any hint of discussions, even for the purpose of encouraging disarray and resentment in the Camp of Islam, of the maldistribution in order to encourage resentment, by the poor Muslims, of the rich Muslims. One can imagine why children of inherited privilege (Bush), or those who managed to go from their "public service" to corporate careers that gave them gigantic fortunes within a few years (Cheney), in both parties, might shy away from exploitation of such a weapon. But in this war, all weapons need to be employed, and the least of them, right now, the one that does nothing for us, are those boots-on-the-ground in Tarbaby Iraq -- turning quickly into the La Brea Tar Pits, with the ignorant-of-Islam-and-of-Iraq in both the civilian and military leadership becoming permanently stuck, and fossilized, before our very eyes.

[Posted by Hugh at May 22, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:31 PM

Oh Yeah I have a third option.
Stay and fight in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, remove the worthless ROE and allow the soldiers to take care of the nutjobs in turbans...

At the same time Arrest Harry Reid, John Murtha and Nancy Pelosi and try them for treason, followed by a quick yep painful hanging.

while we are at it, Make the NYT, LAT, put a disclaimer in front of all of their anti-American articles that says this is a one sided view point based on fantasy.

Hows that?

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 6:34 PM

Now let's see:

Who will one listen to ? Tarbaby Hugh or General Petraeus ? Both claim that they will likely produce victory, one hasn't, and to a limited degree the other has ?

Now which one should one go with ?

This is so tough to decide.

God bless America and her fighting men and women.

Posted by: dgene at September 10, 2007 6:47 PM

June 4, 2007

Fitzgerald: A tribute to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen

"If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys -- a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now -- that's the same thing that drives me, you know?" -- David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, senior commander in Iraq

The "impressive" and "brilliant" (first in his class in military school in Australia) Lt. Col. David Kilcullen should be asked a number of questions about his all-purpose, one-size-more-or-less- fits-all (after a little softening of the boots-on-the-ground leather) "rules of counterinsurgency." He should be questioned about how and why he thinks the insurrection in Malaya, or that in Greece, are like that in Iraq. He might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Sunnis, or rather of the two main Sunni groups, which yesterday collaborated with each other and yet today are apparently at daggers drawn, and which tomorrow might yet collaborate against the Shi'a, and which in any case are, all of them, against the Infidel Americans (though the "Anbar tribes" of which we hear so much are happy to pocket American aid).

And he might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Shi'a, or rather of the different groups of Shi'a -- of Moqtada al-Sadr, and of Hakim of SCIRI, and Maliki of the Da'wa Party. And he then might tell us who, in Greece or Malaya or Aden or Kenya or East Timor or wherever it is that provides him with the "data" for his "counterinsurgency" ideas, played the role of the Kurds, who though Muslim are more grateful and reliable for American purposes than any of the Arab groups.

And then one might ask Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, he of the impressive strine accent (any accent but an American one can woo and win the easily-impressed likes of Condoleeza Rice), if he sees anything that might distinguish Iraq otherwise from his "counterinsurgency" "laws" and "rules" and "lessons." For example, what is the significance of the existence of Shi'a Iran on one side of Iraq, along its longest border, and of states (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Egypt, even Syria -- which is 70% Sunni though the Alawites are not, and Sunni Muslims as well as most Shi'a do not regard them even as real Muslims, given their cult of Mary) dominated by or largely peopled by Sunni Arabs on the other side? Does the ability of both sides to aid their co-religionists, and their keen awareness of the need to do so, not give pause to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen and to those who are impressed with him?

Do they not see beyond Iraq to a larger war, a war not simply with what Lt. Col. David Kilcullen has described as "a kook in a room" whom we must prevent from having mass appeal? Jihad already has, and always will have, "mass appeal" to Muslims. And Bin Laden is not a "kook"; Khomeini was not a "kook"; Nasrallah is not a "kook"; the leaders of the Ikhwan, wherever the Ikhwan has its many cells, are not "kooks" -- they are perfectly traditional Muslims, who choose to act on the central duty of Jihad by direct participation, rather than offering other kinds of support, such as promoting Da'wa in the Western world, or buying up Western hirelings, or merely contributing their mite to demographic conquest and a slow undoing of Infidel legal and political institutions. The enemy is Jihad, or more bluntly, the supremacist Belief-System that Lt. Col. David Kilcullen self-assuredly think she knows quite enough of, when he knows dangerously little. And that little, that ignorance of Islam, and of the ethnic and sectarian fissures in Iraq, explains the fiasco to date.

Final question: who, in all those other "insurgencies" from which the Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them draw their "laws," played the role of the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, the people who are, like the Mandeans and Yazidis, the ones who have fled, or are fleeing, or are being killed, because Islam, you see...is Islam? The Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them do not see the complete picture, of which Iraq is only a part. Nor do they see the need in Iraq to end with a result that justifies the colossal investment, that is, a result that will guarantee further divisions and demoralizations within the camp of Islamic supremacism.

[Posted by Hugh at June 4, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:54 PM

Now let's see:

Who will one listen to ? Tarbaby Hugh or General Petraeus ? Both claim that they will likely produce victory, one hasn't, and to a limited degree the other has ?

Now which one should one go with ?

This is so tough to decide.

God bless America and her fighting men and women.

Posted by: dgene at September 10, 2007 6:54 PM

Good points, Hugh, especially the one about the Money Weapon. In that regard, consider this interesting phenomenon: Why do you think it is that the insurgency is so much fiercer in Iraq than Afghanistan, despite the fact that Afghanistan provides better cover, being mountainous? I think it's because the Muslims know damn well that Iraq has the fourth largest oil reserves in the world.
Whatever happens in Iraq, and I agree with the preposterous prospects of democracy, we really will have lost if those reserves fall into radical hands. Of course, our efforts right now are merely paving the way for that by trying to pacify the country for a Muslim government. But a precipitous withdrawal would have the same result, eventually.
The problem is one of failing to define goals that are both realistic and put our own interests first.
After being attacked, and then jerked around for years by Saddam Hussein and every other Muslim regime, we don't owe those guys spit.

Posted by: jewdog at September 10, 2007 6:54 PM

June 4, 2007

Fitzgerald: A tribute to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen

"If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys -- a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now -- that's the same thing that drives me, you know?" -- David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, senior commander in Iraq

The "impressive" and "brilliant" (first in his class in military school in Australia) Lt. Col. David Kilcullen should be asked a number of questions about his all-purpose, one-size-more-or-less- fits-all (after a little softening of the boots-on-the-ground leather) "rules of counterinsurgency." He should be questioned about how and why he thinks the insurrection in Malaya, or that in Greece, are like that in Iraq. He might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Sunnis, or rather of the two main Sunni groups, which yesterday collaborated with each other and yet today are apparently at daggers drawn, and which tomorrow might yet collaborate against the Shi'a, and which in any case are, all of them, against the Infidel Americans (though the "Anbar tribes" of which we hear so much are happy to pocket American aid).

And he might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Shi'a, or rather of the different groups of Shi'a -- of Moqtada al-Sadr, and of Hakim of SCIRI, and Maliki of the Da'wa Party. And he then might tell us who, in Greece or Malaya or Aden or Kenya or East Timor or wherever it is that provides him with the "data" for his "counterinsurgency" ideas, played the role of the Kurds, who though Muslim are more grateful and reliable for American purposes than any of the Arab groups.

And then one might ask Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, he of the impressive strine accent (any accent but an American one can woo and win the easily-impressed likes of Condoleeza Rice), if he sees anything that might distinguish Iraq otherwise from his "counterinsurgency" "laws" and "rules" and "lessons." For example, what is the significance of the existence of Shi'a Iran on one side of Iraq, along its longest border, and of states (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Egypt, even Syria -- which is 70% Sunni though the Alawites are not, and Sunni Muslims as well as most Shi'a do not regard them even as real Muslims, given their cult of Mary) dominated by or largely peopled by Sunni Arabs on the other side? Does the ability of both sides to aid their co-religionists, and their keen awareness of the need to do so, not give pause to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen and to those who are impressed with him?

Do they not see beyond Iraq to a larger war, a war not simply with what Lt. Col. David Kilcullen has described as "a kook in a room" whom we must prevent from having mass appeal? Jihad already has, and always will have, "mass appeal" to Muslims. And Bin Laden is not a "kook"; Khomeini was not a "kook"; Nasrallah is not a "kook"; the leaders of the Ikhwan, wherever the Ikhwan has its many cells, are not "kooks" -- they are perfectly traditional Muslims, who choose to act on the central duty of Jihad by direct participation, rather than offering other kinds of support, such as promoting Da'wa in the Western world, or buying up Western hirelings, or merely contributing their mite to demographic conquest and a slow undoing of Infidel legal and political institutions. The enemy is Jihad, or more bluntly, the supremacist Belief-System that Lt. Col. David Kilcullen self-assuredly think she knows quite enough of, when he knows dangerously little. And that little, that ignorance of Islam, and of the ethnic and sectarian fissures in Iraq, explains the fiasco to date.

Final question: who, in all those other "insurgencies" from which the Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them draw their "laws," played the role of the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, the people who are, like the Mandeans and Yazidis, the ones who have fled, or are fleeing, or are being killed, because Islam, you see...is Islam? The Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them do not see the complete picture, of which Iraq is only a part. Nor do they see the need in Iraq to end with a result that justifies the colossal investment, that is, a result that will guarantee further divisions and demoralizations within the camp of Islamic supremacism.

[Posted by Hugh at June 4, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 6:58 PM

Occupying a hostile population is never a good proposition. There's a reason why the Jewish laws of warfare are void of the assumption of occupation, nay, they forbid it in the strongest terms.

(You don't need to tell me that Israel isn't operating according to those laws. *sigh* )

Posted by: ZionistYoungster at September 10, 2007 6:59 PM

Oh Yeah I have a third option.
Stay and fight in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, remove the worthless ROE and allow the soldiers to take care of the nutjobs in turbans...

At the same time Arrest Harry Reid, John Murtha and Nancy Pelosi and try them for treason, followed by a quick yep painful hanging.

Hows that?
--posted by Robert

Proof that your I.Q. is smaller than my shoe size.

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at September 10, 2007 7:02 PM

June 4, 2007

Fitzgerald: A tribute to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen

"If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys -- a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now -- that's the same thing that drives me, you know?" -- David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, senior commander in Iraq

The "impressive" and "brilliant" (first in his class in military school in Australia) Lt. Col. David Kilcullen should be asked a number of questions about his all-purpose, one-size-more-or-less- fits-all (after a little softening of the boots-on-the-ground leather) "rules of counterinsurgency." He should be questioned about how and why he thinks the insurrection in Malaya, or that in Greece, are like that in Iraq. He might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Sunnis, or rather of the two main Sunni groups, which yesterday collaborated with each other and yet today are apparently at daggers drawn, and which tomorrow might yet collaborate against the Shi'a, and which in any case are, all of them, against the Infidel Americans (though the "Anbar tribes" of which we hear so much are happy to pocket American aid).

And he might tell us who in those "insurgencies" played the role of the Shi'a, or rather of the different groups of Shi'a -- of Moqtada al-Sadr, and of Hakim of SCIRI, and Maliki of the Da'wa Party. And he then might tell us who, in Greece or Malaya or Aden or Kenya or East Timor or wherever it is that provides him with the "data" for his "counterinsurgency" ideas, played the role of the Kurds, who though Muslim are more grateful and reliable for American purposes than any of the Arab groups.

And then one might ask Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, he of the impressive strine accent (any accent but an American one can woo and win the easily-impressed likes of Condoleeza Rice), if he sees anything that might distinguish Iraq otherwise from his "counterinsurgency" "laws" and "rules" and "lessons." For example, what is the significance of the existence of Shi'a Iran on one side of Iraq, along its longest border, and of states (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Egypt, even Syria -- which is 70% Sunni though the Alawites are not, and Sunni Muslims as well as most Shi'a do not regard them even as real Muslims, given their cult of Mary) dominated by or largely peopled by Sunni Arabs on the other side? Does the ability of both sides to aid their co-religionists, and their keen awareness of the need to do so, not give pause to Lt. Col. David Kilcullen and to those who are impressed with him?

Do they not see beyond Iraq to a larger war, a war not simply with what Lt. Col. David Kilcullen has described as "a kook in a room" whom we must prevent from having mass appeal? Jihad already has, and always will have, "mass appeal" to Muslims. And Bin Laden is not a "kook"; Khomeini was not a "kook"; Nasrallah is not a "kook"; the leaders of the Ikhwan, wherever the Ikhwan has its many cells, are not "kooks" -- they are perfectly traditional Muslims, who choose to act on the central duty of Jihad by direct participation, rather than offering other kinds of support, such as promoting Da'wa in the Western world, or buying up Western hirelings, or merely contributing their mite to demographic conquest and a slow undoing of Infidel legal and political institutions. The enemy is Jihad, or more bluntly, the supremacist Belief-System that Lt. Col. David Kilcullen self-assuredly think she knows quite enough of, when he knows dangerously little. And that little, that ignorance of Islam, and of the ethnic and sectarian fissures in Iraq, explains the fiasco to date.

Final question: who, in all those other "insurgencies" from which the Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them draw their "laws," played the role of the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, the people who are, like the Mandeans and Yazidis, the ones who have fled, or are fleeing, or are being killed, because Islam, you see...is Islam? The Kilcullens of this world and those who are impressed by them do not see the complete picture, of which Iraq is only a part. Nor do they see the need in Iraq to end with a result that justifies the colossal investment, that is, a result that will guarantee further divisions and demoralizations within the camp of Islamic supremacism.

[Posted by Hugh at June 4, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 7:05 PM

Ynkedoodl2, or proof that your shoe size is the only thing on you worth mentioning.

Posted by: Robert at September 10, 2007 7:07 PM

Any self-sustaining government in Iraq, that is quasi democratic, is an American success and weakens the Jihadis.

Any perceived defeat of U.S. aims strengthens the Jihadis in direct proportion to the magnitude of that defeat.

If not in Iraq then where? Who will join us after we have displayed our weakness and failure to the world?

If the worlds’ only superpower and champion of freedom is seen as impotent against the Jihadis, who will then step up to oppose them?

If not us then Who?

Posted by: Davegreybeard at September 10, 2007 7:17 PM

Hugh...

Dear Lord!

Hugh I respect you. You are tying to educate the ignorant who clearly don't understand...

(1) Basic strategy
(2) The nature of Islam

I sort of get that feeling we are riding into Hattin and Sir Cornelius and his merry band are leading us...

I hope my horse is fast...

Posted by: greatcometof1577 at September 10, 2007 7:22 PM

The Democrats don't care how many Americans die as long as a democrat can be president - to them the more dead american body bags the better. Thats why the MSM gleefully reports each and every american death.

Does anyone really think they give a rats ass how many Iraqi's are killed? I don't. Which is why they are pushing to surrender Iraq.

Posted by: CrazyFool at September 10, 2007 7:22 PM

Foehammer:
Do what I've been saying to do for years now: smack the crap out of Iran to cripple its military so that it cannot take over Iraq without insane amounts of resources expended.

Nope, leave it. Just make sure that Iran and its proxy Hezbollah knows that that the crap will be bombed out of them if they so much as 1 missile is lobbed Israels way. Iran should be told upfront that their only refinery will be reduced to rubble. Instead let Kuwait, Saudi Arabia expend their petrodollars and military hardware against Iran.

Why wade in? You only need to if SA screws up big time. And no matter how many siren noises comes from SA - do nothing (you can be sympathetic while laughing into hankerchiefs as long as you do nothing). This is classic military tactics of letting 2 common enemies slug it out and only taking action against who is left once they have weakened each other.
Going by the dictum : Anything that weakens Islam is good.

Move all American and Coalition forces out of Iraqi urban areas. Guard the oil fields.

Leave them.

Shut our borders to Muslim immigrants and shut-off the flow of dirty Saudi oil money to the United States in every way, shape and form possible. No madrassas being built in NYC or anywhere else.

Yes. Absolutely. And start funding diplomatic initiatives, radio and TV broadcasts that counter Islamic propaganda. CIA should be given new objectives - anything weakening Islam is good. If Islamic organisations are almost at blows with each other (e.g. Fateh & Hamas) - the CIA should see if they could fan it into war - nothing inept mind you. Shut down financial help to 57 OIC countries. Any financial help should be made conditional on them treating their minorities with dignity, no honour killings.

Elect a new President that actually understands the real threat -- do any of them?

Yup

Posted by: UK Infidel Lover at September 10, 2007 7:31 PM

Wow, It really takes a learned academic like Robert to point out to you'll that Osama is planning an attack?

Posted by: cerebate at September 10, 2007 7:34 PM

With an obstinacy bordering on the insane, Messrs
Bush & Co aided by aimable stooge General Petraeus
are to 'stay the course' in Iraq. Not satisfied with sqandering years of American blood & treasure, they intend to spend more to achieve-what ?? Exactly WHEN will the Islamic Republic of
Iraq be ready-be the Multicultural, Democratic power sharing Government that woolly headed Western Idealists want to project upon an alien culture & people...Western Leaders & Bush in particular,
seem incapable of learning from past mistakes of
U.S Foreign Policy.
Samuel Huntingdon warned of this in his book 'Clash of Civilizations' that the West must
NOT ASSUME & PROJECT THEIR MORES that the rest of
the world wanted the same things, e.g.DEMOCRACY
especially in countries which had never know any.
No good will come of this decision-many posting here know this too. See a weakened America haemorrhaging on two fronts[maybe a third] which
will delight Al Quaeda who will mercilessly strike
with impunity. Since Bush has gone out of his way
to insult Orthodox Christians & their concerns,
powerful contries such as Russia & India, he and
America will truly reap the Whirlwind...
China is no friend of arrogant America but possessing subtle minds [and brains] will already
be calculating when they will step into No I slot
in the world!

Posted by: Morgane at September 10, 2007 7:40 PM

Hugh
Q. General Petraeus, the population of Iraq is, with the current flight of the Christians, now about 98% Muslim, isn't that correct?

A.: I'd have to check my figures, but that sounds about right.

Q.: So it might be helpful to find out what Islam is all about, isn't that right?

A.: No i do not. It would be a waste of time for us, because there are various sects in Islam and because no two people believe the same thing. That some motivation is politicial, some financial , some mob behavior and some religious.
Perhaps armchair academics with no idea about what war entails and the complexities of war would have us think so, but i believe it would be a wastage of resources.

Q. : Hey Robert, he didnt answer the questions like you told me he would. What do i do now?

Posted by: cerebate at September 10, 2007 7:43 PM

I'm afraid none of the presidential candidates at this point has a realistic assessment. On the Tonight Show last week, Leno asked Fred Thompson about his position on Iraq. Much to my dismay, Fred said something about the need to remain until we "get the job done". Jay then asked him, quite intelligently in my view, "just what does 'get the job done' mean?" Fred, again to my dismay, spouted some nonsense about making the place safe for those purple-fingertipped(shiites) who voted for the present government. We deserve better answers than that.

Posted by: Infidel33 at September 10, 2007 7:45 PM

'Any perceived defeat of U.S. aims strengthens the Jihadis in direct proportion to the magnitude of that defeat.' Posted by: Davegreybeard

The Americans will be defeated, it's just a matter of when. This is because they cannot devote infinite manpower on the ground, and their presence in mostly rejected by the populace. Whatever number of jihadists are liquidated becomes a mout point, a TEMPORARY success if you will. The moslems will always regroup, plot, coerce to destroy the kuffir at all costs. Any agreement at creating a democracy will be a hudna, a contrived deception at gaining the confidence of the Americans. It will dissolve as soon as troop levels decrease - you can bet the farm on that!

If not in Iraq then where? Who will join us after we have displayed our weakness and failure to the world? Posted by: Davegreybeard

Who else of our allies willfully agreed to this travesty in the first place? Who else besides England has joined forces by contributing significant forces to the cause? Seems to me, American has been alone from the beginning.

If the worlds’ only superpower and champion of freedom is seen as impotent against the Jihadis, who will then step up to oppose them?
Posted by: Davegreybeard

It's not about us giving up against the jihadis but more about how to take the fight to them in a smarter and more meaningful way. I certainly do not have all the answers here; but what I can say is that foreign policy, as it stands currently, is a colossal failure. We've handed Iraq to Iran on a platter. We have thought about the conflict from a western only perspective, and failed to anticipate the religious divide. Worst of all, killing jihadists in Iraq doesn't mean a damn thing when terrorists can enter at will through the southern border. Maybe we can start an alliance of democracies and fight Jihad ideaogy in a more effective manner?

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin at September 10, 2007 7:56 PM

Paladin is, of course, correct. Staying only means more $$$$ and more death (for our soldiers). Who knows what the near-term end game will be? Perhaps the Iranian govt will be overthrown; or perhaps we or Israel will attack it and destabilize it. And, sure, AQ will be there and the population will be terrorized. It will mostly likely follow the Somalia pattern until strongmen rise and control large chunks of territory. Sadly, for us, our government (Dems and GOP) will learn nothing from this about Islam.

Posted by: Seymour Paine at September 10, 2007 8:00 PM

May 15, 2007

Fitzgerald: Uncle Sap

Cheney "worked to overcome Saudi skepticism" about Maliki? But King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is not "skeptical" at all. King Abdullah has no concerns about the "leadership abilities" of Maliki, or for that matter Jaafari before him, or of the "leadership abilities" of any Shi'ite leader or Shi'a-dominated government in Iraq.

King Abdullah is not concerned about "leadership abilities." He knows perfectly well what Maliki, what Maliki's party, Hizb al-Da'wa (the Army of Da'wa) is all about. It's about Shi'a Islam. And still worse, that word "Da'wa" sends shudders down Sunni spines, because while Sunnis have been conducting Da'wa among Infidels in the West, Shi'a have been, as the Egyptian and Saudi press report grimly (and no doubt with exaggeration), actively trying to conduct Da'wa among the Sunni Muslims, in Syria, in Lebanon, and elsewhere. And who knows better than King Abdullah and other Sunni Muslims how cunning, how relentless, how dangerous Muslims engaged in campaigns of Da'wa can be?

And in addition to Maliki and the Hizb al-Da'wa, there is SCIRI, and Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish-e-Mahdi. Abdullah knows about all of them. Oh, he knows.

He knows, and he doesn't like. Behind the forced smiles, Abdullah and the rest of the Al-Saud family, doesn’t like it at all. Neither does Mubarak, or the members of Mubarak's Family-and-Friends Plan who rule over Egypt and pocket so much of its wealth. And of course Son-of-Plucky-Little-King Hussein, Abdullah of Jordan, doesn't like it either. They aren't in favor of replacing Maliki with someone more forceful. Their unhappiness is not with Maliki. Their unhappiness is with the Shi'a ascendancy and the loss of Sunni power.

And just like the Sunnis within Iraq, the Sunnis outside Iraq will never reconcile themselves to this loss. Never. Why not? Well, here is where a little history might do Cheney and Bush and Rice, not for the first time, a little good. They should recognize that the adherents of the belief-system of Islam are, all of them, history-haunted -- because to them, in a sense, there is no history. There is only Islam, and before Islam, outside of Islam, nothing really matters. And Islam is paralysis, is stasis. There is no such thing as "progress" in Islamic history, but only the history of Islamic success and dominance. And when that success, and that dominance, came early, and after a few centuries was lost, Muslims could not and cannot stand it.

Why can't they stand it? Why are they so history-haunted, just as other belief-systems have been, such as Fascism, and Mussolini with his tales of Roman greatness and Mare Nostrum, or Nazism, and Hitler with his harking back to those warlike Teutonic tribes supposedly enjoying their untrammeled Lebensraum? Because of the notion of Lost Greatness, a Greatness that was and always will belong to Islam as by right, as is only natural, is essential to the worldview which insists that Islam "must dominate and is not to be dominated."

And central to the notion of Muslim greatness is the tale of fabled Baghdad, the capital, and center for almost all of the 500 years of Islam's most glorious days, the period roughly from 750 to 1250. (It was in 1258 that the Mongols over Hulegu conquered and destroyed the city, and the Abbasid Caliphate centered there.) Baghdad itself had replaced Samarra, which had been the Abbasid capital for the first hundred years, and became, under three great Abbasid Caliphs -- Al-Mansur, (754-775), Harun al-Rashid (786-809), al Ma'mun (813-833) -- the madinat al-salaam, the first City of Islam. It was never replaced in Arab hearts by the successor capital of Islam, Constantinople of the Ottoman Turks. No, it was only Baghdad the city, and Baghdad the capital of Iraq, Mesopotamia, the Land of the Two Rivers. Baghdad is the place where, more than any other place, Arab Muslim history was made more than a millennium ago. Sunni Arab hearts cannot relinquish, Sunni Arab minds cannot forget, the city that must, no matter what, belong to them, if their history-haunted dreams are not to be nightmarish. And certainly it must not belong to the Shi'a, those untrustworthy "Rafidite dogs," as the more extreme Sunnis of Al Qaeda call them. (Did you know that the Shi'a secretly opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols? Yes. The Shi'a and the Jews, they did it. Just consult the Sunni Arab histories).

Why can't the Sunnis accept the Shi'a, you ask? Aren't the Shi'a at least Muslims? If you still have to ask that question, you demonstrate that you don’t know the history that guides the present conflicts. And Bush and Cheney and Rice, with her inane "they'll (the Sunnis and the Shi'a) just have to get over it," still have to ask that question. So do many of those all-too-obedient and unquestioning-of-the-"mission" generals in and out of Iraq. But fewer of the keener, younger, less careerist colonels and majors and captains under them, who have experienced Iraq and Islam and Muslims in a way that the party-line generals have not, have to ask it. The answer is that the Sunnis can’t accept the Shi’a simply because they can't. Because compromise and sweet reason are not inculcated by Islam. Because the depth and the duration of the Sunni-Shi'a split go far beyond their stated differences. The split has become a wide fissure not only in Iraq, but in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia. Look at how the Shi'a of the Eastern Province are discriminated against, even persecuted, by the Sunni Arabs who rule that country. It is also a wide fissure in Bahrain, Yemen, and recently Lebanon, where the Shi'a have over years increased in numbers (an intra-Islam demographic conquest, mimicking that of Muslims in Western Europe) and in response a new Sunni terrorist group may find itself battling Hizballah. Can you think of anything finer, than Hizballah and Al-Qaeda going at it in Lebanon? Yes, you can -- and that is representatives of Sunnis and Shi'a going at it forever in Iraq. Nothing could be finer, except the same thing happening in Iraq once the Americans leave, only with the Shi'a militias really going after the Sunnis, including but not limited to supporters of Al Qaeda.

And that is why King Abdullah solemnly expresses, to an unskeptical, credulous Cheney, his worry about the "leadership abilities" of al-Maliki. And that is what Mubarak and Abdullah of Jordan will also express: the same "worries" over his "leadership" or that of any Shi'a "leaders," as a supplement to their shrill, hysterical, and transparent attempts to whip up the Americans against a supposed "Shi'a crescent." The only thing the Americans need to worry about is not Shi'a efforts to convert Sunnis, or their efforts to become a geopolitical threat to the equally malign Saudis in the Gulf, but their nuclear project -- for that does threaten Infidels.

The Americans got into Iraq in large part, though not completely, because of the false information supplied to them by Shi'a "informants" about weapons of mass destruction, and furthermore because of the ridiculous assertions made to the Americans about how wonderfully, permanently grateful "the Iraqis" would be, with demonstrations following the liberation of Baghdad that "would make the liberation of Kabul seem like a funeral procession." Oh, great things were believed by Paul Wolfowitz (the war might cost "as much" as $40 billion), by Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Bernard Lewis, tutti quanti. They knew. Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya and Shaha Riza and so many others of that ilk, wonderful people, people on Western wavelength, told them so.

So the Shi'a helped to get us in.

And now, it seems, the Sunnis -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia among them -- are determined to keep us there to protect the Sunnis and their interests from the Shi'a, including Maliki and all the others, who simply refuse to yield up their new-found dominance, and refuse to give the local Sunnis what the Saudi king, and the Egyptian military dictator, and the Jordanian kinglet, and so many other Sunnis, want them to give them.

Those who have done nothing to tax oil or gasoline or build nuclear reactors (as France has done) or subsidize mass transit (as Japan has done) or give the kind of tax credits for solar energy or direct subsidies (as Germany has done), have no right to tell any of us what should or should not be done in Iraq or elsewhere. Those who do not have any energy policy, and who have not yet recognized the obvious -- the need to diminish the money-weapon of the global Jihad -- and who have done nothing to educate themselves, much less the public, and who are fashioning policies toward Islam based on ignorance of Islam, have no right to tell us anything about how to resist the Jihad. They have forfeited whatever respect some were inclined to offer them. They have failed to set the right goals, and have squandered men, money, and material for goals that are unattainable. And even were they to be attained, they would be exactly the wrong goals.

When the Americans do leave, and the ethnic and sectarian fissures provide that "victory" that can only be achieved and will be inevitable once the Americans leave, do not let the Bush Administration claim credit for that victory. Only those who correctly identified the nature of a "victory" for Americans and other Infidels -- not "freedom" for "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East but rather the promotion of division and demoralization and permanent strife within the Camp of Islam and Jihad -- can claim some share of that "victory."

There are not many who will be able to do so.

Meanwhile, someone please explain to Cheney that we need not fashion our policy to meet the current unhappiness of the Sunni Arabs, in some kind of attempt to match our original circa 2001-2003 gullibility to Shi'a Arab blandishments and come-ons, with gullibility and a willingness to sacrifice American soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars in order to curry favor with the likes of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, or Mubarak of Egypt.

When did Uncle Sam leap athletically, alphabetically, across two letters to end up becoming Uncle Sap?

We're tired of it. The voters are tired of it. The soldiers are tired of it. We're sick of it. 880 billion dollars later, 3,350 killed and 25,000 wounded later, we're sick of it. It unnecessarily both costs and endangers us, Americans and other Infidels threatened by all the varied instruments of Jihad, so much.

[Posted by Hugh at May 15, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:09 PM

April 29, 2007

Fitzgerald: Who Was Right -- And Who Was Wrong?

'Democracy is nothing, but counting of heads. It cannot differentiate between good and bad people, as in this system the vote of a devout Muslim equals the vote of a frail Muslim,' [Maulana Abdul Aziz, head of the Lal Masjid] said."
-- from this article

Yet Bush and Cheney and Rice keep singing the praises of not one, not two, but three "elections" in Iraq. They apparently think that when, in January 2005, the Shi'a went out and voted as they were instructed to vote by those in the three main parties animated by Shi'a Islam -- SCIRI, Da'wa, and the new force of Moqtata al-Sadr -- voted in all their purple-thumbed majesty, voted as Shi'a Arabs for Shi'a Arabs and Shi'a Arab domination, they were "practicing democracy." They apparently think that the Sunnis, on the other hand, who did not vote in that first election, but then begrudgingly took part in the later two, were less interested in “practicing democracy.”

The Sunnis were no more, and no less, for the "democracy" that the electoral process supposedly represented than were the Shi'a. It is just that knowing they would lose (if they had been more numerous than the Shi'a they would have participated more energetically) they had no desire to take part.

For both sides, Sunni and Shi'a, know that the true spirit that makes modern democracy work, the spirit of political compromise, is lacking in Islam -- a belief-system that worships might (the "strong horse") and encourages aggression, and views the universe in manichean terms: light and dark, manifested as Believer and Infidel, Victor and Vanquished. And that attitude naturally carries over -- how could it not? -- to the attitudes toward others, perhaps even other sects within Islam. The effects of that can and will be seen in Iraq.

Then there was that referendum on that much-ballyhooed newly-written Iraqi constitution. It was not, and those who composed it were not, at all reminiscent of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, though Condoleeza Rice found apparent parallels. It was written, after much delay, in a few weeks (see Ali Allawi's just-published book about the Writing of the Constitution). There were a few local wise men, and a few foreign fools (notably Noah "After Jihad" Feldman, the kind of "expert" on Islam only Roy Mottahedeh and the Times Sunday Magazine editors could take seriously) but it hardly mattered. The Constitution will mean whatever those who inherit Iraq will want it to mean. The rule of law does not exist, if by law we mean manmade law. For the Iraqi Constitution itself makes clear that it is not supreme. In the United States, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, for nothing deemed "unconstitutional" by judges, appointed for life and not elected, can stand. But the Iraqi Constitution says that no law, nor any provisions of the Constitution itself, can stand if they contradict the "law of Islam" -- that is, the Shari'a. What in our country would be thrown out if declared "unconstitutional," in the New Iraq, can be thrown out if declared contrary to the Law of Islam -- that is, contrary to the Shari'a.

The belief in the possibility, even the ease of transplanting "democracy" to Iraq ignores the nature of Islam, and how mere mortals, Believers, are not the sources of political legitimacy. The source of political legitimacy is Islam and only Islam. If the ruler is Muslim, he must be obeyed. Islam encourages submission -- from mental submission to the submission of the Muslim subject to the Muslim ruler -- because Islam is based on the idea of submission of men to Allah, to the expressed will of Allah to be found in the Qur'an, and further interpreted by the Sunna (consisting essentially of what is written down in the Hadith and the Sira).

Bush can't admit or recognize this. Partly it is that the enormity of the error is so great, that at this point neither he, nor Cheney, nor their loyalists, can admit it. There should be an epuration of the so-called "conservative media" of such loyalists. They have done so much damage by sticking with and defending years beyond the time they could plausibly do so, an absurd policy that, far from weakening Islamic supremacism, has only weakened and distracted the Western world from concentrating its efforts on checking the main instruments of Jihad -- the money weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

But those who recognize that the mistakes in Iraq were those both about Islam (the failure to identify Islam as the enemy needing to be divided and demoralized), and about Iraq (the failure to recognize in Iraq those fissures that could be exploited, by leaving Iraq once Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed, both sectarian and ethnic), deserve a closer hearing.

The record of all the pundits and commentators can easily be found online. It is all there.

Who was right -- and who was wrong? Look for yourself.

[Posted by Hugh at April 29, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:12 PM

April 29, 2007

Fitzgerald: Paul Wolfowitz, or, After Such Ignorance, What Forgiveness?

It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them.
-- Cardinal De Retz

Paul Wolfowitz is in trouble, but for all the wrong reasons. Surely the main and overlooked aspect of the entire World Bank brouhaha is not any supposed “corruption” in the arrangements made for Shaha Ali Riza (the woman described sometimes demurely as his "girlfriend,” sometimes less primly as his "squeeze") or in Wolfowitz’s liberality in setting her salary and benefits, but her identity and role in his comprehension of, and decision-making about, both Islam and Iraq.

Shaha Riza was born in North Africa (some say in Libya, some say in Tunisia) but her origins are otherwise obscure. Is she from a Shi’a family? Sunni? Arab? Persian? She has lived in various parts of Dar al-Islam, including a stint, one has read, in Saudi Arabia, but not in Iraq. She is like so many who made friends in high places -- Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya and Rend al-Rahim come immediately to mind. Those friends in high places went on to do things based in not inconsequential part on what they learned or thought they learned from these “representative” most unrepresentative Iraqis and other Muslims.

If Wolfowitz is to be separated from his current princely allowance, it should not be because World Bank members are offended at his anti-corruption measures (measures not only not objectionable, but necessary), but because of his relationship with Shaha Riza -- a relationship that helped to cause the inexcusable mess of Tarbaby Iraq.

Wolfowitz was not the only one to favor this Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations scheme in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and hundreds of others -- none of them correctly identified the enemy. For them it really was a “war on terror” and not a war of self-defense against Jihad, worldwide, and against all the instruments of Jihad -- including the money weapon, Da’wa, and demographic conquest. And therefore they did not set the right goal, which ought to have been defined succinctly as follows: whatever helps to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad, and possibly at the same time instruct, and hearten, the Camp of the Infidels, is desirable. In Iraq, that weakening of the Camp of Islam and Jihad can only be achieved by an American withdrawal, instead of American forces remaining to achieve a goal which is exactly the wrong one (a united and stable Iraq) and in any case, cannot conceivably be achieved.

This is because the requisite willingness to engage in compromise with one’s enemies or rivals is absent from Islam. Islam inculcates aggression toward enemies, and sees only two possible outcomes: that of being the Victor, or that of being the Vanquished. That is how the Sunnis, who will never acquiesce in their new, subordinate status, see it. That is how the Shi’a Arabs see it also. They will never agree to truly share political and economic power with the Sunnis who have persecuted and even killed them, not only during Saddam Hussein’s regime, not only during the entire history of modern Iraq, but since the very first century of Islam. “Taqiyya” was a doctrine that originated in Shi’a Islam, and answered the felt need of those Shi’a who had to deny their faith in order to escape from death at the hands of Sunni Muslims, not from non-Muslims.

Wolfowitz knew none of that. Furthermore, like others, he failed to recognize that Bush would not listen to reason, and if one put him in the engine car and allowed the train to start, there would be no stopping him. The true scandal of Paul Wolfowitz will forever be the scandal of his own ignorance about Islam and Iraq. This is the result, one suspects, of the same involvement with Shaha Riza, and the favoring of her, that is the subject of the current discontent at the World Bank. For Shaha Riza was long ago chosen by Wolfowitz as his personal, pillow-talk guide to the Middle East, to Islam, to Iraq. And she turns out to be not a good guide, but very much parti pris in her vision, her hopes, her dreams. She had her own belief in the possibility of reform in Iraq and the likelihood of a reformed Iraq somehow being a model for the Sunni Arab states. How implausible, even impossible, that was, she did not recognize.

Shaha Riza is not an apostate. She does not identify Islam as the source of the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states and Muslim societies and Muslim peoples. She can’t. She is one more example, in the wrong place, alas, at the wrong time, of charming, soft-spoken, westernized, secularized Muslims in the West. They have their own agendas and well-stocked agenda books. They are taken as “representative” when they are no such thing, and have had a dangerous influence in molding the minds of the powerful, at dinner parties, and over tennis games, which are also Washington corridors of power as much as any Old Executive Office Building, or the Pentagon or the State Department.

Ahmad Chalabi was so determinedly friendly with Bernard Lewis, knowing full well how influential Lewis had become as virtually the sole dispenser of wisdom on Islam to Cheney, and with his acolytes well-placed in the Pentagon. Kanan Makiya eagerly looked forward to moving back to Iraq, such was his own delusion about that place, about its people and rulers, and about the influence of Islam. Kanan Makiya is safely back in his Cambridge apartment, still pondering what he must have misunderstood. These advanced, westernized, secularized Muslims cannot identify the Arab problem as coming from Islam itself, so intertwined with Arab identity. Out of embarrassment, filial piety, or fear of what such a move might mean for their own careers or physical safety, they cannot bring themselves to admit that the source of the political despotism, economic backwardness, social injustice, intellectual triviality of the Muslim and Arab world is a direct result of Islam itself. They keep seeking other answers, other ways out. In Iraq they thought, or rather allowed themselves to believe -- and convinced such naifs as Wolfowitz -- that if only Saddam Hussein’s regime were to be removed, all manner of things would be well, in Iraq and in the larger Arab and Muslim world.

It was a crazed idea. These chalabis and makiyas and rend al-rahims (who was just on O’Reilly the other night, unapologetically insisting that the Americans remain in Iraq -- in order to help, after more than four years of helping, the Iraqis who of course will never make the compromises necessary for a unified polity – Islam gets in the way) all forgot, in their long Western exile (Ahmad Chalabi had been out of Iraq since 1958, the others for only two or three decades), what the primitive masses of Iraq, both Sunni and Shi’a, were like. They forgot what the leaders were like. Al-Sistani is not quite the saint he is made out to be. See his website, see his reported fury when learning that Noah Feldman, “a Jew,” had participated in the writing of the Iraqi Constitution. Moqtada al-Sadr is deeply representative of the Shi’a underclass. For every Mithal al-Alusi (a secular Sunni, or rather an undeclared apostate of Sunni background, who received 4,500 votes when he ran), there were a thousand Sunnis who favored attacks on Americans and on those “Rafidite dogs” who had the gall to inherit the power that by right belonged forever to the Sunni Arabs.

These Shaha-Riza brigades believed deeply that they, and people like them, could inherit Iraq. But it could never have been: not if the Administration had done everything, even by its own lights, correctly. Not if Bremer had not dissolved the army, not if de-Ba’athification had been less extreme. There was never a chance, in a society suffused with Islam, for the spirit of true political compromise, or for the letter of a western legal system un-subservient to the principles of Islam, to be exhibited. This is why those who intelligently analyze the ignorance of the Bush Administration, and its “failures” in Iraq -- such as Ali Allawi -- still miss the point. The point is that once Saddam Hussein and his disguised Sunni despotism was removed, power would inevitably be transferred, elections or no elections, from the Sunni Arabs -- who constitute only 19% of the population -- to the Shi’a Arabs, who make up 65% of the Iraqi population, and who will not give up the political and economic power they now possess.

What did Paul Wolfowitz know about Iraq, or about Islam? What training in history, or in the exercise of the imagination (without which it becomes hard for Infidels to “imagine” the Muslim mind) had he had before 2001, or after 2001, or in the years since the Iraq fiasco, which he had such a hand in promoting, has come about? How many books has he read? How often has he, in the silence of study or of bed, realized how little he knew, and how wrong he was to put his faith not in princes, but in the Muslim princess who has been his guide, and more than his guide, for all of this time? What did or what does Wolfowitz know about the doctrines of Islam? Do you think, in the last few years, he has studied, or even read and re-read, with intelligent commentaries and guides, the Qur’an? How many of the thousands of the Hadith in the collections of Bukhari and Muslim has he read, taken in, made sense of? For every day he spent in the company of Shaha Riza, how many minutes did he devote to reading about Muhammad, for Muslims the Model of the Perfect Man (uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil)? What did he read, what does he know? About Iraq, did he read Philip Ireland, whose 1939 book still stands up (for J. B. Kelly, it remains one of the surest guide to Iraq)? What, even today, has Wolfowitz chosen to find out about Iraq in the pages of Elie Kedourie -- the dry, unsurpassed Kedourie, who describes the history of modern Iraq in his own review of Majid Khadduri’s misleading history, “Independent Iraq.” This is how Kedourie deals devastatingly in “The Chatham House Version” with Kadduri’s description of “the wise leadership of [King]Faisal, who inspired public spirit in every department of government”:

If this [Khadduri's description of Faisal] were in any way true, there would be no accounting for the degraded and murderous politics of Iraq from the end of the mandate to the end of the monarchy.” [i.e., from 1932 to 1958, when first Qassem, and then the Ba'athists, took over, and things became even more degraded and much, much more murderous].
The fact is, of course, that this kind of language is most inappropriate to Iraq under the monarchy or afterwards.

Lack of scruple greater or lesser, cupidity more or less unrestrained, ability to plot more or less consummate, bloodlust more or less obsessive: these rather are the terms which the historian must use who surveys this unfortunate polity [modern Iraq] and those into whose power it was delivered.

This Iraq, the Iraq described so dryly by Kedourie, was, and is, the true Iraq. But neither Kanan Makiya, nor Ahmad Chalabi, nor Rend al-Rahim [Francke], nor, alas, Wolfowitz’s good and great friend (as TIME magazine used to put it) Shaha Riza, were able to recognize that. They had their own hopes and their own dreams for Iraq and for the Dar al-Islam. And other Muslims who wish for some amelioration in their own countries share their hopes and their dreams. Not incidentally, they often wish that they themselves might be the new bearers and enforcers of such amelioration, along with the attendant wealth and power such positions would inevitably bring.

But we Infidels, even if we find this or that Muslim charmer charming, should not ever again make the mistake of confusing our interests -- which is to constrain Islam’s supremacist impulse, constrain its power, constrain or undo its instruments of Jihad (the money weapon, Da’wa, demographic conquest). The best means to do this is to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islamic Jihad, not through the baseless notion, promoted by some, that “moderate Muslims are the solution” (those who at this point keep up this mantra will find themselves cutting off the limb they have climbed out on, though no doubt the government and foundation grant money, and lecture fees, will still flow in), but by exploiting the fissures, ethnic, sectarian, and economic, that are there, waiting to be exploited, if only they can be recognized and appreciated.

What do we know about Wolfowitz? That he was a weapons systems analyst. That he was a Good Boy, and remains a Good Boy still. He wants Only the Best for everyone, and that includes Muslims. He does not see, he cannot see, the full menace of Islam’s supremacism, and therefore of the need to weaken the Camp of Islam. It doesn’t go with his mental or emotional makeup, that of the earnest good man, wishing only earnestly good things for others, and disinclined to see the need for ruthlessness or cunning. He’s exactly the wrong man at exactly the wrong time in history.

What did he know about Islam? Nothing, except what Shaha Riza and possibly Bernard Lewis (for more on Lewis google “Bernard Lewis” and “Hugh Fitzgerald”) told him. He was summed up by Professor Richard Pipes in a November 2, 2003 interview in The Boston Sunday Globe:

It is all the more remarkable, then, that [Richard] Pipes has some misgivings about the most recent application, in Iraq, of the approach he helped formulate. "I think the war was correct -- destroying this invasive evil. But beyond this I think they're too ambitious," he says.

He bluntly dismisses the promise of a democratic Iraq -- "impossible, a fantasy" -- citing obstacles similar to Russia's. "Democracy requires, among other things, individualism -- the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run."

What about the constitution soon to be written in Baghdad? Pipes laughs. "Stalin had a wonderful constitution, the most perfect constitution in the world. There's a lot of naivete in that. I should think we'd be satisfied with some kind of stability, preventing Saddam Hussein from coming back. It's fantastic that we haven't caught this man. He sits there somewhere."

It is not lost on Pipes that his criticism goes directly to the judgment of the Bush team, conservatives like himself, in some cases former colleagues, most prominently Team B's own Wolfowitz. "Paul didn't have much education in history," Pipes says. "It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist.”

“Paul didn’t have much education in history. It’s not his field.”

And that was from someone who, ideologically, shares so much with Wolfowitz -- but has, as well, an experience of life, and a familiarity with history, and an understanding of the need to know history, that Wolfowitz did not, and could not have, in his sheltered and limited existence.

But, someone will say, wasn’t Paul Wolfowitz the ambassador to a Muslim country? And didn’t that make him aware of Islam and of what societies suffused with Islam are all about? No. Wolfowitz, as the cosseted ambassador in Jakarta, did not “see” Indonesia. Even though he famously made those trips outside the Embassy compound, he did not do what he should have done, which was to spend his free moments reading Snouck Hurgronje on Islam in the Dutch East Indies. It would have taught him far more about Islam, even the Islam in such an atypical place -- non-Arab, still with a syncretistic and easygoing admixture from its Buddhist and Hindu population and background -- than visiting some school or public works project. And didn’t Paul Wolfowitz have the wit to understand that if Indonesians, knowing perfectly well he was not only the American ambassador to Indonesia but the “Jewish” American ambassador, would be falling all over themselves telling him what they though such a person would want to hear, all about how they were looking forward to establishing relations with Israel and all the rest of it? None of it. He learned nothing about Islam, the real Islam. And what is worse, he thinks that in his golden cage he actually did.

And what about Iraq? Wolfowitz said in 2002 that “Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.” Really? No history of anything going on between, say, the Kurds and the Arabs, as far back as the 1920s? So what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds was, in Wolfowitz’s view, simply unprecedented. Wolfowitz had, and may still have, no idea of the Arab view of non-Arabs, including non-Arab Muslims. And he certainly has not made any connections between the long history of Arab supremacism and Islam itself, the supremacism shown by the murder of the Kurds, by the denial of cultural and linguistic rights to the Berbers in Algeria. One wonders if Shaha Ali Riza introduced Wolfowitz to the works of the Berber writer Kateb Yacine? Somehow I doubt it.

And about the Sunnis and the Shi’a? Who told Wolfowitz that this was a short-term business, and that after Saddam Hussein was removed, all manner of things would be well? Who led him to believe that “Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict”? Who prevented Paul Wolfowitz from finding out for himself, by reading a bit of recent history, how false that was?

What, for example, would Paul Wolfowitz have made of this?

1. Gertrude Bell, 1920: “In the light of the events of the last two months there's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and what that may mean exactly I don't know. I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern - and failed. I personally thought we tried to govern too much, but I hoped that things would hold out till Sir Percy came back and that the transition from British to native rule might be made peacefully, in which case much of what we have done might have been made use of. Now I fear that that will be impossible.” [Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]
Or this?

#2. Gertrude Bell, 1920: “We as outsiders can't differentiate between Sunni and Shi'ah, but leave it to them and they'll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it's the only way of getting over it. I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil.” [Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]
Or this?

#3. King Faisal of Iraq, 1933: "Regrettably, I can say there is no Iraqi people yet, but only deluded human groups void of any national idea. Iraqis are not only disunited but evil-motivated, anarchy prone and always ready to prey on their government." -- King Faisal I, writing in his memoirs shortly before he died in 1933.
Or, above all, this?

#4. “There are only two political parties in Iraq: the Sunni party and the Shia party.” -- Tawfiq Al-Suwaidi, Iraqi Prime Minister, 1929, 1930, 1946, 1950.
But of course Wolfowitz has not been alone in his incredible misunderstanding. There are the Senators, such as those who think we shouldn’t “cut and run” and have no idea what the main instruments of Jihad are, or how best to exploit the situation in Iraq:

"It's hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what's wrong with these people," he said. "Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me." -- Senator Trent Lott in Sept. 2006
And then there is the President himself:

"I thought they were all Muslims". --President Bush when asked about the Sunni-Shi'a split in Iraq in 2004
And then there is Condoleeza Rice, who said of the Sunni-Shi’a conflict that “They’re going to have to overcome that.”

Paul Wolfowitz because of his relationship with Shaha Riza, was not only ignorant, but remained ignorant -- because he trusted what he learned from this westernized, secularized native informant, instead of finding out his own, from Gertrude Bell and Elie Kedourie and from Western students of Islam, and from the facts of Iraq itself (see those quotes given just above, especially that of Tawfiq al-Suwaidi), how wrong his dreamy assumptions would turn out to be.

He is not the only one so charged. There are many others. And there are the cheerleaders and loyalists who did not make the policy, but think that they must stick by it, coute que coute, lest they inadvertently give aid and comfort to the cindy sheehans of this world. Meanwhile, Tarbaby Iraq is still there, and the squandering goes on, and the waste, and the inability to turn the situation in Iraq to our advantage, by leaving, still is evident.

For Wolfowitz, as for the others, one must ask: After Such Ignorance,
What Forgiveness?

[Posted by Hugh at April 29, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:14 PM

April 28, 2007

Fitzgerald: Never Have So Few Done So Much Damage To So Many

Would it be immoral for Americans to leave Iraq, or to allow it to dissolve? Some have said so. But as to the question of morality, I don't even understand the question. The Kurds resent the Arabs for good reason. Why should they not try to make a move for independence, and if by helping them the American government can weaken Syria and Iran, and have a semi-reliable ally in what was northern Iraq, why not? What is immoral about that?

And as to the sectarian divisions, they date back a thousand years before the founding of the United States. The depth and duration of that division, in other words, owes nothing to us. It is the Americans who have tried, at great human and economic cost, to make the Iraqis less tribal, less selfish, more imbued with a sense of a nation -- and a nation that is not merely a place to be controlled by their sect or tribe or family. The Americans have tried to encourage entrepreneurial activity instead of reliance, as in so many other Muslim states, on either oil money or foreign aid from Infidels, and to encourage the adoption of a Constitution that would actually move away from the Shari'a.

It has all failed. And that is despite the enormous efforts of American soldiers, who were never taught about Islam, and yet persevered, and were puzzled when the Muslims of Iraq did not behave, as those soldiers expected them to, as a grateful "Iraqi people," but rather as a collection -- with a handful of exceptions -- of grasping, whining, greedy, meretricious people, eager to have the Americans do everything for them, eager to have them lavish them with aid money (thrown around, by the billions, like confetti), and distinctly indifferent to American losses when not taking outright pleasure in such losses, yet always willing to blame the Americans for everything.

Does a Sunni bomb go off killing Shi'a? The Shi'a crowds gather, and tell reporters that they blame the Americans. The Sunnis are kidnapped by Shi'a militia, and the Sunnis rant against the Americans. And now 98% of the Sunni Arabs say that all attacks on Americans are justified and that they personally approve of them, and 75% of the Shi'a say the same thing. Only the Kurds express, by a large majority, lack of approval for such attacks.

What is the conceivable offense to morality in no longer sending Americans to fight and die for people who cannot overcome Islam, who will in large -- and ever-increasing -- numbers, take delight in the deaths of Americans? And does anyone, does even Bush, still think that Iraq could somehow become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations? Karen Hughes, Bush’s loyal and equally unintelligent aide, is the one who is most directly involved with "reaching out to Muslims." That is the extent of our propaganda effort, an effort that should be made not to win jihadists over, but to fill them with confusion and to demoralize them, and make at least some of them begin to see that their political, economic, and social failures are a direct result of what Islam inculcates -- not only the specific doctrines, but the habit of mental submission that it demands.

It is immoral for Bush and others to persist obstinately in a course that makes no sense. Like the general in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," or like the madly complacent generals who sent people to their death in the trenches in World War I, these people are not thinking straight. Others -- the soldiers and Marines of the regular army, and of the Reserves and National Guard -- at least had every right to expect that they would not be sent to Iraq except in case of absolute national emergency. Yet the war in Iraq is most definitely not a case of "national emergency" but of willful ignorance of Islam, lack of imagination, lack of wit, lack of knowledge about Iraq, at the very top. And then there is always that claque of loyalists, the assorted kagans and kristols or, for that matter, that speaking-truth-to-power admirer of Edward Said, the minor polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who only yesterday began to find out a little about Islam. He's a dab hand at running with whatever little knowledge he acquires, tout en faisant son petit Orwell.

There is nothing "machiavellian" or "immoral" about refusing to continue to keep various groups of Muslims from one another's throats. Who knows? Maybe they'll all make peace. Let's say that is the outcome. I could live with that. I could also live with the other. It is theirs to make or mar. We got rid of a murderous monster. That murderous monster, it turns out, was about what Iraq appeared to need, if the only conceivable good is an absence of the kind of strife that became inevitable, sooner or later, once the regime of Saddam Hussein was removed.

Perhaps some think the regime of Saddam Hussein was moral, and that therefore it was immoral to end it, but Christopher Hitchens is not among them. He thinks the removal of Saddam Husseini was justified and desirable. Unfortunately, he also seems to think it is Americans who should pay, and keep paying, the price for that removal -- instead of those whose belief-system makes them naturally unwilling to compromise, that makes them susceptible to crazed beliefs and conspiracy theories (the Sunni Arabs, for example, really allow themselves to believe that they constitute 42% of the Iraqi population, and they really believe that they have a right to that amount of power, or even more, and certainly they will never acquiesce in the Shi'a rule over Iraq).

Bush and his loyalists refuse to identify the enemy properly -- which consists of all those who think they have a duty to spread Islam through Jihad, until the goal that Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, is achieved, and the world is made safe for Islam because all obstacles to its spread, and imposition, have been removed, so that "Islam dominates and is not to be dominated."

The Bush Amdinistration prates about a "war on terror" and tells us that this war "can be won" but it will take time. Cheney says "a generation." Blair speaks of "twenty, even thirty years." This shows their wilful misunderstanding.

This "war" has no end. Even to think in terms of a war with an "end" shows that you have not thought through the problem of Islam. Even if Muslims are weakened, or appear to have let the doctrine of Jihad fall into desuetude, because they may appear, and may in fact be, too weak to act on it (essentially, from about 1800 to 1960, that was the case, and that was the period when some Muslims, recognizing the weakness of the Islamic world, actually tried to think of ways to "reform" it but aside from visiting Europe and noting the need to rival it in military technology, nothing every came of that "reformist" impulse, tiny and ineffectual as it was).

This war has no end, because Islam cannot everywhere be stamped out -- have Nazis, or neo-Nazis, ceased to exist? Of course not, nor have devout Communists eager for levelling by the state, nor have Fascists, nor have all kinds of human impulses that, if translated into the political sphere, are mortal enemies of civilization and intelligent freedom. But they have been held in check, their numbers limited.

The task of the non-Muslim world is to weaken the Camp of Islam, and the appeal of Islam to the psychically and economically marginal in the West, in the most effective way, and at the lowest cost. Ordinarily that can be done by exploiting the natural pre-existing divisions within Islam. Iraq, for example, offers two of the three main divisions.

The first is the sectarian (Shi'a and Sunni), and sufficiently balanced in power that neither side could easily defeat the other, despite the large Shi'a advantage in population, for the Sunnis are much more ruthless, aggressive, and determined, and have deep-pocketed allies in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait (the Al-Sabah family doesn't want a Shi'a threat from Iran-cum-Iraq to replace what it faced with Saddam Hussein, especially since there are many Shi'a in Kuwait, who may now be regarded as a potential fifth column).

The second is the ethnic: the justified desire of the Kurds to be independent of the Arabs, who have persecuted them, and murdered them, and taken over their lands, and appropriated the oil wealth under those lands (which lands, in fact, were in reality those of the Assyrian Christians who in fact were, in the post-World War I settlement, dispossessed by some of those Kurds moving south, as in turn, the Kurds were later dispossessed --as in Kirkuk -- by the government-sponsored resettlement of Arabs moving north).

The third, not present within Iraq but certainly present among the Muslim states: is economic: the resentment of poor Arabs and Muslims over the unmerited vast wealth of the rich Arabs and Muslims, a resentment that has not been exploited because, idiotically, the Western world has, instead of drawing attention to the grand theft of "Muslim" resources by a handful of rulers and states, and their refusal to share the wealth not only with many of the people in those states, but also with other Muslims, thus showing not the slightest interest in supporting fellow members of the umma (although payments to other Muslims for spreading Islam in the West, or to engage in acts of terrorism against Israel or India or other Infidel states -- well, that can and is supported by rich Arabs).

We need first to recognize, and then to exploit, these fissures. I haven't begun to explain the kind of propaganda that would help, but most of it should be obvious.

But it is not obvious to the likes of Karen Hughes. It is not obvious to the likes of Cheney's daughter, the one involved in bringing "democracy" to Iraq (what makes her an expert? what allowed her to be put in charge of such matters?). And it certainly isn't obvious to Condoleeza Rice, with a most limited view of things, whose claim to fame is that she was a good -- i.e., obedient -- graduate student in some branch of Kremlinology, but lacks the learning, the world experience, and the imagination to push her even more limited boss into something like a comprehension of what Islam is all about, and how it makes best sense to constrain and weaken it.

There are at least three separate Sunni insurgent groups: the Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia who want to fight the Americans, and the Shi'a for being "Rafidite dogs" or the worst kind of Infidels; ; the tribes in Anbar Province who have been offended by Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and are fighting with them and may, mistakenly, be thought of therefore as American allies; the Sunni Arabs in Iraq who refuse to acquiesce in their loss of power to the Shi'a, and to want to fight the Americans, seen as having been responsible for that loss of power, and the Shi'a, but do not quite see the Shi'a as those "Rafidite dogs" that the members of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia do.

There are at least three Shi'a groups: the Shi'a who are genuinely secular, westernized nice. This nearly-infinitesimal group, the very group that presented itself to the Bush Administration as representative of Iraq, has people who are secular, some of whom were once even pre-Saddam members of the Ba'ath Party (see Allawi), and represent the remaining Baghdad elite (Shi'a division), all of whom, of course, were trained by the Jesuits at Baghdad College and all of whom have spent between 10 and 45 years in the West. They represent almost nobody but themselves. The second group consists of the los-de-abajo Shi'a poor, who have rallied around the troglodytic ABD (all-but-desertion) resentful Moqtada al-Sadr, whose face shows exactly what he is, and who support their own Jaish-e-Mahdi and of course some militias. The third group consists of the slightly better off, and slightly more presentable, leaders and members of SCIRI and Daw'a, competing parties, with ideologies or personal agendas that can hardly be distinguished by non-Muslim Iraqis, and need not be. They claim to listen to Sistani, and Sistani, it is claimed by the Americans, is simply solidly on the side of right (that, of course, is nonsense) -- see www.sistani.org and scroll down until you find the list of what is "najis" or "unclean" in the view of Sistani -- you'll find yourself on the list.

Then there are the others, including possibly the most touching and impressive political figure in Iraqi public life, Mithal al-Alusi, the son of a professor of classical Arabic literature, supporter and signer of the St. Petersburg Declaration of "secular" (mostly apostates) Muslims, and a brave visitor to Israel. It should be no surprise that when Mithal al-Alusi's party ran, in a nation of 27 million, it received 4,500 votes. Policy cannot be made on the basis of the nearly infinitesimal group of thoroughly secularized and westernized Muslims. Moqtada al-Sadr has at least a thousand times the support of Mithal al-Alusi, and were the most savage of Sunnis to run, he would command Shi'a millions as well. This is something that the Bush Administration and those who still wish to support its Iraq policy simply cannot comprehend, or will not allow themselves to comprehend.

No one in the intelligent past would have found anything remarkable in the notion that one needs to know what moves the minds of men -- and in the case of Muslim men, above all else what moves them is Islam -- and to know the history of a place, ancient and modern, the history of its people or peoples, their manners and customs and desires and motives.

And without some sense of Iraq's past, in a past-controlled part of the world, with adherents of a belief-system who insist on living, especially in times of mental and emotional desarroi, in that past of fabled and exaggerated greatness, no sensible policies can be constructed.

Here is a florilegium of quotations, culled quickly from both Iraqis (rulers and scholars, including the formidable Elie Kedourie, a Baghdadi Jew who at the university level was educated, and made his celebrated academic career, in England) and non-Iraqis, and how one wishes they had been known, and studied, and thought carefully about, in Washington four years ago:

#1. The Commander of the British Forces that wrested Mesopotamia [Iraq] from the Turks, 1917:

"To the People of the Baghdad Vilayet... our armies have not come into your Cities and Lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators. Since the days of Hulaku your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of Strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken into desolation and you yourselves have groaned in bondage. ...It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance that you should prosper ...But you, the people of Baghdad, ... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised again. O! People of Baghdad. ... I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West in realising the aspirations of your race."

[Source: Atiyyah, Ghassan: Iraq : 1908 - 1921 : A Socio - Political Study. - Beirut : The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1973 p. 151.]

#2. Gertrude Bell, 1920:

“In the light of the events of the last two months there's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and what that may mean exactly I don't know. I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern - and failed. I personally thought we tried to govern too much, but I hoped that things would hold out till Sir Percy came back and that the transition from British to native rule might be made peacefully, in which case much of what we have done might have been made use of. Now I fear that that will be impossible.”

[Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]

#3. Gertrude Bell, 1920:

“We as outsiders can't differentiate between Sunni and Shi'ah, but leave it to them and they'll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it's the only way of getting over it. I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil.”

[Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]

#4. King Faisal of Iraq, 1933:

"Regrettably, I can say there is no Iraqi people yet, but only deluded human groups void of any national idea. Iraqis are not only disunited but evil-motivated, anarchy prone and always ready to prey on their government." – King Faisal I, writing in his memoirs shortly before he died in 1933.
________________________________________

#5. “There are only two political parties in Iraq: the Sunni party and the Shia party.” – Tawfiq Al-Suwaidi, Iraqi Prime Minister, 1929, 1930, 1946, 1950.
________________________________________

#6. In "The Chatham House Version" the scholar Elie Kedourie comments dryly on the description by the far-less-great scholar Majid Kadduri (in his own book, "Independent Iraq") of “the wise leadership of Faisal, who inspired public spirit in every department of government”:

“If this [Khadduri's description of Faisal] were in any way true, there would be no accounting for the degraded and murderous politics of Iraq from the end of the mandate to the end of the monarchy.” [i.e., from 1932 to 1958, when first Qassem, and then the Ba'athists, took over, and things became even more degraded and much, much more murderous].].

“The fact is, of course, that this kind of language is most inappropriate to Iraq under the monarchy or afterwards.”
.........
“Lack of scruple greater or lesser, cupidity more or less unrestrained, ability to plot more or less consummate, bloodlust more or less obsessive: these rather are the terms which the historian must use who surveys this unfortunate polity [modern Iraq] and those into whose power it was deliverered.

Do you think such material, had it been thoroughly read, in its full context, and digested, might have helped make American policymakers a bit more realistic and less messianic about Iraq? Do you think Richard Perle would not have so excitedly declared in 2003 that he wouldn't be surprised if a boulevard were named after George Bush in Baghdad? Or that Wolfowitz would estimate that the "cost" of the Iraq War might be "$20 billion," and therefore so much more of a bargain, than the cost of the sanctions program --when the cost now, at a minimum, has been estimated at between $1 and $2 trillion dollars, if the costs incurred for the treatment of the wounded, and the macroeconomic costs (see the paper of Stiglitz and Bilmes, and if you wish, forget the macroeconomic costs and take the lower figure, and if you like, reduce even that to something we can all agree on as an absolute base -- say, $750 billion)? Or that Bernard Lewis would confidently predict that when the Americans overturned the regime the spectacle of rapture and gratitude in Baghdad "would make the liberation of Kabul seem like a funeral procession"?

They forgot, or didn't know, with their narrow certainties and dependence on Bernard Lewis. A false choice was offered: on the one hand there was the usual crew of appeasers and hirelings and simply ignoramuses (and they were and are appeasers, and hirelings, and ignoramuses), people who cannot conceive of Islam being the problem. These were the espositos and william-polks and scowcrofts and the djerijians, who wanted nothing done to upset anyone. There was the belief that Harold Rhode, so uncritically worshipful of Bernard Lewis, see Douglas Feith -- so dependent on Harold Rhode, see Cheney, who was so certain about so many things, and similarly thought Lewis the last word on everything to do with Islam, and Iraq -- not a hint of any consulting with the live J. B. Kelly, or the writings of the dead Kedourie. or for that matter with others, including Bat Ye'or -- it was apparently a false polarity: either Lewis, or the likes of such apologists as Esposito, or just as bad, that fake "old Iraq" hand William Polk, with his predictable appeasements. No other conceivable alternatives. There is a good deal that Bernard Lewis is able to forget, or didn't know -- (look at his enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords, and his grotesque minimizing of the menace of Islam and the mistreatment of the dhimmis, quite unlike his two coevals S. D. Goitein and Gustave von Grunebaum on the mistreatment of non-Muslims under Islam) and what would almost certainly happen once the despotism of the Sunni Saddam Hussein was removed? And wouldn't a knowledge of Islam have told them something about the prospects for real "democracy" as opposed to the vote-counting (that the Shi'a were happy to participate in, and voted for whomever their leaders told them to vote lemming-like for?). In other words, isn't a knowledge both of Islam and of the history of Iraq essential, so as not to engage in the kind of folly that is being engaged in.

The Americans, had they informed themselves, would then most likely either have

1) left Saddam Hussein in place, if indeed there was no real reason to suspect his possession, or his being able to acquire, weapons of mass destruction or,

2) if there was indeed sufficient reason to believe [we still do not know that, do but those of us who were long willing to believe that the government was reasonable in fearing the existence of WMDs or of the ability of the regime to acquire them -- I was one of them -- are looking more abashed every day] that he either had or was attempting to acquire, or could soon start acquiring or making, such weapons.

What are the most important things to study to figure out what makes sense, for the wellbeing of Infidels, at this moment, in Iraq, given the instruments of Jihad as we can now identify them, and the behavior, ignorant and often pusillanimous, of much of the Western world?

It is history. The history of Islam, both doctrine and practice. The history of Iraq, especially of Iraq since 1920.

Not "psychoanalysis." Not the "generally applicable rules of counter-insurgency" such as "insurgencies tend, on average, to last 10 years."

As Ibn Warraq noted in his brilliant essay, comparing Islam and Fascism, both are belief-systems fixed on past glories. Compare Mussolini on "Mare Nostrum" (the Mediterranean) and the greatness of Rome, or for that matter, Hitler on the supposedly bottled-up greatness of the Aryan or Germanic peoples, and his dithyrambs, and that of his ideological collaborators, on the past greatness of Deutschland, and even more than Germany, of the Germanic peoples, with that natural energy and life-force, so different from the Slavs and Latins and everyone else.

You didn't have to psychoanalyze anyone to comprehend that living in the past is essential to Islam. And that helps to explain something: the significance of Iraq and Baghdad to Sunni Arabs everywhere. Because they live in that Muslim mythology, and because Baghdad was for 500 years the most important city in Islam, at the time of Islam's greatest glory (for Arabs Constantinople doesn't count -- it was the center for their oppressors, the Ottoman Turks, not for Arab Islam), they simply cannot allow it to be controlled by those "Rafidite dogs" the Shi'a.

When historians write about the years 2000-2008, they will gasp at the expense, at the squandering, at the obstinate naiveté and failures of intelligence (of every kind) and of imagination. They will be amazed at the lack of ability of the people in charge to comprehend, to articulate, to instruct, and to protect. They will be flabbergasted at the trillion dollars wasted, at the great damage done to the morale of the military and to its capability, at a time of peril. They will not understand why nothing started to be done, then, about the campaigns of Daw'a and the slow but seemingly inexorable (it is not inexorable, it can be halted, and it can be reversed, but this requires a recognition of the problem and an intelligent awareness of what is at stake, and what is permissible – (see the Benes Decree of 1946 for a guide) considering the demographic conquest of the heart of the West -- Europe.

The historians will compare the failure of our leaders, or rather, of those "taking a leadership role" -- with the intelligent awareness, and acts of mass auto-didacticism, whereby many, including those who come to this website, have begun to undertake their own study of Islam, because they sense the discrepancy between what they are told in the press and on television and by their "taking-leadership-role" leaders, and what they see all about them, if they are not deaf, and dumb, and blind.

The political class, the ruling classes, the elites all over the West have failed. They failed when, without study or thought, they began some thirty years ago to let in Muslim migrants. They failed when they continued to avert their eyes from what such migration meant for the indigenous Infidels, their legal and political institutions, their freedoms, their art, their free inquiry, their physical safety. They failed for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity, cupidity, timidity - the Esdrujula Explanation that has been put up here many times. They will not be forgiven by posterity. So many things, now so difficult to deal with, could have been so easily avoided in the first place, had intelligence been properly applied.

Future historians will sum it up this way:

Never have so few done so much damage to so many.

[Posted by Hugh at April 28, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:17 PM

April 28, 2007

Fitzgerald: We need a return on this fantastic investment

What has been the effect on weakening the Camp of Islam and Jihad by spending this $880 billion in Iraq, and how else might it have been spent to weaken that Camp?

For example, some of it could have been spent on the building of nuclear plants (on the model of what the French government has done), on subsidies to solar and wind energy projects, or for mass transit. Suppose $300 billion had been spent on all that?

And suppose some of the rest had been spent on propaganda, broadcasting akin to Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, not to tell Muslims how much we like and respect them, nor how well-off Muslims are in our country, but rather to tell other Infidels about Jihad News around the globe (the kind of thing one finds gathered at Jihad Watch every day, but on a much larger scale, disseminated hither and yon).

Or what if the American government had also beamed into Muslim countries the voices of Wafa Sultan and Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both in English and whatever other languages they choose to broadcast in, about their own "spiritual journey" out of Islam? What if there were, on these satellite channels beamed into Dar al-Islam, discussions by scientists on what is necessary for the development of science -- the free and skeptical inquiry so discouraged, even punished, in Islam? What if there were figurative artists and sculptors and art historians discussing their art, and the lack of such means of expression in Islam? What if archaeologists came on to discuss how the civilizations of the Near East were rediscovered not by the Muslims, but by such Westerners as the Assyriologist Austen Henry Layard, and Leonard Woolley at Ur, and a succession of Egyptologists -- Champollion, Lepsius, Howard Carter -- from everywhere but Egypt itself?

But there is no propaganda campaign. There is no large-scale effort, or even a small-scale effort, or even the hint of serious imposition of taxes by the American government on gasoline and on oil, to do as much damage to OPEC, and to raise the price of oil and gasoline as much as possible, thereby to encourage conservation and new technologies and new sources of energy.

No.

There is only the idiotic squandering of men, money, and matériel, on and on and on, world without end, in Iraq, to bring "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Muslim Middle East, and somehow to make of Iraq a unified state, instead of what we should be wanting, which is to create a permanent fault line between Shi'a and Sunni running north and west of Baghdad, a line that the Sunnis will never acquiesce in.

Oh, it's a policy all right. It's Boots on the Ground. It's soldiers, taught never to question but only to execute. It's destruction of morale, military (at least among the soldiers who can think for themselves, can take in the nature of Islam, and of Iraq, and of Iraqis) and civilian (ditto). It's not the way to combat, it does nothing to halt, the instruments of Jihad that really count: Da'wa, demographic conquest, and the money weapon.

It's a policy begun by those who did not know about Islam and about Iraq, and still refuse to learn. It makes no sense.

Did I mention that in January 2006 the economist Joseph Stiglitz, with a collaborator Linda Bilmes, estimated the cost of the war at between one and two trillion dollars? Or that this past January, Linda Bilmes offered different estimates, based on different assumptions, for the lifetime costs of caring for those wounded in Iraq, and for that alone came up with a separate figure (google "Linda Bilmes" and "Iraq War") of several hundred billion?

The 2 trillion dollar figure was admittedly calculated on the basis of macroecnomic costs (such as changes in the price of oil) and I left those out of my own figure because I assume that at this point an American withdrawal will not cause the price of oil to go down, given a hoped-for continued instability. On the other hand, as you know, during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988, the price of oil steadily declined.

I think the war will certainly top one trillion dollars. And the only way to get a return on our investment is to make sure nothing is done by the Americans to prevent those Sunni-Shi'a hostilities from continuing, and having spillover effects elsewhere. We need, we deserve, a return on this fantastic investment.

[Posted by Hugh at April 28, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:20 PM

Israel's experience is points towards the solution for the West. Containment combined with punitive bombing. We need to end Muslim immigration, expel Muslims who are supports of Sharia law and violent Jihad, erect a wall between the Muslim world (both politically and economically) and let history show which culture will thrive. Islam and freedom are mutually exclusive ... remember Islam means submission.

The biggest blow economically we could deal Islam is to end the Oil Age and move into the Solar Age. We can then let the Mullahs eat sand with oil on top and the occasional goat. BTW, is eating oil halal? ;)

Posted by: James Martel at September 10, 2007 8:22 PM

April 15, 2007

Fitzgerald: Learning about Islam should be part of essential military training

Part of the essential training of soldiers, those going to Iraq, and those going elsewhere or remaining at home, ought to be about Islam. Not fake Islam. Not the Islam of the Muslim apologists whom too many in the government think are just the people to teach about Islam. Remember that nice Egyptian man, who joined the U. S. Army and was put in charge of teaching about Islam and cultural sensitivity to soldiers, and then turned out to have been involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center?

There should be lectures for this audience, this captive audience of hundreds of thousands, on how non-Muslims are regarded in Islam, how they were treated under the Shari'a, what the Muslim worldview is, and why this belief-system has such a hold on its adherents, why Believers are not allowed to get out but treated, if they dare to question or leave Islam, as traitors.

The Army has not done this. No doubt it fears suits by CAIR, and the reaction of those few Muslim troops (almost entirely black Muslims). But it has somehow to overcome its timidity, just as the C.I.A. and F.B.I. and local police forces need to stop being so protective -- fearful, rather -- of Muslim sensibilities that they dare not speak truthfully about Islam. We can only hope that on their own, in the interstices of life, those whose duty it is to protect this country will somehow, catch-as-catch-can, learn a little here and a little there about Islam.

It is possible to construct courses that will set out the doctrines of Islam, relying heavily, almost exclusively, on what is to be found in the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and in the commentators who are themselves Muslim. It can and should be done.

Meanwhile, the army should make sure that the "training" includes enough to ensure that the soldiers are no longer surprised, shocked in fact, at how those whom they have come to help are never going to regard those Americans as anything other than Infidels, that is, with essential hostility that transcends, or survives, any temporary accommodation for the purposes of self-interest. While they may be eager to use the Americans for their own ends (getting the Americans to fight their internal wars, or soaking them for the very last dollar in aid they can get), those Sunni tribes in Anbar Province who have apparently now turned on Al-Qaeda are not our "friends" and never could be. They have fallen out with Al Qaeda not because Al Qaeda attacks the Americans, but because Al Qaeda has been too zealous in its imposition of its own ways on them, and has killed local sheiks and their relatives.

One reason for the very high degree of demoralization among the most aware and thoughtful troops -- the ones who reflect upon their experience -- is the gap between what they were told about Islam and about Iraq and their own experience of it.

This cannot go on.

At the various camps in which soldiers are trained, there is a chance to allow hundreds of men to learn something about Islam, something about the 1350-year history of Islam, something about the central duty of Jihad, and the various instruments of Jihad that go far beyond mere "terrorism" or indeed, combat (qitaal). And finally, those officers and men should be required to learn something as well about the fissures -- ethnic, sectarian, and economic -- within the Camp of Islam.

So far, more than four years into this mistaken campaign, this Tarbaby Iraq, there is not the slightest sign that either the military or the civilian leadership (including members of Congress) have begun to recognize that those who presume to lead us (to "take a leadership role"), those that is whose task is to both instruct and protect us, have a duty to themselves learn about Islam, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics, and about the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest and subsequent subjugation of non-Muslim peoples.

This is not a duty that can be foresworn. It must be fulfilled. Lives, countries, whole ways of life, depend on enough people in our ruling elites, in North America and in Western Europe, learning enough, and in time, and then acting sensibly and appropriately on that basis.

[Posted by Hugh at April 15, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:24 PM

April 12, 2007

Fitzgerald: Steps that could be taken

Over the years at Jihad Watch I have stressed several principal themes.

These are:

1) That the Iraq venture makes no sense not only because the goal or goals to be achieved are not the right ones, but because they are based on a belief that "democracy" or "freedom" can easily be transplanted, or transplanted at all, into a Muslim society in which most people locate political legitimacy not in the expressed will of mere mortals in their voting, but rather in the will expressed by Allah in the Qur'an as glossed by the Sunnah (derived from the Hadith and Sira). Mere mortals are slaves of Allah, and their highest and correct role is to be submissive to his will. And his will has by scholars been codified as the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam.

2) That the best way to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad is to have far less direct intervention, indeed to keep intervention at a minimum, and instead through careful study identify the weak points within the Camp of Islam, including the main fissures (sectarian, ethnic, financial) and where possible, to exploit those fissures. This will weaken the Jihad onslaught as nothing else will.

This Administration does not display, in its war-making, the intelligence and even cunning that members of the American government displayed during the Cold War (their names not all household words). Propaganda is non-existent, if by propaganda we mean information designed to lessen the appeal of the enemy’s ideology to others, and also to cause disaffection within the ranks of that enemy. Instead, Muslims are having their hearts and minds won by the constant repetition of praise for Islam, and by a misstating of Islam’s effects. Why have Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Wafa Sultan or Ali Sina or Ibn Warraq not been asked to broadcast about Islam, in both English and other languages? Have the defectors from the Army of Islam been allowed to enroll in our Office of War Propaganda, for as much or as little time as they wish? Or is it they who, out of the Administration’s timidity, and its determined unwillingness to recognize the nature and scope of the Muslim threat, who are kept out, not even brought in to at least offer their worldview to high government officials in the Executive Branch, in the Pentagon, or for that matter, before Congress?

Instead of such sensible measures, there is the blind willingness to keep squandering troops. Nearly half of all post-2001 West Point graduates have left the military. There is the blind willingness to keep throwing tanks and helicopters and Strykers and Humvees and planes, in a large, ill-conceived, Baby-Hughie operation, against forces that are all hostile to us, but much more importantly, are hostile to each other. And that latter hostility ought to be recognized and exploited for our ends, instead of allowing our enemies to exploit us for their respective ends.

Here and there some creative diplomacy might actually be necessary, as with getting Turkey to accept an independent Kurdistan with the right American guarantees (in turn dependent on American pressure on the Kurds, which could be considerable).

That idea, because it would require some mental effort, and some cunning, is one that probably appeals less to the Administration than its pursuit of this crazed policy in Tarbaby Iraq. Our rulers are simply not up to it, and they obscurely sense that.

But surely the American government can be a little less timid, a little more ruthless and willing to pressure old but temporary allies of convenience, such as Turkey, or for that matter, new but temporary allies of convenience, such as an independent Kurdistan.

In dozens of postings over the past few years I have explained how complicated this will be. I first noted that the Turkish government must have made known to it that its usefulness during the Cold War has not continued since, and that bases in Bulgaria and elsewhere make Turkey, and those listening-posts and airbases, no longer useful -- if those bases cannot be used in the war that must now be waged. It would require our eliciting from the Kurdish government guarantees about not making territorial demands on Turkey, but at the same time giving the Kurds every encouragement to make such demands on Syria and Iran, where Kurds also live. This can be achieved only because the Kurds have nowhere else to turn for long-term diplomatic and military support.

The Turks will be unhappy with this, but might be made to see that it could work in their favor, and that the moral case of the Kurds in eastern Anatolia is lessened, not increased, by the existence of a Kurdish state to which they could, if they insist, move. It would never be easy to bring all this about. It would require intelligence, tact, cunning -- and these seem to be lacking at all levels of our government.

[Posted by Hugh at April 12, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:27 PM

April 12, 2007

Fitzgerald: Walk away from our responsibilities in Iraq?

Some have asserted that if we leave Iraq, it will amount to abandoning our responsibilities there, and foregoing an opportunity to exert a positive influence in the region.

Of course, The Americna government does not need to exert a "positive influence" if by that one means winning hearts and minds. Such efforts are, as has been demonstrated again and again, futile and self-defeating when those hearts and those minds are Muslim.

Many, furthermore, make the same mistake as Bush has made: they interpret as "having influence" only the doing of certain things, rather than ceasing to do certain things that are now being done and should not be done.

If, for example, the American government were to halt the disguised Jizyah of foreign aid to countries whose governments are meretricious, and whose peoples hate the United States, that would exert the right kind of influence. For the hate of those people is encouraged, not quite paradoxically, by the media campaigns that are either allowed or encouraged by their governments (as in Egypt), or are encouraged by the fact of our aid being seen as propping up despotic governments (Egypt, Pakistan). Or else that aid is misused for the purposes of making war on fellow Infidel lands (all aid to the so-called "Palestinians," the name given to local Arabs in Gaza and the "West Bank," falls into that category). Wouldn't the halting of aid be as much of an influential act as the provision of it was in the first place?

Isn't educating one's population about Islam more important now than sending more brigades to Iraq? That may not conform to most people's idea of "war," but it matters far more how many people in the West stop accepting the versions of Islam of apologists for Islam, Muslim and non-Muslim, with all the plausible Taqiyya and Tu-Quoque, than how many troops we have trying to bring democracy to a place where virtually no one wants it.

My wish for an American withdrawal from in Iraq has been reinforced by recent news about the shortages in military equipment for training (and in both army and National Guard armories), and from the fact that it now is greatly damaging to military morale. Recently an article appeared noting that 46% of all post-2001 West Point graduates have now left the military. This is an unprecedented figure. And besides those graduates of West Point, many of the best young officers are leaving the services. Who will replace them? How much time and money will go into finding them, and training them? And what of the members of the National Guard and Reserve who are sent back for more than one tour, an unprecedented demand and one which those affected, or many of them, believe violates a clear undertaking on the government's side? Will they re-enlist? Will they recommend to others that they join the Reserves or National Guard, given the kine of treatment being given them that this Administration apparently thinks it can get away with? Troops are perfectly willing to go to Iraq once. But the severe drop in morale comes when they, after their first tour, having seen Iraq, and the "Iraqis," and having measured the distance between the hallucinators in Washington (and some of the more pliant generals) with their prattle about the "mission" and "getting the job done" and what their own experience in Iraq, (with their very own boots on the ground), taught them, are asked to go back. Do you think so many have left the service, including those once committed West Point graduates, because they are "scared to fight"? I don't. I think this can be attributed, rather, to the fact that they have discovered in Iraq that the "mission" is pointless and the waste of American servicemen's lives at this point is both stupid and cruel.

So shall we "walk away from our responsibilities in Iraq"? What "responsibilities in Iraq"? This is merely a variant on the Friedmanesque "we broke it, we bought it" nonsense. We don't have "responsibilities" toward anyone but ourselves, to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad that threatens our continued existence. We don't have to try to fix the innate aggression of Muslim peoples and their inability to compromise with each other. That aggression is based on their worldview, which is provided by Qur'an, Hadith, and the example of Muhammad in the Sira. It leads them to view outcomes of warfare always as a matter of Victor and Vanquished. We don't have a "responsibility" to undo the effects of Islam in order to make Sunnis and Shi'a behave differently. And we couldn't undo those effects, in that way, no matter how prolonged the effort.

Finally, the Administration was ignorant, and apparently intends to stay ignorant, not only of the fact of sectarian (and ethnic) fissures, but of their depth and duration. Only those unaware of how deep those fissures are, and how they go back to the very first century of Islam (in the case of the Sunni-Shi'a divide) could conceivably think that the American government, if it does not somehow solve this insolvable problem, is "walking away from its responsibilities in Iraq." These problems go back to the essence of Islam from its very beginning, as a vehicle for Arab supremacism (in the case of the Kurd-Arab divide, a result of mistreatment of the Kurds by the Arabs over a very long time).

More than four years, and half-a-million officers and men trying their best, in a series of rotations, and the spending of $880 billion in past, present, and future committed costs, more than the total cost of all the wars ever fought by the United States save for World War II, is enough. Is more than enough. "Walk away from our responsibilities in Iraq"? Nonsense.

[Posted by Hugh at April 12, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:31 PM

We need to be involved in counter-insurgency efforts only including, but not limited to, tactical strikes and Isreali style attacks on dwellings that harbor terrorists. We must get our soldiers off the streets. They must cease acting like policemen. I am convinced we can do what I mentioned above with fewer men and with soldiers that are less exposed to dangers on the streets of Iraq.

We are building another base by Iran. Perhaps we can bunker down and act defensively, striking only when necessary. We cannot however allow Al Qaeda stlyle terrorists to take entire sections of the country.

Hillary will not withdraw troops once she is in office, despite assurances (to the party base) to that effect. A Guiliani or Hillary win means the country stays on course. So long as either wins, the US is not changing direction in virtually any respect.

Posted by: Kafir Nonbeliever at September 10, 2007 8:32 PM

April 5, 2007

Fitzgerald: Victory Stands Shining Before Us

Powerline blog recently published “a pessimistic assessment” of the situation in Iraq, written by an American serving there. While it is labelled a "pessimistic" assessment, it would be more accurate to call it a "realistic" assessment. The fact that it has been put up at a website ordinarily an unshakeable supporter of the war may be that one swallow that doesn't make a spring, or it may mean that at long last, the swallows of more ruthless common sense are now winging their way back to all kinds of mental Capistranos.

For Victory, Rightly Understood, Stands Shining Before Us, if Only We Get Out. When you hear dire predictions of "chaos" and "catastrophe," be sure to ask "but whose chaos?" And "whose catastrophe?" The goals of the Administration have successively been whittled down. The "democracy" is not true democracy, but Shari'a-limited, and so is merely one of purple-thumbed head-counting, which the Shi'a Arabs will gladly support (and dutifully vote exactly as they are told by their leaders) because they constitute 60-65% of the population. The Sunni Arabs remain resentful of the Shi’a, because while they "know" that they are the "largest" group in Iraq, they also "know" (i.e., obscurely realize) that in fact they constitute less than 20% of the population, and to regain power, and then to hold onto it, will require mass intimidation, through terrorism and economic sabotage, of the Shi’a. Just as Muslims were quite capable of believing that 1) the Mossad and the C.I.A. were behind the World Trade Center Attacks and 2) Bin Laden achieved a great thing, did something wonderful, against the Infidels with those World Trade Center Attacks which, however, were committed by the Mossad or the C.I.A., so are the Sunni Arabs capable of understanding that they really do constitute 19% of Iraq's population but at the same constitute 42% of it and are, they believe, the largest group, the group entitled to rule.

I have written about this hundreds of times. We have our Victory in Iraq. The Bush Administration just fails to recognize it, because that Victory is not the “victory” that the Bush Administration has set out, and never swerved, from wishing to achieve -- a “victory” that makes no sense. The real Victory, the one that makes perfect sense, was achieved long ago, and was made certain at the end of 2003 when Saddam Hussein was seized. The time to start removing troops was at the beginning of 2004, and to have them all about by the end of that spring. No dreams of American bases safely tucked here and there into the comforting fabric of Iraq, no fabulous xanadu of a $595 million dollar Embassy (let’s see what they thought they were going to build in their sheer craziness – can we have a picture please?), no Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations, no bringing "democracy" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East, none of it. Just a sober understanding that the instruments of Jihad are many, that the threat is worldwide (and most dangerously shown in the accelerating islamization of the advanced societies, the cultural heart of our civilization, without which the United States cannot survive in more than a physical sense, the lands of Western Europe). We must therefore exploit, wherever and whenever we can, the fissures within Islam or the Camp of Islam.

There are ethnic fissures: in Iraq the Arab vs. Non-Arab Muslim battle is between Arabs and Kurds. (In North Africa, and especially Algeria, it is between Arabs and Berbers). It is the Kurds, who now see their opportunity for independence, who can help provide an example, if they are successful, of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke. And in the effort to do so, the understanding will spread among the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs, that Islam has always been, and always will be, despite its universalist pretensions, a vehicle for Arab linguistic, cultural, economic, and political imperialism.

Even more obviously present in Iraq is the main sectarian fissure within Islam, that between Sunnis and Shi’a. This split dates back to the first century of Islam. Those who, like the inimitable Dinesh D’Souza, claim it is “merely” a “political” rather than a “religious” split, appear not to realize that the religious and the political are one within Islam. For as Bernard Lewis never tires of repeating (the same Lewis whom Dinesh D’Souza claims to have read with such attention, needing no other authority), the doctrine of “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” is an idea that permits the sundering of political and religious authority in the Christian West, an idea that makes no sense to Muslims, or in Islam. The Shi’a having a long history of enduring, over many centuries, at times only contumely and discrimination, and at times persecution and murder at the hands of the Sunnis. In the history of modern Iraq, it has been mostly persecution, and more recently, murder.

And finally there is the clear economic division between Haves and Have-Nots. The oil-rich Arabs lead lives of luxury and languor, the result of an accident of geology, not of any industry or enterprise on their part. And this is in contrast to the impoverished state of those Arabs and other Muslims who do not possess that oil bonanza, and who, being Muslims, are incapable of the kind of enterprise and energy that the development of modern economies require. For inshallah-fatalism inhibits economic activity. Look at any country where there are significant numbers of both Muslims and non-Muslims. Look at Malaysia, and which group is responsible for economic development in that country, or at Indonesia, or at Lebanon, or at Nigeria. Look at the massive exploitation of the welfare states of western Europe, not by “immigrants” in general (not the Chinese, not the Vietnamese, not the Hindus) but by one specific group: Muslims, and not in this or that country alone, but in every Infidel land of Western Europe, no matter what its history or current political setup, or benefits offered. Despite the fact that the oil-rich Arabs and Muslims have been the beneficiaries of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, far outreaching anything received by all the colonial powers through all the years of colonialism, amounting since 1973 to ten trillion dollars, it is not they, but we the Infidels, who have somehow become responsible, or who have allowed ourselves, in a moment of distraction or semi-dementia, to think that we somehow should be responsible, for their economic disarray. For we supply money and goods and services of all kinds to the non-oil-endowed Arab and Muslim states. Those receiving such foreign aid take it as by right, and show not gratitude but continued undisguised hostility to those giving them that aid. And the givers of such aid give it with alacrity, an eagerness to please, and with such fear of cutting or diminishing such aid lest the beneficiaries are angered and begin to behave in a manner still more hostile to the donors who have been trying, tugging at their metaphorical forelocks, to comply in every way with what those recipients of aid demand.

For the implication is always, as the Infidels fearfully see it, that if they don’t give such aid, then those Muslim recipients will do them harm, or even more harm than they now do them. Yes, those Infidels convince themselves, we’d better not stop that aid to those inculcated to hate us by their own sacred texts. One can almost hear in the background the aposiopetic threat of Neptune in the Aeneid, Book IV, when the God of the Sea shakes his triton and offers a dire warning, the “Quos Ego…” so carefully attended to in many a third-year Latin class. What we should be doing is not only cutting all aid to members of the Camp of Islam (and spending that money on efforts to alert the peoples of the West to the theory and practice of Islam), but publicly embarrassing the Arabs and Muslims by pointedly making clear that the poor members of the Umma should be seeking whatever aid they need from the rich members of the Umma, given that the Umma al-Islamiyya is the only community, for Muslims, that counts, and where all that blague and blah about “social justice” should be duly noted, and the loyalty of rich Muslims to poor ones should be put to the public test. Yes, why isn’t Saudi Arabia, why aren’t the Emirates, why isn’t Kuwait, really sharing the wealth with the rest of the “Arab Nation” or the “Umma al-Islamiyya”?

Iraq presents us clearly with two of those three main fissures. Those two are, for the thousandth time at this website, the sectarian and the ethnic fissures within the Camp of Islam that long pre-date our entry to Iraq -- pre-date the founding of the American Republic, in fact, by a thousand years. We need do nothing to "encourage" those fissures. We have in fact done everything we can to prevent them, to engender a spirit of sweet reason and compromise that shows how little we comprehend the belief-system of Islam, which nowhere inculcates the spirit of sweet reason and compromise, but everywhere quite a different view of the universe, in which peoples are divided between Believers and Unbelievers -- the rightful victors, and the rightfully vanquished. But of course, our leaders haven't bothered, or are incapable of finding advisers able to explain to them, what Islam's tenets, and attitudes, and atmospherics, are all about. Such people exist -- you can find a few of them right at this website. The government might have saved American taxpayers a cool $500 or $600 or $700 or $800 billion, had it chosen to listen to such people and to begin to fashion policies based on some understanding of the need to identify the instruments of Jihad (and stop focusing on this "war on terror"), and to render them less effective. It might also have then ceased the obsessive and obsessed attempt to make Iraq into something it never could have been, and had it been, had that goal been achieved, it would have worked against the Infidels, and promoted only unity within the Camp of Islam.

It is not, however, too late.

Victory, rightly understood (as being defined as any acts which weaken, by demoralizing, or dividing, and using up the resources and attention that might otherwise be devoted, directly or indirectly to Jihad, the Camp of Islam) Stands Shining Before Us. It has been before us for several years. But Victory, in one of those seeming paradoxes, can only be achieved If Only We Get Out.

[Posted by Hugh at April 5, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:34 PM

@Foehammer

The only thing I would add is do a Gen. Sherman type of sweep destroying the infrastructure so they would not be able to wage war. Specifically destroying any and every war material and munitions that are found. Garrison the pipe line, wells and pumping stations of all the oil. We're damned by the left anyway. So take it to pay for the war. After the war is all over, we could give Iraq very responsible loans to help them rebuild a non-islamic government.

Afghanistan should also be turned into a non-islamic state. For those who may think that is impossible do you think the other side would not do the same thing. I am just getting started but will stop there for now.

Proverbs 3:33
The curse of the LORD is on the house of the wicked, But He blesses the dwelling of the righteous.

امثال 3:33
لعنة الرب على منزل الشرس ، لكنه يبارك مسكن الصالحين.

Posted by: Im.mad.as.HELL! at September 10, 2007 8:34 PM

March 28, 2007

Fitzgerald: Success in Tal Afar

Little more than a year ago, in Cleveland, President Bush delivered a speech, and at great length told the audience all about the "success" of his "strategy" in Tal Afar, a model city in what will be Iraq the Model (that's right -- Sunni Arab regimes everywhere will look on Shi'a dominated Iraq as a splendid model of what they can be, if only they get with the program).

Here is that speech. Read it, and weep, as a celebrated writer offhandedly wrote, "like a Babylonian willow":

President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom Renaissance Cleveland Hotel Cleveland, Ohio
12:25 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. (Applause.) Thank you all. Please be seated. Sanjiv, thanks for the introduction. He called me on the phone and said, listen, we believe in free speech, so you're going to come and give us a speech for free. (Laughter.) Thanks for the invitation, thanks for the warm welcome. It's good to be here at the City Club of Cleveland.

For almost a century, you have provided an important forum for debate and discussion on the issues of the day. And I have come to discuss a vital issue of the day, which is the safety and security of every American -- and our need to achieve victory in the war on terror.
I want to thank the Mayor for joining us. Mr. Mayor, appreciate you being here. (Applause.) It must make you feel pretty good to get the "Most Liveable City" award. (Laughter.) I want to thank all the members of the City Club for graciously inviting me to come. I want to thank the students who are here. Thanks for your interest in your government. I look forward to giving you a speech and then answering questions, if you have any.

The central front on the war on terror is Iraq. And in the past few weeks, we've seen horrific images coming out of that country. We've seen a great house of worship -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra -- in ruins after a brutal terrorist attack. We have seen reprisal attacks by armed militia on Sunni mosques. We have seen car bombs take the lives of shoppers in a crowded market in Sadr City. We've seen the bodies of scores of Iraqi men brutally executed or beaten to death.

The enemies of a free Iraq attacked the Golden Mosque for a reason: They know they lack the military strength to challenge Iraqi and coalition forces in a direct battle, so they're trying to provoke a civil war. By attacking one of Shia Islam's holiest sites, they hoped to incite violence that would drive Iraqis apart and stop their progress on the path to a free society.

The timing of the attack in Samarra is no accident. It comes at a moment when Iraq's elected leaders are working to form a unity government. Last December, four short months ago, more than 11 million people expressed their opinion. They said loud and clear at the ballot box that they desire a future of freedom and unity. And now it is time for the leaders to put aside their differences, reach out across political, religious, and sectarian lines, and form a unity government that will earn the trust and the confidence of all Iraqis. My administration, led by Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, is helping, and will continue to help the Iraqis achieve this goal.

The situation on the ground remains tense. And in the face of continued reports about killings and reprisals, I understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken. Others look at the violence they see each night on their television screens, and they wonder how I can remain so optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq. They wonder what I see that they don't. So today I'd like to share a concrete example of progress in Iraq that most Americans do not see every day in their newspapers and on their television screens. I'm going to tell you the story of a northern Iraqi city called Tal Afar, which was once a key base of operations for al Qaeda and is today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.

Tal Afar is a city of more than 200,000 residents, roughly the population of Akron, Ohio. In many ways, Tal Afar is a microcosm of Iraq: It has dozens of tribes of different ethnicity and religion. Most of the city residents are Sunnis of Turkmen origin. Tal Afar sits just 35 miles from the Syrian border. It was a strategic location for al Qaeda and their leader, Zarqawi. Now, it's important to remember what Al Qaeda has told us, their stated objectives. Their goal is to drive us out of Iraq so they can take the country over. Their goal is to overthrow moderate Muslim governments throughout the region. Their goal is to use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks against America. To achieve this goal, they're recruiting terrorists from the Middle East to come into Iraq to infiltrate its cities, and to sow violence and destruction so that no legitimate government can exercise control. And Tal Afar was a key way station for their operations in Iraq.

After we removed Saddam Hussein in April 2003, the terrorists began moving into the city. They sought to divide Tal Afar's many ethnic and religious groups, and forged an alliance of convenience with those who benefitted from Saddam's regime and others with their own grievances. They skillfully used propaganda to foment hostility toward the coalition and the new Iraqi government. They exploited a weak economy to recruit young men to their cause. And by September 2004, the terrorists and insurgents had basically seized control of Tal Afar.

We recognized the situation was unacceptable. So we launched a military operation against them. After three days of heavy fighting, the terrorists and the insurgents fled the city. Our strategy at the time was to stay after the terrorists and keep them on the run. So coalition forces kept moving, kept pursuing the enemy and routing out the terrorists in other parts of Iraq

Unfortunately, in 2004 the local security forces there in Tal Afar weren't able to maintain order, and so the terrorists and the insurgents eventually moved back into the town. Because the terrorists threatened to murder the families of Tal Afar's police, its members rarely ventured out from the headquarters in an old Ottoman fortress. The terrorists also took over local mosques, forcing local imams out and insisting that the terrorist message of hatred and intolerance and violence be spread from the mosques. The same happened in Tal Afar's schools, where the terrorists eliminated real education and instead indoctrinated young men in their hateful ideology. By November 2004, two months after our operation to clear the city, the terrorists had returned to continue their brutal campaign of intimidation.

The return of al Qaeda meant the innocent civilians in Tal Afar were in a difficult position. Just put yourself in the shoes of the citizens of Tal Afar as all this was happening. On the one side, you hear coalition and Iraqi forces saying they're coming to protect you -- but they'd already come in once, and they had not stopped the terrorists from coming back. You worry that when the coalition goes after the terrorists, you or your family may be caught in the crossfire, and your city might be destroyed. You don't trust the police. You badly want to believe the coalition forces really can help you out, but three decades of Saddam's brutal rule have taught you a lesson: Don't stick your neck out for anybody.

On the other side, you see the terrorists and the insurgents. You know they mean business. They control the only hospital in town. You see that the mayor and other political figures are collaborating with the terrorists. You see how the people who worked as interpreters for the coalition forces are beheaded. You see a popular city councilman gunned down in front of his horrified wife and children. You see a respected Sheik and an Imam kidnapped and murdered. You see the terrorists deliberately firing mortars into playgrounds and soccer fields filled with children. You see communities becoming armed enclaves. If you are in a part of Tal Afar that was not considered friendly, you see that the terrorists cut off your basic services like electricity and water. You and your family feel besieged and you see no way out.

The savagery of the terrorists and insurgents who controlled Tal Afar is really hard for Americans to imagine. They enforced their rule through fear and intimidation -- and women and children were not spared. In one grim incident, the terrorists kidnapped a young boy from the hospital and killed him And then they booby-trapped his body and placed him along a road where his family would see him. And when the boy's father came to retrieve his son's body, he was blown up. These weren't random acts of violence; these were deliberate and highly organized attempts to maintain control through intimidation. In Tal Afar, the terrorists had schools for kidnapping and beheading and laying IEDs. And they sent a clear message to the citizens of the city: Anyone who dares oppose their reign of terror will be murdered.

As they enforced their rule by targeting civilians, they also preyed upon adolescents craving affirmation. Our troops found one Iraqi teenager who was taken from his family by the terrorists. The terrorists routinely abused him and violated his dignity. The terrorists offered him a chance to prove his manhood -- by holding the legs of captives as they were beheaded. When our forces interviewed this boy, he told them that his greatest aspiration was to be promoted to the killer who would behead the bound captives. Al Qaeda's idea of manhood may be fanatical and perverse, but it served two clear purposes: It helped provide recruits willing to commit any atrocity, and it enforced the rule of fear.

The result of this barbarity was a city where normal life had virtually ceased. Colonel H.R. McMaster of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment described it this way: "When you come into a place in the grip of al Qaeda, you see a ghost town. There are no children playing in the streets. Shops are closed and boarded. All construction is stopped. People stay inside, prisoners in their own homes." This is the brutal reality that al Qaeda wishes to impose on all the people of Iraq.

The ability of al Qaeda and its associates to retake Tal Afar was an example of something we saw elsewhere in Iraq. We recognized the problem, and we changed our strategy. Instead of coming in and removing the terrorists, and then moving on, the Iraqi government and the coalition adopted a new approach called clear, hold, and build. This new approach was made possible because of the significant gains made in training large numbers of highly capable Iraqi security forces. Under this new approach, Iraq and coalition -- Iraqi and coalition forces would clear a city of the terrorists, leave well-trained Iraqi units behind to hold the city, and work with local leaders to build the economic and political infrastructure Iraqis need to live in freedom.

One of the first tests of this new approach was Tal Afar. In May 2005, Colonel McMaster's unit was given responsibility for the western part of Nineva Province where Tal Afar is located, and two months later Iraq's national government announced that a major offensive to clear the city of the terrorists and insurgents would soon be launched. Iraqi and coalition forces first met with tribal leaders and local residents to listen to their grievances. One of the biggest complaints was the police force, which rarely ventured out of its headquarters. When it did venture, it was mostly to carry out sectarian reprisals. And so the national government sent out new leaders to head the force. The new leaders set about getting rid of the bad elements, and building a professional police force that all sides could have confidence in. We recognized it was important to listen to the representatives of Tal Afar's many ethnic and religious groups. It's an important part of helping to remove one of the leading sources of mistrust.

Next, Iraqi and army coalition forces spent weeks preparing for what they knew would be a tough military offensive. They built an 8-foot high, 12-mile long dirt wall that ringed the city. This wall was designed to cut off any escape for terrorists trying to evade security checkpoints. Iraqi and coalition forces also built temporary housing outside the city, so that Tal Afar's people would have places to go when the fighting started. Before the assault on the city, Iraqi and coalition forces initiated a series of operations in surrounding towns to eliminate safe havens and make it harder for fleeing terrorists to hide. These steps took time, but as life returned to these outlying towns, these operations helped persuade the population of Tal Afar that Iraqi and coalition forces were on their side against a common enemy: the extremists who had taken control of their city and their lives.

Only after all these steps did Iraqi and coalition authorities launch Operation Restoring Rights to clear the city of the terrorists. Iraqi forces took the lead. The primary force was 10 Iraqi battalions, backed by three coalition battalions. Many Iraqi units conducted their own anti-terrorist operations and controlled their own battle space, hunting for the enemy fighters and securing neighborhoods block by block. Throughout the operation, Iraqi and coalition forces were careful to hold their fire to let civilians pass safely out of the city. By focusing on securing the safety of Tal Afar's population, the Iraqi and coalition forces begin to win the trust of the city's residents -- which is critical to defeating the terrorists who were hiding among them.

After about two weeks of intense activity, coalition and Iraqi forces had killed about 150 terrorists and captured 850 more. The operation uncovered weapons caches loaded with small arms ammunition and ski masks, RPG rockets, grenade and machine gun ammunition, and fuses and batteries for making IEDs. In one cache we found an axe inscribed with the names of the victims the terrorists had beheaded. And the operation accomplished all this while protecting innocent civilians and inflicting minimal damage on the city.

After the main combat operations were over, Iraqi forces moved in to hold the city. Iraqis' government deployed more than a thousand Iraqi army soldiers and emergency police to keep order, and they were supported by a newly restored police force that would eventually grow to about 1,700 officers. As part of the new strategy we embedded coalition forces with the Iraqi police and with the army units patrolling Tal Afar to work with their Iraqi counterparts and to help them become more capable and more professional. In the weeks and months that followed, the Iraqi police built stations throughout Tal Afar -- and city residents began stepping forward to offer testimony against captured terrorists, and inform soldiers about where the remaining terrorists were hiding.

Inside the old Ottoman fortress, a Joint Coordination Center manned by Iraqi army and Iraqi police and coalition forces answers the many phone calls that now come into a new tip line. As a result of the tips, when someone tries to plant an IED in Tal Afar, it's often reported and disabled before it can do any harm. The Iraqi forces patrolling the cities are effective because they know the people, they know the language and they know the culture. And by turning control of these cities over to capable Iraqi troops and police, we give Iraqis confidence that they can determine their own destiny -- and that frees up coalition forces to hunt the high-value targets like Zarqawi.

The recent elections show us how Iraqis respond when they know they're safe Tal Afar is the largest city in Western Nineveh Province. In the elections held in January 2005, of about 190,000 registered voters, only 32,000 people went to the polls. Only Fallujah had a lower participation rate. By the time of the October referendum on the constitution and the December elections, Iraqi and coalition forces had secured Tal Afar and surrounding areas. The number of registered voters rose to about 204,000 -- and more than 175,000 turned out to vote in each election, more than 85 percent of the eligible voters in Western Nineva Province. These citizens turned out because they were determined to have a say in their nation's future, and they cast their ballots at polling stations that were guarded and secured by fellow Iraqis.

One young teacher described the change this way: "What you see here is hope -- the hope that Iraq will become safer and fairer. I feel very confident when I see so many people voting."

The confidence that has been restored to the people of Tal Afar is crucial to their efforts to rebuild their city. Immediately following the military operations, we helped the Iraqis set up humanitarian relief for the civilian population. We also set up a fund to reimburse innocent Iraqi families for damage done to their homes and businesses in the fight against the terrorists. The Iraqi government pledged $50 million to help reconstruct Tal Afar by paving roads, and rebuilding hospitals and schools, and by improving infrastructure from the electric grid to sewer and water systems. With their city now more secure, the people of Tal Afar are beginning to rebuild a better future for themselves and their children.

See, if you're a resident of Tal Afar today, this is what you're going to see: You see that the terrorist who once exercised brutal control over every aspect of your city has been killed or captured, or driven out, or put on the run. You see your children going to school and playing safely in the streets. You see the electricity and water service restored throughout the city. You see a police force that better reflects the ethnic and religious diversity of the communities they patrol. You see markets opening, and you hear the sound of construction equipment as buildings go up and homes are remade. In short, you see a city that is coming back to life.

The success of Tal Afar also shows how the three elements of our strategy in Iraq -- political, security, and economic -- depend on and reinforce one another. By working with local leaders to address community grievances, Iraqi and coalition forces helped build the political support needed to make the military operation a success. The military success against the terrorists helped give the citizens of Tal Afar security, and this allowed them to vote in the elections and begin to rebuild their city. And the economic rebuilding that is beginning to take place is giving Tal Afar residents a real stake in the success of a free Iraq. And as all this happens, the terrorists, those who offer nothing but destruction and death, are becoming marginalized.

The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight -- it came only after much trial and error. It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working. And we know it's working because the people of Tal Afar are showing their gratitude for the good work that Americans have given on their behalf. A recent television report followed a guy named Captain Jesse Sellars on patrol, and described him as a "pied piper" with crowds of Iraqi children happily chanting his name as he greets locals with the words "Salaam alaikum," which mean "peace be with you."

When the newswoman asks the local merchant what would have happened a few months earlier if he'd been seen talking with an American, his answer was clear: "They'd have cut off my head, they would have beheaded me." Like thousands of others in Tal Afar, this man knows the true meaning of liberation.

Recently, Senator Joe Biden said that America cannot want peace for Iraqis more than they want it for themselves. I agree with that. And the story of Tal Afar shows that when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully. We saw this in Tal Afar after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. Unlike other parts of Iraq, in Tal Afar the reaction was subdued, with few reports of sectarian violence. Actually, on the Friday after the attack, more than a thousand demonstrators gathered in Tal Afar to protest the attack peacefully.

The terrorists have not given up in Tal Afar, and they may yet succeed in exploding bomb or provoking acts of sectarian violence. The people of the city still have many challenges to overcome, including old-age [sic] resentments that still create suspicion, an economy that needs to create jobs and opportunity for its young, and determined enemies who will continue trying to foment a civil war to move back in. But the people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists. The people of Tal Afar have shown that Iraqis do want peace and freedom, and no one should underestimate them.

I wish I could tell you that the progress made in Tal Afar is the same in every single part of Iraq. It's not. Though most of the country has remained relatively peaceful, in some parts of Iraq the enemy is carrying out savage acts of violence, particularly in Baghdad and the surrounding areas of Baghdad. But the progress made in bringing more Iraqi security forces online is helping to bring peace and stability to Iraqi cities. The example of Tal Afar gives me confidence in our strategy, because in this city we see the outlines of the Iraq that we and the Iraqi people have been fighting for: a free and secure people who are getting back on their feet, who are participating in government and civic life, and who have become allies in the fight against the terrorists.

I believe that as Iraqis continue to see the benefits of liberty they will gain confidence in their future -- and they will work to ensure that common purpose trumps narrow sectarianism. And by standing with them in their hour of need, we're going to help the Iraqis build a strong democracy that will be an inspiration throughout the Middle East; a democracy that will be a partner in the global war against the terrorists.

The kind of progress that we and the Iraqi people are making in places like Tal Afar is not easy to capture in a short clip on the evening news. Footage of children playing, or shops opening, and people resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an IED explosion, or the destruction of a mosque, or soldiers and civilians being killed or injured. The enemy understands this, and it explains their continued acts of violence in Iraq. Yet the progress we and the Iraqi people are making is also real. And those in a position to know best are the Iraqis, themselves.

One of the most eloquent is the Mayor of Tal Afar, a courageous Iraqi man named Najim. Mayor Najim arrived in the city in the midst of the al Qaeda occupation, and he knows exactly what our troops have helped accomplish. He calls our men and women in uniform "lion-hearts," and in a letter to the troopers of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, he spoke of a friendship sealed in blood and sacrifice. As Mayor Najim had this to say to the families of our fallen: "To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls [are] hovering around us every second of every minute. They will not be forgotten for giving their precious lives. They have sacrificed that which is most valuable. We see them in the smile of every child, and in every flower growing in this land. Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life." America is proud of that sacrifice, and we're proud to have allies like Mayor Najim on our side in the fight for freedom.

Yesterday we marked the third anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. At the time there is much to -- this time, there's much discussion in our country about the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and our remaining mission in Iraq. The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was a difficult decision; the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. (Applause.)

Before we acted, his regime was defying U.N. resolutions calling for it to disarm; it was violating cease-fire agreements, was firing on British and American pilots which were enforcing no-fly zones. Saddam Hussein was a leader who brutalized his people, had pursued and used weapons of mass destruction, and sponsored terrorism. Today Saddam Hussein is no longer oppressing his people or threatening the world. He's being tried for his crimes by the free citizens of a free Iraq -- and America and our allies are safer for it. (Applause.)

The last three years have tested our resolve. The fighting has been tough. The enemy we face has proved to be brutal and relentless. We're adapting our approach to reflect the hard realities on the ground. And the sacrifice being made by our young men and women who wear our uniform has been heartening and inspiring.

The terrorists who are setting off bombs in mosques and markets in Iraq share the same hateful ideology as the terrorists who attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, those who blew up commuters in London and Madrid, and those who murdered tourists in Bali, or workers in Riyadh, or guests at a wedding in Amman, Jordan. In the war on terror we face a global enemy -- and if we were not fighting this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and trying to kill Americans across the world and within our own borders. Against this enemy, there can be no compromise. So we will fight them in Iraq, we'll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.

In the long run, the best way to defeat this enemy and to ensure the security of our own citizens is to spread the hope of freedom across the broader Middle East. We've seen freedom conquer evil and secure the peace before. In World War II, free nations came together to fight the ideology of fascism, and freedom prevailed. And today, Germany and Japan are democracies -- and they are allies in securing the peace. In the Cold War, freedom defeated the ideology of communism and led to a democratic movement that freed the nations of Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. And today, these nations are strong allies in the war on terror.

In the Middle East, freedom is once again contending with an ideology that seeks to sow anger and hatred and despair. And like fascism and communism before, the hateful ideologies that use terror will be defeated. Freedom will prevail in Iraq; freedom will prevail in the Middle East; and as the hope of freedom spreads to nations that have not known it, these countries will become allies in the cause of peace.

The security of our country is directly linked to the liberty of the Iraqi people -- and we will settle for nothing less than victory. Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their citizens on their own, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks against our nation. There will be more days of sacrifice and tough fighting before the victory is achieved. Yet by helping the Iraqis defeat the terrorists in their land, we bring greater security to our own.

As we make progress toward victory, Iraqis will continue to take more responsibility for their own security, and fewer U.S. forces will be needed to complete the mission. But it's important for the Iraqis to hear this: The United States will not abandon Iraq. We will not leave that country to the terrorists who attacked America and want to attack us again. We will leave Iraq, but when we do, it will be from a position of strength, not weakness. Americans have never retreated in the face of thugs and assassins, and we will not begin now. (Applause.)

Thanks for listening. (Applause.) And I'll be glad to answer some questions, if you have any.

Yes, I have one.

Could you tell us how it is, four years into a war, after 3,250 dead and 25,000 wounded, and nearly one trillion dollars either spent or committed, that you cannot figure out how the only outcome in Iraq that will actually weaken the Camp of Islam is offered not by your stated, naive, ill-informed goal, but by the opposite -- by the American troops leaving, and letting those sectarian and ethnic fissures work to divide and demoralize and weaken the Camp of Islam, and to use up Muslim energies, Muslim men, money, materiel (not only in Iraq, but from co-religioinists outside Iraq)?

How is it that you remain so completely oblivious to this, and so, apparently, do so many of those merely military men who advise you? They are "merely" military men in the sense that they have not understood the need to understand and to thoroughly assimilate the tenets of Islam, the attitudes of Islam, the atmospherics of Islam. Nor have they understood the necessity not to accept but to reject the "mission" as defined, however vaguely and incompletely and even at times incoherently, by Bush, Cheney, Rice, and their stout loyalists among the "counter-insurgency" experts who fail to realize there is not one but a dozen "insurgencies," and that every single one of them, whatever the hatreds within Islam, is also directed, in the end, against Americans as Infidels. They do not understand that any "general laws of counter-insurgency" as to techniques, or as to duration, are simply silly unless Islam itself is understood, and the goals of the Iraq operation redefined to be what they should always have been, whether publicly stated or not: not to bring "freedom" ("democracy," "prosperity," whatever the hell else you want to stick in here that sounds good) to the "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East, but only to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad.

And that can only be achieved, in Tel Afar as in Baghdad or Basra or Kirkuk, by getting out, and stopping the squandering of American resources, and doing such damage, incredible damage, to the military. That damages begins but does not end with the morale of the civilian army, that is plummteing because those who have served in Iraq once, however inarticulate some may be in expressing their views, know that the "mission" makes no sense and that the "Iraqi people" are not wonderful, are not grateful, are in fact on the whole deeply hostile. It is madness to sacrifice American soldiers, such as the boy from Maine blown up the other day while he was -- in what is a grim metaphor for the American winning of unwinnable hearts and minds -- handing out candy to Iraqi children, the ones still young enough (below the age of 10) not to be taught, quite enough, to hate the Americans.

Basta with Bush and the dream-palace, in Ajami's phrase, of his imaginary Arabs, and his imaginary Islam, and his imaginary Iraq.

[Posted by Hugh at March 28, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 8:39 PM

Correction:
I meant to say reasonable not responsible loans. Maybe give them the oil fields back who knows.

Posted by: Im.mad.as.HELL! at September 10, 2007 8:48 PM

Folks, I ask you to look at this statement and ascertain the extent of its disconnect from reality.

HUGH: "There is so much more that might be said, including my oft-repeated argument that Turkey can be made to accept an independent Kurdistan, with American guarantees that such a state will not make territorial demands on Turkey, but will direct its efforts to Iran and Syria."

RESPONSE: The Turks have a clearly enunciated policy of threatening direct intervention to forestall any Iraqi Kurdish move towards independence. Kurdish separatism is seen in Ankara as the greatest existential threat to the Turkish nation, a view shared by both secularists and Islamists.

Yet, here is Hugh, insisting that America - hightailing it from the region and leaving Iraq to our enemies - can not only prevail upon the Turks to acquiesce to an independent Iraqi Kurdistan, but get them to sign on to a Kurdish irredentism that will lop off Kurdish portions of Syria and Iran, so that the only remaining Kurds left waiting to be incorporated into the new polity will be in Turkey...9 million of them!

It is this kind of disconnect that concerns me about Hugh. His overall position on Iraq is credible...I don't happen to agree with him, but his general argument is grounded in reality; e.g., 'is the price of American lives and treasure worth trying to prop up Iraq as a unitary state?' This is very valid question.

But this notion that a retreating America will have the credibility and the power to convince the Turks to betray their national interests and support not just an independent Kurdistan, but an irredentist one establishing the precedent of seizing territory inhabited by Kurds from neighboring countries...is just absurd.

Though I certainly like and admire Hugh, it is this kind of detail that causes me great concern about his global vision.

Posted by: Cornelius at September 10, 2007 8:53 PM

Moonbat Fashion:

Giorgio Yer’mami Presents The Essential ‘Peace Scarf’

http://sheikyermami.com/2007/09/10/moonbat-fashion-giorgio-yermami-presents-the-essential-peace-scarf/

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at September 10, 2007 9:13 PM

March 26, 2007

Fitzgerald: History, history

Robert Spencer has mentioned that someone with a reasonable knowledge of the worldview of Islam, of what Islam inculcates, would not have been a booster of the Iraq the Model (or Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations) Project. For one would have known that "democracy" in the Western sense is not possible -- that is, a democracy that would enshrine the rights of the individual (as expressed in the American Bill of Rights, or in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), insist upon legal equality for non-Muslims and for women, and, above all, be based on a system that would require the people in Iraq (not the "Iraqi people" in whom Bush so devoutly appears to believe) to locate political legitimacy in the expressed will of the people. (See the social-contract theories, see Hobbes, see Locke, see Rousseau, and go right up to Rawls, by which governments are legitimated by appeal to that will.)

The people in Iraq do not believe that it is the expressed will of the people that matters, but rather the will expressed by Allah in Qur'an (and glossed by the Sunnah). But Bush scarcely knew or knows a thing about Islam. His chief advisors on the subject have been, inter alios, a professor of law in Ohio. And how did Karen Hughes, our great expert in "reaching out" (something that in any case is completely contrary to what should be done) to the world of Islam, decide that this was just one more little topic, easily mastered, and that in no time at all, by meeting with Saudi ambassadors and suchlike, they'd get the hang of it?

But, you will say, didn't Kanan Makiya and Ahmed Chalabi explain that everything would be all right? Didn't Bernard Lewis think it would all work out fine? And what about all those predictions -- Paul Wolfowitz claiming the entire war and brief occupation, so very brief, would cost some tens of billions of dollars, or that other fellow, the one who said it would be "walk in the park"? What about Richard Perle, who was so sound when he was Henry Jackson's deputy but apparently not eager to study Islam himself? Instead he and the rest were willing to rely on those nice unrepresentative Shi'a-in-exile who were all over Washington. It is they who deserve the most credit for the war in Iraq. It is they who held out the promise of so much, in their desire to convince or inveigle the Americans into removing Saddam Hussein.

And Lewis himself, who has Arab visitors to his house to see his rarities in Princeton, always seems so impressed with those Arabs and Muslims who share one important characteristic: they all appear to be so impressed with Bernard Lewis. And so Ahmed Chalabi was seen as an Iraqi attuned to Iraqi reality, when Ahmed Chalabi in fact had been out of Iraq for 45 years. After all, he was a serious mathematician, with a doctorate from the University of Chicago to prove it. (And what has become of Waring's Problem, since it gave Chalabi, or he gave it, the slip?) And then there was Kanan Makiya, author of "The Republic of Fear" and stout oppononent of both Saddam Hussein and that other bully, this one in so-called intellectual matters, Edward Said. And there was also that charming Arab lady interested in rescuing the Arab world, who was, and perhaps still is, a great and good friend of Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz may have learned from her, rather than from quiet days and nights among the books, nights spent not only studying but taking in, assimilating, the material -- which requires the quiet that the hectic vacancy of Washington so seldom permits.

And then there was not only Islam, but history itself. Where was the study of the divide between Sunni and Shi'a? It was seen as something temporary, something that could and would be bridged. After all, were there not Sunni-Shi'a marriages? Were there not good Sunnis and good Shi'a -- precisely the kind one would find among the secularized and outwardly westernized elites in exile, the very people who knew each other and who presented themselves as "representative" Iraqis?

Lewis might have been dreaming, for all we know, of an Iraq that would be run by his friends and acquaintances, such as Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya and Mithal al-Alusi and all the other unrepresentative representative men. How many votes did the slate of Ahmed Chalabi receive? Compare that result with the slate of Moqtada al-Sadr, or the parties controlled by people only a tad less unpleasant than Moqtada al-Sadr. And if the Sunnis were really to participate wholeheartedly in one of those purple-thumbed supposedly majestic exercises in voting, for whom would they vote? Mithal al-Alusi? Well, no, because when he ran, on his own, he received 4,500 votes in a country of 27 million.

The clash between Sunnis and Shi'a goes back to earliest Islam. The depth and duration of that hostility, which in history-haunted Islam can be so easily evoked, so easily brought up and made more real for those living in the present than the present itself, was simply ignored by these Iraqis-in-exile. Party, it was a function of their own ignorance. They really thought that the "problem" of Iraq was Saddam Hussein and the last thirty years. They didn't know Iraq's history. Had they spent time reading, say, Elie Kedourie (oh, but he doesn't count because he was Jewish and as an adult lived in England? So his meticulous and dry studies count for nothing? Is that it?), they would have seen the history of suppression of enemies, of endemic violence, of palace coups. Remember "strongman" Nuri es-Said? They would have read about that early revolt of the Shi'a tribes, who were unwilling to be ruled, as the British wanted them to be ruled, by a Sunni king and a Sunni elite (see "The Letters of Gertrude Bell").

Islam was not understood. Iraq was wilfully misunderstood.

Otherwise, the American government, the Bush Administration, knew -- and knows -- exactly what it is doing.

History, history.

[Posted by Hugh at March 26, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 9:21 PM

isnt it easy for me and you to say we think people should stay in iraq?
i know people jion the army knowing they go to war at any time
BUT the reasons we invaded them and the reason we are there now have changed.
I want to tell anyone who answers me do not like islam one bit and i know we have to stand up against it
BUT im trying to type whats in my mind and i want to ask people on here if it was you there what would you feel.
you only get one life and do you honestly believe a politicican gives a shit about your life.
i have always wondered what tony blair or bush would do if his wife or daughter had a knife to their neck by al zarqawi.
i feel like im going to be attcked because on this post. i feel like i have to say it.

Posted by: markuk at September 10, 2007 9:24 PM

March 18, 2007

Fitzgerald: Folly to withdraw from Iraq?

A poster at Jihad Watch recently summed up the conventional wisdom: "The truth is until the Iranians are dealt with it would be folly to move out of Iraq."

That is exactly backwards. Tarbaby Iraq makes it far less likely the United States will intelligently deal with Iran. At this point, with the various Iranian agents going back and forth, it is clear that the American troops are hostages. Or rather, it is clear that American policy is being held hostage to Iran, which could retaliate against those troops that are in the midst of 27 million Muslims, and are in no condition to conduct a war against Iran from Iraqi soil. And this is something Iran knows very well.

Furthermore, even if the American government tries to use economic sanctions to get the Islamic Republic of Iran to finally stop its nuclear project, those sanctions will not work because Iran has greatly increased its trade -- by 30% in the last year -- with Iraq. It is all that American money that has been poured into Iraq that is used, in turn, to buy Iranian goods and is helping to keep Iran sufficiently prosperous so that it can afford to ride out -- or thinks it can afford to ride out -- sanctions.

In other words, the American presence in Iraq makes it far less likely that the Americans will be able to stop Iran's rush to manufacture nuclear weapons for two reasons:

1) A policy that must necessarily end in attacks -- not an "invasion" of Iran -- on Iran's nuclear facilities is now inhibited, and even held hostage, by the fact of about 150,000 American soldiers. Muslims who do not wish them well surround those soldiers. Many of those Muslims are either indifferent, or positively delighted, when those Americans are attacked and wounded or killed. If the Sunni Arabs have to date been the most dangerous, the Shi'a Arabs would, if Shi'a Iran is attacked, not think twice about attacking the Americans in their midst. And the American officers and men know this, and so does the Pentagon, and so must even that remarkably ignorant man, George Bush.

2) If plans for attacking Iran are inhibited by the American presence, as it is currently configured (if all those soldiers were in the desert, or in Kurdistan, and not spread out through the streets of Baghdad, that would be better, though still not nearly as good as removing them altogether), then that leaves economic sanctions. And as noted above, economic sanctions will not work if the Bush Administration keeps up this cockamamie idea of pouring still more American money into Iraq for what is politely called "reconstruction." It should be called "construction," for there wasn't much to begin with.

In other words, while the Iraq policy makes at this point no sense, and hasn't made any sense since the beginning of 2004, when the country had been scoured for weapons, and represents a squandering of men, money, and materiel on exactly the wrong goal, it is even worse than that.

Why? Because remaining in Iraq is not helping deal with Iran, but positively getting directly in the way.

This colossal error, this stupidity, cannot ever be forgiven. And those who refuse to attack it for the right reasons will not be forgiven either.

Meanwhile, I just ran across this from one of those "cut-and-run liberals" that loyalists of the crazed Iraq policy like to denounce because, as they repeat in their zombie-like way, "if we don't fight them over there we'll have to fight them over here." Why? Because, you see, "they'll follow us home." Exactly how, on which particular airline and flight, or on what tramp steamer, they will "follow us home" is unclear, and also unclear is why those who talk about the need to keep "them" from "following us home" never discuss "those" (of "them") who are already well-ensconced both in North America and in the countries of Western Europe. Nor do they discuss the conceivable connection between the deteriorating situation in Western Europe and the project of bringing peace, stability, prosperity, unity, and toys and good things to eat to the boys and girls on the other side of the Muslim mountain (the one that wouldn't come to Muhammad, so he went to it), in the place called the Land of the Two Rivers, or Iraq.

Here is what that cut-and-runner wrote:

"...the number [of voters] displaying acquiescence, let alone enthusiasm, for more of the same[in Iraq]is approaching zero. Giuliani, while ferocious in his determination to defeat terrorists, distances himself from the Bush administration's optimistic predictions.
I think there is a sense in the land that the Iraqi people are not doing their part. It's true that Mr. al-Maliki has several times insisted on sharing the security burden more rigorously. And it is true that the Iraqi people are suffering mortally. The people who get killed every day by those insurgents are here and there an American soldier, an average of three per day. Mostly, though, the people who are getting killed are Iraqis. An estimated 1.8 million Iraqis have left their homes and fled the country, exiled by the war. One cannot count that less than a major sacrifice.

Yet Americans feel that the Iraqis' sacrifice is disproportionately low, and the single reason for this is that it is also Iraqis who are causing the tribulation in which American soldiers are being wounded and killed. And there is no strategic plan, issuing from the White House, that apportions the sacrifice being made to goals being accomplished. There is no sense of the sun rising every day on freshly liberated soil."

He doesn't get to my point, the point about how sectarian and ethnic fissures are not to be worried about but welcomed, and the details of how, and why, and where that would help us that have been posted here, several hundred times, over the past three years.

But he does reveal, this crazed far left-wing cut-and-runner, who apparently is willing to let them "win" over there, and then "follow us home over here," that he thinks the Iraq War is now folly.

The name of this far-left commentator?

William F. Buckley, Jr. of the Upper East Side, and Gstaad.

[Posted by Hugh at March 18, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 9:26 PM

March 18, 2007

Fitzgerald: Getting out so as to concentrate on more important things

A poster at Jihad Watch recently took issue with some comments I made by saying, "No politician can stand before the people and say they want to pull out of Iraq so that the Muslims will slaughter each other. "

I don't expect any politician to say that, so baldly. I never did. I expect them to say something like "We have done quite enough for the Iraqis. We freed them from a monstrous regime. That regime was in power for 35 years, and that regime attacked two of its neighbors -- one Shi'a, Iran, and one Sunni, Kuwait. That regime ordered the mass slaughter of both Kurds and Shi'a Muslims. That regime was prepared to continue for another 35 years. Saddam Hussein and his sons and his collaborators were moral monsters, and they are now permanently removed from the scene. We brought an experiment in democratic elections, and should the people in Iraq wish to repeat the experiment, if they wish to entrust their destiny to the expressed will of the people -- that is, themselves -- we will be satisfied, but of course it is their decision.

“So far we have lost more than 3,200 men. We have had nearly 25,000 men wounded, many with wounds that will require us to take care of them for their lives. We have spent billions of dollars, and will spend billions more once the committed costs of taking care of those wounded for their lives, and of replacing the equipment that, from the stores of both the regular army and the National Guard, have been used up at such a terrific rate, are calculated. Those costs include trucks and Humvees and helicopters and planes that have been damaged in war and have also suffered because the desert conditions degrade such equipment at a terrifically accelerated rate. We have gone around the world and obtained nearly $100 billion in debt cancellation from the countries of the West, and we still await a promise by the Arab creditors that they, too, will cancel the debts incurred by Iraq under that monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein.

“We have done all we could, and much more. We have remained in Iraq now, for more than four years. We have, that is, been at war on behalf of the people of Iraq, in order to liberate them from a despot and so that they could get unused to the habit of submitting to despotism, and begin to experience some notion of democracy. This is longer than we were at war during the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War I, or World War II, or the war in Korea. It is now time -- some would say it is long past time -- for the people in Iraq to decide if they are indeed the people in Iraq, or if they are the "Iraqi people."

“We cannot stay to make that decision for them. We cannot stay to fight the battles of this side against that side, or that side against this side. That would be a terrible thing to expect us to do. We will not do it.

“I now declare that American forces will be withdrawing from Iraq, starting May 1, 2007. That withdrawal does not depend on what the Iraqi government tells us it wants. We will do what the American people tell us they want, rather, and it has told us, in any number of ways, that it wants us out of Iraq.

“Our country is a democracy. Democracy is not defined only by the election results. Between elections, those who have been elected have a duty to take the pulse of the nation. Only a madman could ignore the fact that 3/4 of this nation wants our troops out of Iraq and many of those people want those troops out today, or yesterday. The opinion polls show that this is not close, not nearly. Those against remaining in Iraq outnumber those who have not declared themselves against by a margin of nearly 3 to 1. That is simply too great to ignore. If it were to be ignored, this country would no longer seem to be a democracy, but would rather be akin to a runaway train, with a mad engineer who refuses to stop even as the passengers pull the cords and scream at the top of their lungs.”

Something like that will do nicely, thank you.

It has a virtue, the little speech I just composed above. It is unlike the utter nonsense we have heard about "bringing freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East, unlike the misguided phrase "war on terror," unlike the cheapness of those warnings about those who, opposed to the war, have been stupidly described as merely wanting to "cut and run." It is unlike those who now use this idiotic phrase, "if we don't fight them over there, they will follow us home." (Can anyone say that phrase and not be an idiot?) There are many people in this country who are fully aware of the menace of Islam, of the Jihad. They are fully aware of the weapons of Jihad that might be fought better, in a more sensible and effective way, if we were out of Iraq and allowed the fissures, sectarian and ethnic, to take their natural course within Iraq and among Iraq's Muslim neighbors, so as to allow us to concentrate on many other things: ending the Jizyah of foreign aid to all Muslim states, meeting with NATO allies to discuss the security threats that arise from a growing Muslim population in Western Europe, encouraging widespread publicity given to the St. Petersburg Declaration and beaming into Muslim lands the words and ideas of Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and all the others who so terrify the fake "moderate" Muslims -- because unlike them, the people who took part in the St. Petersburg deliberations are the real, and not the phony, thing.

And then there is the possibility of seizing southern Sudan and Darfur, until such time as a referendum on independence can he held. How hard would it be to destroy the Sudanese air force, and all of those helicopters that support the Janjaweed? How many American soldiers would it take to seize and hold that area, and thereby to send a signal to black African Christians that they will not be abandoned, and that the slow march of Islam down from Egypt through Sudan with Ethiopia as the big prize ("Christian" Ethiopia), a country that Egypt wishes to islamize and insure that it never gets to divert the headwaters of the Nile, will not be allowed to continue? How many men? A few thousand, greeted by grateful black Africans? And what would the government of Egypt, what would the Arab League, do then? Declare it has a divine right to kill black Africans, either because they are non-Muslim as in the southern Sudan, or because they are non-Arabs, as in Darfur?

And finally there is Iran. And Iran must be dealt with, and can only be dealt with, with the American troops out of Iraq, and with Iraq itself in a state of confusion. The Iranian government wants the Americans to stay. It wants them there, and it wants to be able to keep them tied down there and subject to low-level but constant assault. This fits Iranian policy. Some argue otherwise, and think the American presence somehow scares Iran. But this just shows how silly they are about the usefulness of those forces, their mobility, their relative freedom from attack.

Iran must be dealt with from afar. Offshore, way offshore, and from the sky. It can be done, and must.

[Posted by Hugh at March 18, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 9:30 PM

Ever wonder why the insurgency is much fiercer in Iraq than in mountainous Afghanistan, which has better terrain for guerilla warfare? It's because Iraq has the world's fourth largest oil reserves and the Muslims know it.
Losing Iraq means losing the oil. If a Muslim regime gets that oil, we will have Saddam Hussein redux as Iraq rearms.
There are two ways the Muslims get the oil: Either we help them secure their power over the country, as we are doing now, or we abandon the oil fields.
The left says, No blood for oil. Tell that to the jihadis.

Posted by: jewdog at September 10, 2007 9:36 PM

Foehammer - please let me know where I can send the first donation for your presidential campaign! :-)

ZionistYoungster - please check out the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, etc. There were lots of wars to get control of the Holy Land. I don't recall all the details. But with the Israelites in control of the whole land, there were two options: occupation and expulsion. Some of the nations were indeed described as living in Israel with a secondary status - the Gibeonites, if I remember correctly. I would say that today's Palestinian-Arabs (and arguably India's and Europe's Muslims) have richly earned the other fate, following in the footsteps of the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland, Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia.

Posted by: Surak at September 10, 2007 9:50 PM

March 5, 2007

Fitzgerald: Whose "Catastrophe" must be avoided?

J. B. Kelly noted in his celebrated Encounter essay ("Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies"), written in 1979, that the United States for decades had a "Twin-Pillar" policy in the Middle East, relying on the assured stability and friendship of those two "staunch allies" Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Three Stooges, Carter and Brzezinski and Gary Sick, aided by others of that uncomprehending ilk (behind every Robert Hunter was a Shirin Hunter -- all of them still going imperturbably strong by the way), allowed that First Pillar, Iran, to sink into the swamp of Khomeini and Islam. That is, they allowed it to revert to what the short-lived Pahlevi Dynasty, going back to the mid-1920s, had tried to change. In their own way, the Pahlevis tried to limit the power of Islam. Certainly they managed to mightily improve the treatment of non-Muslims and create, as was never created in any Arab state, a thinking elite that was open to the West and to taking an interest in, even deliberately cultivating, the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic aspects of Iranian history.

Thanks to the Three Stooges, each with his act, Carter the Pious, Carter the Good, Carter the Saintly, Brzezinski the Deep Geopolitical Thinker, the "Strategist" (deeply resenting the fame and money and glory of Henry Kissinger, who was in fact not a great deal better than Brzezinski in his comprehension of the Middle East and Islam), and of course the inimitable Gary Sick, who cost taxpayers millions in Congressional investigations of his wild charges. Google "Gary Sick" and "Daniel Pipes" for a bit more on the man who, predictably, has ended up as some kind of pooh-bah director of something-or-other at Columbia, which has become in all things middle-eastern the last refuge for scoundrels and dopes.

Iran did not have to be lost. The Shah could have been encouraged to hold on. Even the left in Iran, that had foolishly made its deal with the Islamic devil, might have been assuaged had, early on, the corruption at court been modified, had a Bakhtiar been propped up. But it didn't happen. Carter wrote to Khomeini, hailing him as a "fellow man of faith." It was all there, written in Farsi, what Khomeini's views were, and what he planned to do. Bernard Lewis had read it; he knew what was to come. But no one in the Carter Administration, least of all Brzezinski and Gary Sick, would have figured out that just perhaps, while Khomeini was still in his French exile, but movie theatres with hundreds inside were already being burned to the ground by Muslim militants in Iran, they should have those texts translated so as to find out what Khomeini was all about. (Of course Sick can't read Farsi -- he's only an "Iranian expert," not a "Farsi-reading Iranian expert.") As for the 1942 statement by Khomeini, the one he adhered to all his life, the one quoted repeatedly at this website, that insists that the essence of Islam is making war and killing the Infidels -- that remark never came up. The contents of those cassettes that Khomeini made in Neauphle-le-chateau, after he was kicked out of Iraq by Saddam Hussein (and the government of France so trustingly took him in), were never translated and never listened to -- not one, I am sure -- by Carter, by Brzezinski, by Sick. They were flying blind, making things up, the way they and so many others in successive administrations do whenever the subject of Islam or Muslim peoples and polities comes up.

So the First Pillar of the "Two-Pillar" Strategy fell. That left the Second Pillar -- Saudi Arabia. It was, and for some remains, our "staunch ally." It is nothing of the sort. It is nothing of the sort because the Al-Saud, and those over whom they lord it, are all suffused with Islam. And their Islam is un-modified or softened by anything else, such as a non-Arab ethnic identity, that might tug them slightly away from Islam. They see themselves as the purest Arabs (they are that) and the purest Muslims (they are that). As such, the Infidels, however much they may need to be used or manipulated for Saudi ends, are and can only be the enemy. It is our "staunch ally" that has spent, over the past several decades, nearly a hundred billion dollars on world-wide campaigns to spread Islam, to build and maintain mosques and madrasas all over the Western world, to finance campaigns of Da'wa, and to spread the worst kind of anti-Infidel propaganda -- the kind that Freedom House managed to pick up in Saudi-financed mosques in this country and report on.

That report should be required reading for everyone even remotely connected to policy-making and to the security services in this country, and indeed all over the Western world. But Saudi money has also gone to financing certain "academic" centers and individual professors, and to buying goodwill through the carefully-targeted largesse (when Bill Clinton became President, it was the turn of the University of Arkansas to receive Saudi money) to Presidents and ex-Presidents, to Presidential libraries, to the Baker Center at Rice, to their favorite charities which so often are their private fiefdoms or domains. This lessens the general interest in this report. Yet the Saudi textbooks that contain the most incredible -- and yet entirely predictable -- rantings against Infidels were not new, but had always been there. Saudi Arabia has not changed; it always was this way, but only recently have some begun to understand it differently. Yet still there are those who cling to the idea that Saudi Arabia is our friend, because the "good" side -- the corrupt and worldly Prince Bandar and his supposed allies -- will win.

But Prince Bandar, for all of his blague, is not and cannot be a friend of the West, or insure that Saudi Arabia will stop being the chief funder of the Jihad, the Jihad whose chief instruments are the "money weapon" and Da'wa and demographic conquest. (Paying for mosques and madrasas makes the conduct of Muslim life easier, makes it easier to settle deep within the Lands of the Infidels, and to retain a belief-system that is inimical to the well-being of those Infidels). And finally, the buying-up of influence, especially in Washington, by the Saudis, has been the main obstacle to an energy policy that recognizes the need to diminish the use of fossil fuels.

Now the Two Pillars seem to be together again -- but not in a way that bodes well for the United States. One of the Pillars is the Iran of Ahmadinejad, with his support for Hizballah and his clear determination to efface the Infidel state of Israel from the map. If some Arabs -- "Palestinians" -- must die, so what? It doesn’t matter to Iran or to other Muslims, for what counts is the impossibility of tolerating control of the land, no matter how tiny that sliver of land may be, by non-Muslims.

And the Second Pillar is Saudi Arabia, which may seem, but only to those who want to be fooled, temporarily a force for good, for “moderation.” But what motivates the daggers-and-dishdashi rulers of Saudi Arabia? Not any desire to improve the wellbeing of the United States, or to prevent its conquest, or that of Western Europe, by Islam. Certainly not the wellbeing of any Infidels. That would not make sense. That would be contrary to Islam. They are motivated, in the main, by two desires: to promote Islam, its power and glory, and of course, above all other things, to secure and promote their own well-being, the princes and princelings and princelettes of the Al-Saud. If they can come to some understanding with the Shi’a fanatics now running the Islamic Republic of Iran, that will allow the Sunni fanatics now running Saudi Arabia to avoid having to deal with Shi’a unrest in the oil regions of Al-Hasa, or just outside the confines of Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain and other sheikdoms with smaller Shi’a populations (such as Kuwait), or for that matter with Shi’a tribes in Yemen, a place that has always worried the Al-Saud. And they are worried with reason, given its larger population, and the many Yemenis who manage to come across the border for work, but who have historically been a source of Saudi disquiet.

One doubts if the Carter Administration, as it flailed about as the Shah fell and then during the hostage crisis, ever had compiled a file on Khomeini and his beliefs, or the beliefs of the True Believers in Shi’a Islam. One doubts that the Bush Administration today -- much less those that preceded it -- has ever thought to fully inform the members of that Administration, or rather the thousand most powerful people in the Executive and Congressional branches, by compiling a file marked "Islam: Main Aspects of the Belief-System” and distributing that file. And such a file would have to get beyond, far beyond, the simple-minded business of Islam as a “tolerant” faith, or Islam as a matter of Ramadan and Iftar dinners, but get to the heart of the matter: how, in Islam, are Infidels viewed? How, in the history of Islamic conquest, have Infidels -- all kinds of Infidels, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others -- been treated? No more room for potted apologetics whether from the likes of John Esposito (who during the Clinton Administration was actually consulted by them, apparently -- a man who, were things seen correctly, would be disgraced for his deliberate, constant, well-reimbursed dissembling about the nature of Islam). No more room for the others who make up the Fifth Column of MESA Nostra, and who have captured the minds of the impressionable and innocent young.

No, one doubts that there is such a file that circulates in the government today, for fear that it might get out, for fear that it would fall into the hands of those who would report it. Then the government would feel it would have to distance itself, would have to apologize to the world's Muslims for correctly describing the nature of Islam -- as described by every single Western scholar of Islam, and writer on Islam, for centuries. If, for example, the brilliant analysis of Islam written by one of the greatest American statesmen, John Quincy Adams, were to be circulated today by the American government, or put into the Congressional record by a Congressman, it would promptly be denounced by editorialists everywhere. How dare such views be given expression, or even circulated within the government?

But until some home truths about Islam -- the same home truths that this weekend the most important domestic experts on Islam, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other apostates, are expressing -- are generally recognized, sensible policies which both recognize and exploit the natural fissures within Islam will not be created.

As Ahmadinejad meets the Saudis, Shi’a and the Sunni make peace, trying to head off hostilities. What is your reaction to that meeting? Is it one of pleasure that “instability” in the Middle East may be avoided? Are you glad to see such signs, not so much of reconciliation, but of “peace-making” between Sunni and Shi’a? If you are commonsensical, of course you are not glad. You hope that such efforts fail. You hope that Ahmadinejad and Abdullah do not really make peace.

But then ask yourself this: who, in this country, apparently wants them to succeed? Who in this country is willing to spend the lives of American officers and men, spend another few hundred billion (at least), ship over still more war materiel – so much that the National Guard has very little left for use here at home, as the “National” Guard – in order to do exactly what Abdullah and Ahmadinejad are attempting to do, that is to prevent “sectarian violence”?

Yes, the United States is apparently back with its old “Twin-Pillar Policy” that J. B. Kelly described in 1979, the policy of pretending that America’ s interests could be furthered by relying on Saudi Arabia and Iran as those Twin Pillars. And now we see an Administration that obstinately cannot admit how mistaken it was in its failure to properly label the campaign that Infidels are, or should be engaged in. Instead they call it, idiotically, a “war on terror” which, among other things, does nothing to rally people in Western Europe against the growing menace of islamization in their own lands, as long as the instruments of that islamization do not include “terror” – and why should they, when things are going so swimmingly without terror as one of those instruments?

So if you are happy with Ahmadinejad and Abdullah attempting to head off sectarian strife, then you should be mightily pleased with the Bush Administration’s effort to do the same in Iraq.

On the other hand, if you share my view that sectarian and ethnic fissures within the Camp of Islam, offered on a platter in Iraq, offer Infidels the very best hope for dividing and demoralizing the Camp of Islam, then you will realize, with a pang, that the Bush Administration’s folly in remaining in Tarbaby Iraq is beyond measure, scarcely beyond comprehension, and it is a folly shared not only by loyalists of the Administration, but by all those who brightly speak or write so self-assuredly of “catastrophe” that would follow an American pullout, without ever asking the most obvious next question: “catastrophe for whom?” Nor do they begin to rethink assumptions about how best to weaken the Camp of Islam, and to arouse Infidels out of their somnolence. There is nothing like a Demonstration Project of Muslim violence, Muslim aggression, especially if it is if the kind where Infidels are nowhere in sight, for their presence so often blocks the view.

And it is a folly that has not been properly pointed out by those opposed to Bush and his Iraq nonsense, because they do not themselves see things accurately. They and attack him for the wrong reasons, not for the right and unanswerable reasons that have been presented at this website for three long and infuriating years.

So do you support the attempt to make Iraq a place where the “catastrophe” of sectarian violence can be headed off, and support the use of American troops, and the sacrifice of American lives, to do that? Do you? Then go ahead, support President Bush, and President Ahmedinejad, and King Abdullah, for all three of them agree with you. “Catastrophe” must be avoided.

[Posted by Hugh at March 5, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:11 PM

March 5, 2007

Fitzgerald: Watering the stony soil

When Infidel armies, and legions of Infidel aid workers full of grand ideas enter a place like Afghanistan, and take no notice of the essence of the place -- Islam, and minds on Islam -- or having at long last taken notice still pretend that it doesn't matter, that things can change without changing or weakening the power of Islam and its hold over the minds of men, they are akin to landscape gardeners going off to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. There they pour water, and more water, into the sand, and perhaps here and there attempt to lay down some very expensive peat moss from Ireland, or lush lawns cut out of the bluegrass country of Kentucky, as if somehow this could cause the Empty Quarter, even the tiniest part of it, to permanently bloom. The expense, the effort, are horrific, and horrific too the results -- in the end, nothing at all but waste.

There is no recognition that it is Islam that explains the blowing up of girls' schools, and Islam that explains why, whenever something goes wrong, there is an immediate blaming of the Americans and other Infidels. Hysterical crowds shout against them on the highway (a highway that may owe its very existence to those same Americans), while meretricious and grasping local leaders see the Americans only as a source of money and other handouts, and of nothing else -- not as a source of ideas about human liberty, certainly, but just that money.

So we can keep watering the stony soil, or the sands, of Dar al-Islam. And we can tell ourselves that "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." But why is it, then, that Al Qaeda still exists and thrives in Pakistan, and has in opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world received the support of 50% of the population? And one can assume that if Muslims are going to lie in their responses to such questions, they will lie in only one direction, hiding their support for, or approval of, Bin Laden, in order to curry Western favor or lull Western infidels.

The Western world, the American taxpayers, are not endlessly rich. There are nuclear reactors to be built, wind and solar energy and mass transit systems to be subsidized, bridges and roads to be repaired, a health-care system that needs infusions of money, because the expense for insurance has become absurdly high. Public schools are in disarray, and higher education is crazily expensive (and often not worth it). And so much else is wrong, that in some cases money can help to set it, if not exactly aright, than at least less wrong. But that money is now being poured into those mental deserts made permanently bleak by Islam. No amount of Western watering will change Afghanistan -– not more cash, not more roads, not more time spent trying to win hearts and minds that, as long as they remain true to Islam, cannot conceivably be won by any Infidels no matter how much good they do.

One can do better for the people. How? By allowing the conditions to be created within Afghanistan not of Infidel-delivered and Infidel-paid-for artificial development, but by leaving Afghanistan alone and letting those within it fight it out, in a Hobbesian state, until they finally begin to realize that that Hobbesian state of aggression and violence is linked to, comes out of, Islam itself, with its worship of power, and its insistence on the Victor and the Vanquished. Let them. Let Muslims stop being protected from the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Islam itself. Let them see it.

If it is necessary to bomb a terrorist training camp now and again, do so. But there are no doubt as many terrorist training camps now in Pakistan, which cannot be taken over (a country with 150 million people), than in Afghanistan. And for that matter, the "training" one needs for such things as the bombing of the subways in London and Madrid, or the takeover of the Moscow theatre or the school in Beslan, or even the thousands of terrorist acts committed by assorted Arabs against Israel over the past fifty years, did not require any special camps in Afghanistan. Plots can be hatched in London or Paris or Rome. It is idiotic to take a particular case of a general phenomenon -- the Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan -- and argue from that the entire remote and dangerous and wild country of Afghanistan, with its warring tribes and peoples and warlords and factions, a place never held by anyone, not the British in the 19th century and not the Russians in the 20th, will somehow succumb to the American Infidels. It won't, and we don't even need to try. We need only keep this or that group that intends to do mischief outside permanently at bay -- by the kind of intermittent bombing, say, that the Israelis are now conducting in Gaza.

The Western world has been expending too much money, and too many soldiers, on the wrong things. Its efforts have not been cost-effective. Partly this is a result of the inability of generals to understand that the word "war" does not always imply tanks and planes and guns, nor does it always imply that we are to "go to war" by doing the fighting ourselves. Where is the attempt to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam and Jihad? Where is the Information War? Where is the Propaganda War? Where is the war to make sure that "they don't attack us over here" by doing the most obvious thing: working on measures to halt Muslim migration, given that a certain very large proportion of any given Muslim population has shown itself willing to support and justify terrorism, and many seem hellbent on promoting the spread of Islam through Da'wa and demographic conquest and propaganda which aims to stifle all criticism (sometimes by enrolling the government in passing laws to prevent such criticism, lest it "offend Muslims" and make "our task to reach out to them" more difficult)?

The thing that puzzles is not that Muslims should make every effort to spread Islam, and to attack any Infidel institutions, from the laic rules of the laic state of France, and any individual Infidels who may know too much about Islam and are too effective in presenting their views, in order to tear down all obstacles to the spread of Islam -- in order to achieve, as they are duty-bound to work to achieve, a situation in the former Lands of the Infidels where "Islam dominates and is not to be dominated."

No, what puzzles is why Infidels think that they, in turn, are not permitted to take the most modest of measures -- including those measures to halt Muslim migration and doing nothing to facilitate the practice, and spread, of Islam in Infidel lands -- to defend themselves, their legal and political institutions, their individual rights, their very idea of the individual. Yet all these are so lacking in Islam. Why cannot Infidels attempt to preserve free and skeptical inquiry instead of the habit of mental submission that Islam encourages or even inculcates?

Why don't Infidels defend themselves? Why do they think the only thing they can do is to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into making Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Egypt, or Pakistan, or the "Palestinian"-occupied territories, into places far better than they would be if the local Muslims had to rely either on themselves alone, or on aid from fabulously rich, but extraordinarily selfish, fellow Muslims?

Why?

[Posted by Hugh at March 5, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:13 PM

February 24, 2007

Fitzgerald: What was done, what is being done, what should be done [originally posted on February
20, 2004]

It was right, proper, necessary to destroy Iraq's military power, and its regime. The Ba'athist regime owed its origin to the desperate attempt of Syrian Christians to concoct an ideology that would be an alternative to naked Islam (Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba'athism, converted to Islam on his deathbed; his life was one of pathetic dhimmitude, while his Communazi Ba'athism did little, really, to defang Islam). Despite being ostensibly "secular," whenever necessary the Ba’athist regime made appeal to Islam: witness Saddam Hussein's use of the Battle of Qadassiyah, the Qur’anic inscription put on the flag, the Qur'an written using his own blood, etc. Like that other "secularist," Nasser, Saddam Hussein was a Muslim through and through in his essential attitudes -- simply one who wanted to start with a unified Arabdom rather than aim for a worldwide Caliphate a la Bin Laden.

But the current campaign is a diversion of men, materiel, and attention. We should be winning back Europe by promoting a long-overdue alarm about the demographic invasion. We should expose the international alliance of fellow-travellers of Islam, from certain members of the BBC (such as John Simpson) and Agence France Press (which is, in its Middle East coverage, virtually a handmaiden of the PA) to some in the European media and in the EU hierarchy, including Javier Solana, Chris Patten, and others. Their antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are mutually reinforcing. Those who display either or both are obviously, in their analyses and attitudes, the ones least inclined to see Islamic tenets as a threat to Western (and other) civilizations, and most inclined to ascribe our problems to that pesky affair in western Palestine -- like the antisemites who were those most inclined, of course, in the 1930s to pooh-pooh the Nazi threat.

But the winning of "hearts and minds" in Iraq cannot be accomplished. It is a chimera, a Sisyphean and hopeless task, and it is cruel to cause American soldiers to risk their lives to do something which is impossible. There is almost no gratitude directed at the Americans by more than a small fraction of the Iraqi population -- for rescuing them from a monstrous regime. There are many reported cases -- and returning soldiers have many more to tell -- of mobs celebrating the killing of Americans. They will pocket the rebuilt infrastructure, the electricity grids, the dams, the hospitals, the schools, the soccer balls handed out by touchingly trusting and hopeful Americans. But what will be taught in those schools? What will that electricity light up? How will that hydroelectric energy be used -- if not to recreate an even more Muslim civilization, at least as hostile, and perhaps more potent in its hostility, toward Infidels, as anything Iraq has seen before?

It is not "democracy" that matters, but human rights -- the rights enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights, which, as Reza Afshari, Ibn Warraq, and others have shown, are in every single particular contradicted by Islam and the Shari'a. Will the new Iraq allow real free exercise of religion? Will those born into Islam be allowed to convert out, or openly show their lack of belief? Will women be given equality? In Islam, the greatest reforms that Infidels should welcome -- that is, the reforms which limit precisely the power of Islam -- have not emerged from "democracy" (a democratic but Muslim state is only more, not less dangerous, to Infidels), but from enlightened despots. These include the vain, stupid, but relatively decent Shah Reza Pahlavi, the farsighted Habib Bourguiba and the Destour Party in Tunisia, King Mohammed V of Morocco, King Hussein of Jordan (the "oily little king," as Alan Clark once dubbed him, was a great favorite all over the West, from that eternal innocent, Anthony Lewis, to Prince Charles, that great admirer of what he takes to be Islam), and by far the most important, Kemal Pasha Ataturk.

The "democracy" industry -- all those bright-eyed people in Washington with Centers for This and That Pertaining to Democracy -- has failed to adequately study, understand, and thoroughly assimilate the doctrines of Islam, or to study Islamic history. They understand there is something deeply wrong, but they cling to the notion that it is not the basic texts of Islam itself, but some perversion of those texts. They have it wrong.

No, the troops should not all come home, but a much smaller force, in the Syrian desert, well away from roadside bombs, should replace the current crazy "hearts and minds" effort. The invasion was completely justified; that was War #1. The remaining around to search for, collect, and destroy major weaponry (not just WMD), to find Saddam Hussein, to capture or kill most of the top Ba'athists, was also fully justified. That was War #2. But the current attempt to do the impossible, to make those three former Ottoman vilayets into a single nation-state is hopeless. Since 1920, the Arab treatment of the Kurds, and the Sunni treatment of the Shi'a, has only made things much worse. The Administration should declare that it has done all it can: removed Saddam Hussein, sought for and destroyed WMD programs, sought and destroyed all major weaponry, effectively demolished the Ba'athist structure, and left a small -- 50,000 combat troops -- force in the desert to keep the essential peace.

It is time to get serious about destroying the real WMD threat in Iran, which incidentally will put a nail in the mullahocracy. If the U.S. fails to do so, and the Iranian regime obtains such weaponry, its prestige among the simple Iranians will be sky high and the reformers will be doomed -- so they too have a vested interest in seeing us destroy the Iranian WMD program.

Now notice: I posted the original draft of this article on February 20, 2004, and have done nothing in this version except make some revisions for clarity. In three years, what has changed?

[Posted by Hugh at February 24, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:16 PM

February 24, 2007

Fitzgerald: Virgil Goode and the 17 Republicans

WASHINGTON — A Muslim group said Monday it had invited Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., to expand on biting remarks he made last week during debate on a House resolution disapproving of President Bush's decision to send more than 21,000 U.S. troops into Iraq.

The Muslim American Public Affairs Council has "extended this invitation to Congressman Goode to give him a venue to explain his recent comments about Muslims and Islam," MAPAC Executive Director Marc Conaghan said in a statement. MAPAC also asked Goode to share a dialogue with Jamal Badawi, an Islamic and comparative religion scholar.

Last week, Goode said the nonbinding resolution would provide "comfort and encourage the radical Muslims who want to destroy our country." He also said Islamic jihadists want U.S. currency to say "In Muhammad We Trust," with an Islamic flag flying over the White House and U.S. Capitol. -- from this article

Congressman Virgil Goode should start to figure out that in his entirely justified suspicion of Islam he does not go far enough, and does not make sense of all of the information available.

If he were to do so, he would not be supporting the "surge" in Iraq with its perfectly predictable outcome. He would be furiously opposing -- for all the right reasons -- the squandering of men, money, and materiel in Iraq to obtain a goal that is the exact opposite of the goal that should be sought: not "freedom" for "ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East," and certainly not a "war on terrorism" that "we are fighting over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

Note that among those 17 Republicans who voted correctly, that is, against the surge, there were a number from the districts that include large military installations. These included Congressman Coble, whose district includes Fayetteville, North Carolina -- that is, Fort Bragg. That should have been made much of, but who would have made much of it? The Bush Administration wouldn't have. Those Democrats who opposed the resolution against that "surge" would not have done so either, for their reasons are completely different from those of many of the 17 dissenting but correct Republicans.

Those 17 Republican Congressmen included those most attuned to how the soldiers and Marines think, and feel. And even if not all of them know a thing about Islam, they know as a practical matter that the continued effort in Iraq, and the goals of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, of McCain and Lieberman and the two Kagans and those smug young lochinvars of the lecture circuit, including the comical William Kristol (issuing pronunciamentos about "victory" in Iraq at My Weekly Standard), are impossible of achievement. They know this because they talk to those officers and men who return, and then go back, and then return, all because the Administration is too obstinate and too confused to figure things out.

There is still time for them to figure out, and to spread among the other Republicans, the understanding not only that the "victory" Bush seeks in Iraq is impossible to achieve, but that the only "victory" that makes sense is a different one, and it was achieved well within the first year of the American invasion: the removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of all the pillars (his sons, his face-cards, his Sunni-run army) of that regime. That toppling made inevitable -- not possible, not probable, but inevitable -- the transfer of power from a Sunni despotism to the Shi'a of Iraq. And this, in turn, made possible, though not quite as inevitable, spillover effects in other Muslim countries, wherever Sunnis and Shi'a would identify with their co-religionists fighting or being fought in Iraq, and would lead to sectarian divisions widening all over Dar al-Islam. And if the Kurds are supported in making their move, then the spectacle of non-Arab Muslims throwing off the Arab yoke could inspire other non-Arabs, beginning but not ending with the Berbers in North Africa.

This too would contribute to the only goal that ever made sense, and certainly the only goal that justifies the crazed expenditure of $750 billion. That is now the average estimate for what the war in Iraq will have cost the American taxpayers even if the Americans announce their total withdrawal within the next few months, as of course they should, and should have done so, at the latest, by February 2004.

[Posted by Hugh at February 24, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:18 PM

Foehammer "I love Hugh, but we have to attack Iran before we get out of Iraq."
OK you go first.
I really want you to think if it involved your life would you just say what you said. we need to invade iran.
I really cant stand islam and i know we have to stand up to it. but tell me the truth becuase ive been asking myself this question. if you know you had to go to iran or wherever to fight would you say invade them now?
i know i wouldnt and i really cant stand islam

Posted by: markuk at September 10, 2007 10:19 PM

February 1, 2007

Fitzgerald: Not an overreaction but a misguided reaction

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down. – David Bell in this article
Apparently the author, though having nothing piercingly original to offer, nonetheless felt he had to have his say on the Pressing Matter of the Day, and did so. He contented himself with the banal observation that what we see before us -- the entire Baby-Huey operation of "boots on the ground" in Iraq, determined to prevent those very fissures, sectarian and ethnic, that we should welcome -- is an "overreaction."

He did not wait to find the right word: it is not an "overreaction" but a misguided reaction. It is a reaction of the kind that will come if we persist, like Bush (or like David Bell), in thinking that this is a "war on terrorism." In that case there is no need even to begin to think of all the other instruments of Jihad, the more effective and dangerous instruments, such as the money weapon, Da'wa, and demography. For if Jihad proceeds with instruments other than terror, and Infidels are only engaged in a "war on terror," then we should be content with any analysis that focuses on that. And so the disagreement between the Bush Administration and David Bell is merely over the size of that "terror" threat, and the proper size of our military and security steps to meet that "threat."

Nothing here about the islamization of Europe. Nothing here about the systematic long-term attacks on Christians in Indonesia (thousands of churches destroyed in 2003 alone), on Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, and deep into India. Nothing here about attacks on Christians over the past few decades in Nigeria (the Jihad that Col. Ojukwu, head of Biafra, was fighting against), nor in southern Sudan, nor within a great number of sub-Saharan countries. Nothing about the worldwide activities of the World Muslim Congress or the financing of mosques and madrasas, for which the Saudis have spent $100 billion in the last two decades. (The Soviet Union, in all the years of its existence, never spent abroad on pro-Soviet propaganda and agents more than $10 billion.) Nothing about the takeover of academic departments, or at least the use of Arab money to endow Centers (Durham, Exeter, Georgetown), or expensively-upholstered chairs (University of California, Harvard Law School, and a great many other places), where the King Abdul Aziz Professor of this, and the Guardian of the Two Holy Places Professor of that, can make sure that neither they nor the successors they choose ever enlighten the students about Islam. Thus, for example, does Frank Vogel help pick, with a little help from Roy Mottahedeh and John Esposito, Noah "After Jihad" Feldman to continue to misinform Harvard Law students about Islam, providing a guide to nothing and to nowhere, for the next 35 years. But how would the faculty members, innocent of Islam and of what is going on in the field, be aware of that until long after Feldman arrives, trailing clouds of glory?

Perhaps David Bell is merely disturbed at the colossal waste: the squandering in Iraq of men's lives, of vast sums of money ($700 billion in past and committed future costs), and of war materiel. Then there is the damage to American morale, military as well as civilian -- all to pursue a will-o'-the-wisp of "freedom" and "democracy" in a united, stable, prosperous Iraq that will be a Light Unto the (Sunni Arab) Muslim Nations. That, readers of this site understand, is both impossible and exactly the wrong goal to pursue.

He might merely have written: a response that is purely military, based on a misunderstanding of the nature and scope of the menace, is the wrong response and the wrong type of response, insufficiently various, effective, ruthless, and cunning. For that menace, David Bell might have referred readers to others: See, for example, Bat Ye'or, Oriana Fallaci, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Anne-Marie Delcambre, Alain Finkielkraut, Alain Besancon, Ali Sina, Bassam Tibi, Wafa Sultan, and a thousand others -- not one of whom, I suspect, David Bell has yet read, digested, thoroughly assimilated.

[Posted by Hugh at February 1, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:21 PM

January 25, 2007

Fitzgerald: Final Exam (Take-Home): History 101: The War In Iraq

This is an Open Book Examination. You may use any materials you can find, including other newspaper reports, and of course you are encouraged to use the work of genuine scholars on Islam, Iraq, the history of Sunni-Shi’a relations and of Arab Muslim relations with Kurds and other non-Arab peoples.

You may even consult with others. But the thinking, in the end, must be yours, and so must the expression, in writing, of your thoughts and analysis.

You have one week to complete this task. Examination papers are due by 5 p.m. on January 31, 2007.

_____________________________________________________________

There are two passages below. One consists of an excerpt from an interview with Vice-President Cheney, conducted and broadcast on CNN on January 24, 2007 and reported in The Bandar Beacon (Washington Post) the next day. The other consists of an excerpt from a report from Iraq in The New Duranty Times [New York Times], written the same day, January 24, 2007, and appearing in that paper on January 25, 2007.

You are asked to comment on both of these passages, and on their usefulness to an American audience in illuminating the reality of Iraq today. Discuss the ratio of fact to mere assertion contained in each. Evaluate their overall usefulness, for the public, in judging what might make sense for American national interests.

Wherever possible, be careful to analyze examples of rhetoric that you feel contribute to, or take away from, the understanding of or expression of reality in each article.

Please be careful to support all your assertions with facts. You are encouraged to apply whatever knowledge you possess of the belief-system of Islam as you understand it, and of the attitudes and atmospherics to which the teachings of Islam may naturally give rise.

You are further encouraged to apply in your answer as detailed a knowledge as you possibly can of the history of Iraq and of its sectarian and ethnic fissures, and of how those fissures arise from the nature and history of Islam. You are asked to speculate on how the further development of such fissures might contribute to, or take away from, the security of the people of the United States and of other countries in what may be called, using the term used in Islam, the Dar al-Harb, or House of War.

The more deeply your answer is based on a knowledge both of Islam’s teachings and its history, and of the history of modern Iraq itself and the relations among the varied peoples who live within the state of Iraq, the better. The more you can bring to bear such knowledge, the more likely it is that you will be able to make an intelligent assessment of the effect, both inside and outside Iraq, of the presence or withdrawal of American troops.

Be sure to write from the viewpoint of one determined to further American national interests, broadly conceived, and also to further the interests of those who, while they may differ on all sorts of matters, share the basic assumptions and hierarchy of values of what may be called the West, or Western civilization, or perhaps, even more broadly and more accurately, the non-Islamic world or Camp of the Infidels.

Here are the two passages for comment:

I. When Blitzer asked whether the administration's credibility had been hurt by "the blunders and the failures" in Iraq, Cheney interjected: "Wolf, Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash."

In fact, Cheney said, the operation in Iraq has achieved its original mission. "What we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do," he said. "The world is much safer today because of it. There have been three national elections in Iraq. There's a democracy established there, a constitution, a new democratically elected government. Saddam has been brought to justice and executed. His sons are dead. His government is gone."

"If he were still there today," Cheney added, "we'd have a terrible situation."

"But there is," Blitzer said.

"No, there is not," Cheney retorted. "There is not. There's problems -- ongoing problems -- but we have in fact accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been here for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off." He added: "Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes."

Cheney said Blitzer was advocating retreat. "What you're recommending, or at least what you seem to believe the right course is, is to bail out," the vice president said.

______________________________________________________

II. BAGHDAD, Jan. 24 — In the battle for Baghdad, Haifa Street has changed hands so often that it has taken on the feel of a no man’s land, the deadly space between opposing trenches. On Wednesday, as American and Iraqi troops poured in, the street showed why it is such a sensitive gauge of an urban conflict marked by front lines that melt into confusion, enemies with no clear identity and allies who disappear or do not show up at all.

In a miniature version of the troop increase that the United States hopes will secure the city, American soldiers and armored vehicles raced onto Haifa Street before dawn to dislodge Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias who have been battling for a stretch of ragged slums and mostly abandoned high rises. But as the sun rose, many of the Iraqi Army units who were supposed to do the actual searches of the buildings did not arrive on time, forcing the Americans to start the job on their own.

When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one American soldier, with a shot to the head.

Whether the gunfire was coming from Sunni or Shiite insurgents or militia fighters or some of the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the Gotham-like cityscape, no one could say.

“Who the hell is shooting at us?” shouted Sgt. First Class Marc Biletski, whose platoon was jammed into a small room off an alley that was being swept by a sniper’s bullets. “Who’s shooting at us? Do we know who they are?”

Just before the platoon tossed smoke bombs and sprinted through the alley to a more secure position, Sergeant Biletski had a moment to reflect on this spot, which the United States has now fought to regain from a mysterious enemy at least three times in the past two years.

“This place is a failure,” Sergeant Biletski said. “Every time we come here, we have to come back.”

He paused, then said, “Well, maybe not a total failure,” since American troops have smashed opposition on Haifa Street each time they have come in.

With that, Sergeant Biletski ran through the billowing yellow smoke and took up a new position.

The Haifa Street operation, involving Bradley Fighting Vehicles as well as the highly mobile Stryker vehicles, is likely to cause plenty of reflection by the commanders in charge of the Baghdad buildup of more than 20,000 troops. Just how those extra troops will be used is not yet known, but it is likely to mirror at least broadly the Haifa Street strategy of working with Iraqi forces to take on unruly groups from both sides of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide.

The commander of the operation, Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, said his forces were not interested in whether opposition came from bullets fired by Sunnis or by Shiites. He conceded that the cost of letting the Iraqi forces learn on the job was to add to the risk involved in the operation.

“This was an Iraqi-led effort and with that come challenges and risks,” Colonel Smiley said. “It can be organized chaos.”

The American units in the operation began moving up Haifa Street from the south by 2 a.m. on Wednesday. A platoon of B Company in the Stryker Brigade secured the roof of a high rise, where an Eminem poster was stuck on the wall of what appeared to be an Iraqi teenager’s room on the top floor. But in a pattern that would be repeated again and again in a series of buildings, there was no one in the apartment.

Many of the Iraqi units that showed up late never seemed to take the task seriously, searching haphazardly, breaking dishes and rifling through personal CD collections in the apartments. Eventually the Americans realized that the Iraqis were searching no more than half of the apartments; at one point the Iraqis completely disappeared, leaving the American unit working with them flabbergasted.

“Where did they go?” yelled Sgt. Jeri A. Gillett. Another soldier suggested, “I say we just let them go and we do this ourselves.”

Then the gunfire began. It would come from high rises across the street, from behind trash piles and sandbags in alleys and from so many other directions that the soldiers began to worry that the Iraqi soldiers were firing at them. Mortars started dropping from across the Tigris River, to the east, in the direction of a Shiite slum.

The only thing that was clear was that no one knew who the enemy was. “The thing is, we wear uniforms — they don’t,” said Specialist Terry Wilson.

At one point the Americans were forced to jog alongside the Strykers on Haifa Street, sheltering themselves as best they could from the gunfire. The Americans finally found the Iraqis and ended up accompanying them into an extremely dangerous and exposed warren of low-slung hovels behind the high rises as gunfire rained down.

American officers tried to persuade the Iraqi soldiers to leave the slum area for better cover, but the Iraqis refused to risk crossing a lane that was being raked by machine-gun fire. “It’s their show,” said Lt. David Stroud, adding that the Americans have orders to defer to the Iraqis in cases like this.

In this surreal setting, about 20 American soldiers were forced at one point to pull themselves one by one up a canted tin roof by a dangling rubber hose and then shimmy along a ledge to another hut. The soldiers were stunned when a small child suddenly walked out of a darkened doorway and an old man started wheezing and crying somewhere inside.

Ultimately the group made it back to the high rises and escaped the sniper in the alley by throwing out the smoke bombs and sprinting to safety. Even though two Iraqis were struck by gunfire, many of the rest could not stop shouting and guffawing with amusement as they ran through the smoke.

One Iraqi soldier in the alley pointed his rifle at an American reporter and pulled the trigger. There was only a click: the weapon had no ammunition. The soldier laughed at his joke.

[Posted by Hugh at January 25, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:25 PM

Hugh,

We've all had to wade through your laborious epistles, but have you been drinking tonight? You seem more garrulous than usual. Is it really necessary to bring up all these previous posts of yours? I much prefer Mr. Spencer's succinct style.

Respectfully,

Drewbenstein

Posted by: Drewbenstein at September 10, 2007 10:26 PM

January 23, 2007

Fitzgerald: Rice and worse than Rice

The Secretary of State recently stated that the Middle East will have to “overcome” the tendency to see things in Sunni-Shi’a terms. There are two things wrong with the statement of Condoleeza Rice.

The first is the o'erweening, history-ignoring idea that Sunni-Shi'a rivalries and hostilities can "be overcome." The Sunni-Shi'a split long ago transcended the initial quarrel over succession. Now there are differences in the organization of the Shi'a and Sunni variants of Islam: in organization (the power of the Shi'a ayatollahs and other Shi'a clergy has nothing similar in Sunni Islam); in ritual (the Shi'a Ashoura, with its emphasis on self-flagellation); and practice (the Shi'a shrines and visits to those shrines, so offensive to austere Sunnis, especially to the most austere of all, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia).

The belief that somehow deeply-held beliefs and attitudes can be "overcome" seems to approach all this as if it were a question of civil rights in the South. One of the silliest and most harmful aspects of American governments is the belief that many things are susceptible of change, or of change that will come quickly. "Let's have self-determination now" or "Let's end poverty the way Jeffery Sachs says we can" or "Let's just get right in there and reform Islam." A blend of naivete, ignorance, and arrogance, which yields a most unappetizing brew.

The second thing wrong with Rice's statement is that apparently she cannot conceive of why this Sunni-Shi'a split is a good thing for Infidels. She cannot conceive of why chaos and confusion and endless hostility between the two main branches or sects of Islam is something to be exploited, not to be deplored. It appears that American governments want always to take the side of this or that plausible group of Muslims. First, it was the Shi'a in exile who managed to woo and win so many in the American government with their tales of WMD (Chalabi and his group), and others who confidently predicted that once the Americans "liberated" Iraq they would be greeted, those Americans, with an outpouring of joy and presumably permanent gratitude that "would make the liberation of Kabul look like a funeral procession." It would cost, according to Wolfowitz and others, nothing like what it cost to maintain those sanctions -- possibly a few tens of billions of dollars. And then it would be over. A "cakewalk," wrote Kenneth Adelman (sometime purveyor of Shakespeare to corporations so that the tycoons and tycoonettes can apply "Shakespeare to the business world).

Many have in this farce, on all sides, in the government, and in the press, been weighted and found wanting.

Meanwhile, there's something just over here, freshly scribbled on this wall, that I'd like to show our rulers and our pundits:

"Mene, mene, tekel upharsin."

Do you think they'll be able to make it out?

Yet Rice is not the worst. She is far superior to others who preceded her. If she invites comparison with two former and still nattering-away National Security Advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Condoleeza Rice only gains by the comparison. But that should not be the point of comparison. She, and all others in the government, should be spending their days and nights studying Islam, studying not only the texts -- Qur'an, Hadith, Sira -- but how those texts are naturally received by, not all, but almost all, Muslims, and figure out on what side the textual authority lies. They should learn about taqiyya. They should learn about the history of Islamic conquest and about the subjugation of non-Muslims -- which is not only a matter of history, but can be seen today in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia (where the non-Muslims are to found only among the expatriate wage-slaves). They must learn what is so misleading about the phrase "moderate Muslim" -- misleading and unhelpful. They must learn to detect the plausible from the true, to discover the smyler with the knyf under his cloke, as Chaucer emblemized the figure of Treachery he found in Boccaccio, well in advance.

They must learn to understand it all, and to understand not only the texts and the history, but the other attitudes that naturally arise in Islam: aggression, violence, inability to compromise, susceptibility to the most primitive conspiracy theories, blaming of non-Muslims for all the ills that should rightly be attributed to Islam but of course cannot be, and so on.

These are the things she, and so many others, including all of the would-be Presidents now eagerly seeking our support, must learn. Now, not in five or ten years. Now.

[Posted by Hugh at January 23, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:27 PM

January 18, 2007

Fitzgerald: Victory in Iraq

Winning in Iraq is important. And we need a return on our investment: 3,000 dead, nearly 25,000 wounded, about $700 billion so far spent or committed in future unavoidable costs, with estimates for the total ranging between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

And winning can only be done if the definition of "victory" is first made clear.

What is the correct definition of "victory" for the United States? It is that the Camp of Islam and Jihad be rendered weaker than it was before. The Administration keeps saying that bringing "democracy" itself somehow weakens the appeal of what it inaccurately describes as "extremists who have hijacked a great religion," but since those "extremists" or merely the more religious and less secular have only increased their power whenever free elections have been held -- in Algeria, in Egypt, in the "Palestinian"-controlled territories -- the clash of theory and reality is never explained. How can the Camp of Islam be weakened if American efforts are directed at ensuring a united, stable, and prosperous Iraq?

And if that impossible goal were somehow attained after another few years of expensive and depleting American efforts and expense, and focus remains on Iraq while every other matter is somehow pushed to the back or the side, including that of Iran's steady nuclear project, how would this Iraq serve as a Model? How could an Iraq that was once the place of the Abbasid Caliphate be lost to the Shi'a? After all, that was where so much of that "glorious Islamic past" upon which Muslims like to dwell took place. It is a place so important to their sense of themselves and their rightful role in the universe, that if it were lost by the Sunni Arabs and came to be dominated by the Shi'a, those "Persians," those Rafidite dogs, this would be worse in the eyes of both the Egyptian press and Saudi clerics than Jews and Christians dominating Iraq. Yes, that's just how bad those Shi'a are.

How would the achievement of the stated goals of the Bush Administration in Iraq weaken the Camp of Islam?

The way to weaken the Camp of Islam, and thus to justify the incredible expense in men, money, materiel, and morale both civilian and military, is to allow a situation within Iraq to be created (and still better if that situation is entirely a creation of the people in Iraq -- not "the Iraqis" who do not exist – themselves) in which Muslims who would otherwise be waging jihad against us are divided and demoralized. This will weaken the Camp of Islam. Two of the three major fissures within Islam -- sectarian and ethnic -- are pre-existing conditions. Their origins can be found in the first century of Islam.

The ethnic fissure is that between Arabs and Kurds. The Americans did not cause the mistreatment of the Kurds by both kinds of Arabs, but a not-impossible Kurdish state would serve American interests in two ways. It could weaken both Syria and Iran, that have circumjacent Kurdish populations. And in the case of Iran, not only Iranian Kurds but other non-Persian minorities (Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis) might be inspired by an independent Kurdistan. And the very existence of an independent Kurdistan could have effects far beyond the immediate area for other non-Arabs, including Berbers in North Africa and black Africans in Darfur. They might be heartened by the example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke. And in the "war of ideas" that some like to refer to, anything that reveals Islam to have been and to remain a vehicle of Arab imperialism, cultural, linguistic, economic, and political, is to be encouraged -- so that non-Arab Muslims will begin to view Islam in a new, more accurate, less attractive and more disturbing light.

The much larger fissure is that between Sunni and Shi'a. It goes back to the seventh century and the proper succession, after the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs, to Muhammad. But it became a difference in ritual and in some doctrines as well, though not in the teachings about, and attitudes exhibited, toward non-Muslims. This too was not encouraged by the Americans. The war being conducted on Shi'a by Sunnis centuries ago led to the former adopting the doctrine of taqiyya (which is now essentially practiced by Sunni Muslims as well, relying on Qur'an and Hadith for justification), that is, religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about the faith. Sunni-Shi'a tensions, and Sunni discrimination against or persecution of the Shi'a, including deliberate campaigns of murder as in both Iraq and in Pakistan, will go on whatever the Americans do. These tensions can be seen in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Lebanon, in Bahrain, in Kuwait.

The "victory" in Iraq that would result from the continuation, and enlargement, even beyond Iraq's borders, of ethnic and sectarian hostilities and warfare within the Camp of Islam, is the only kind of "victory" that makes sense. And though it was made possible by the removal of the iron regime and mailed fist of Saddam Hussein, the conditions that cause those fissures were none of America's doing. All the Americans have done is try to prevent the very things that they should be deliberately not preventing, but exploiting.

A topsy-turvy strategy. A crazy quilt of plans and counter-plans that miss the essential point.

A mad world, my masters!

[Posted by Hugh at January 18, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:29 PM

January 7, 2007

Fitzgerald: Iran's designs in Iraq

Iranian agents are in Iraq to inflict as much damage as possible on their chief enemy, the Americans. It is false to say that they help both sides -- Sunni and Shi'a -- equally, but it would hardly be surprising if Iranian agents, like most of the Shi'a, would welcome the Americans suffering at the hands of the Sunnis, and vice-versa.

The Islamic Republic of Iran calculates that the Americans have removed their most potent local enemy, Saddam Hussein (who after a dozen years of sanctions was no longer so potent) and the organized Sunni forces. Now Iran can afford to help, indirectly, perhaps not whatever remnants of Al-Zarqawi's "Al Qaeda in Iraq" may exist (because those who call Shi'a "Rafidite dogs" and regard them as worse Infidels than are the Americans), but Sunnis whose main attacks are on the Americans.

What does this show? That Iran wishes to inflict as much damage on the Americans and tie them down for as long as possible. They take advantage of the fact that American leaders are hopelessly insistent that they must stay, lest "America lose face." Or as Brent Scowcroft, the egregious hireling of Muslims, who refuses to reveal the names of his foreign clients, put it, America won’t "to betray its friends in the region" -- which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, in the view of Brent Scowcroft. Those "friends in the region," unsurprisingly, in Brent Scowcroft's view do not include Israel, a non-Muslim member of the West, whose loss to Islam would have untellable consequences both on Western morale, and on Muslim morale. For Israel, Scowcroft presents his usual prescription: pressure from America on our only true ally there, in order "once and for all" to "solve" the Arab-Israeli conflict. This tells you all you need to know about Brent Scowcroft's knowledge of Islam and of the endless, world-without-end nature of the opposition it inculcates against all Infidel states, and certainly against the state of Israel – since Israel, like Spain and Sicily and the Balkans, Greece and other areas, was once considered part of Dar al-Islam. And that means it is especially offensive to Muslims that it should not be under Muslim rule, though in the end, of course, it is the whole world which "Islam must dominate" and where Islam "is not to be dominated."

In Iraq, the Sunnis are not to be easily tamed, if at all, by the Shi'a or by Iran. Some commentators appear to suggest, without any evidence, that "Iran will take over" as soon as we leave. Nonsense. The headache of the determined Sunni resistance will now be entirely the headache of Iran. And furthermore, the Iraqi Shi'a, or many of them, are not prepared to necessarily turn Iraq, or the part they control, over to the "Persians." The assumption that there are necessarily smooth relations between Arab Shi'a and Persian Shi'a, especially when there are all kinds of potential points of dispute, is false. How exactly would "Iranian" influence, for example, be used to stifle possible sympathies by the Shi'a Arabs of Iraq for the Shi'a Arabs of Khuzistan? And is it inconceivable that the Shi'a Arabs of Khuzistan might wish to be free of Iran in order to unite with the Shi'a of Iraq?

There are all kinds of possibilities, of shifts and shape-shifting, that those who tell us we must stay because "otherwise Iran will take over" refuse to consider. They also appear to think that the American public will remain endlessly patient, and that American soldiers will remain unaffected by this fool's errand. Those soldiers are themselves are being asked to bear the entire burden of a foolish policy. They know better than anyone the meretriciousness, the lack of national feeling, and the hostility hidden or revealed toward them as Infidels by virtually the entire ungrateful population of Arabs in Iraq. The Kurds are a different matter, and for reasons that go beyond their regarding the Americans as their protector -- reasons that include their other non-Arab identity, which plays against Islam, while the Arab identity reinforces Islam. That is what such people as McCain (whose disastrous choice of an adviser, Robert Kagan, is a mistake on the level with John Edwards's disastrous choice of Bonior for his campaign) appear to think, swallowing the Party Line of the Bush Administration whole.

Iraq can work to the benefit of the Camp of Infidels. It contains a mix of hostilities, rivalries, hatreds among different groups of Muslims. It is madness for the Americans to worry about "Iran taking over." It cannot happen. Or rather, Iran has already taken over, in a sense, what it can, and now it is time to let the Sunni Arabs inside Iraq, but supported by the Sunni Arabs outside, do whatever they intend to do in order to preserve their position, and to allow the Shi'a Arabs to do whatever it is they will do in turn.

It is not time to follow the siren song of Brent Scowcroft, as he tells us we, the Americans, cannot "leave Iraq" now, because that is what the Sunni Arabs have been telling him and so many others who are perhaps just as eager -- if such is possible -- to serve, like Scowcroft, as an unfailing mouthpiece for those Sunni Arabs, "our friends in the region."

[Posted by Hugh at January 7, 2007]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:32 PM

December 22, 2006

Fitzgerald: A fantastic war

"In the future,” many have predicted, “the Iraqis will blame their civil war on the US."

Well, of course they will. They already do. They do in Man-on-the-street interviews, in which those men on the street explain how “everyone got along” until the bad old Americans came. In a poof, the persecution and mass-murder of the Kurds is forgotten by all the Arabs. In a poof, the persecution and mass-murder of the Shi'a by the Sunnis (the regime of Saddam Hussein being merely a disguised Sunni despotism) is forgotten -- certainly by almost all the Sunnis, but also by some Shi'a when they want to blame, as they do want to blame, the Infidels for everything. Everything was wonderful.

In Pakistan Sipaha-e-Sahaba never attacked the Shi'a. In Afghanistan the Taliban never tried to wipe out every last Shi'a Hazara. In Lebanon, the Shi'a have never suffered or ever wanted to get back at the Sunnis. In Bahrain, the Shi'a who constitute 75% of the population are ruled benignly by a Sunni Arab about whom they have nothing to complain. And as for the past 1300 years of Sunni-Shi'a relations, let's just say it has been roses, roses, roses all the way.

Of course the Americans are to blame, in Muslim eyes. Always will be.

But here's the amusing part. The Bush Administration cannot admit to itself that the Sunni-Shi'a divide pre-dated the invasion of Iraq by some 1300 years, and that the fissures between them would inevitably widen once the iron grip of Saddam Hussein had been removed. Because to admit that this was all inevitable, would be to raise the question: if it was all inevitable, why did we not see it? For it if was inevitable, and we hadn't -- and still refuse to have -- the slightest idea of its inevitability, then there must be something wrong with us. But we can't admit that. Nor can all the commentators, for and against the war, who failed to immediately identify this inevitable outcome, and who either remained Bush loyalists, or opposed the war for all the wrong, appeasing reasons. Or they advocated some halfway measure, such as that "put in a strongman" -- without, of course, asking themselves whether that "strongman" would be Sunni, in which case the Shi'a would never accept him, or Shi'a, in which case the Sunnis would never accept him.

No, those who were wrong, being unable to admit it, will persist in their obstinacy. And that obstinacy requires them to deny the depth and duration of the Sunni-Shi'a split, and thus to support the view that the "Americans caused it."

A fantastic war, this Iraq war. Undertaken for one stated reason, continued long after for quite another, crazily messianic and polypragmonic reason. Supported by those who simply mechanically rallied around the Bush-Republican-conservative wagons, without considering what was actually going on. And even today most are still unable to see the folly of the Bush and now Gates definition of "victory," which is the very opposite of what should be desired.

When Gates says failure to obtain "victory" -- by which he means ending the Sunni-Shi'a violence and forcing the Kurds to permanently acquiesce in remaining within Arab-ruled Iraq, he has it all backwards. He speaks of "catastrophe." But the real "catastrophe" would be if the Americans, after having squandered 3,000 lives and 22,000 wounded and a half-trillion dollars in sunk or committed future expenses, and after having done great damage to both the materiel and the morale of the armed services (not cheap to repair in one case and not easily recovered in the other), were to continue to squander men, money, and materiel in order to achieve the opposite of what would constitute a kind of victory, which would come through dividing and demoralizing and thereby weakening the Camp of Islam. Well, this would be the greatest self-inflicted defeat in American history. And it would have been entirely avoidable if Bush and Co. had had the right understanding of the instruments and full scope of the menace of Jihad.

But Jihad is not understood. Not by Bush. Not by Cheney. Not by Rice. Not by Gates. Not by the idiotic Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. Not by The New Duranty Times. Not by The Bandar Beacon. Not by the bright-eyed "insurgency experts" who keep making plans to win hearts and minds in Iraq, and who speak confidently and irrelevantly about how insurgencies "last on average ten years." They do not consider that this "insurgency" is Islam-based. As long as Islam is there, the Infidels will always be fought, and as long as Islam is there, the ethnic and sectarian divisions within Islam will never be overcome, because the spirit of compromise, especially peaceful compromise, is contradicted by the tenets and attitudes of the belief-system of Islam.

How long will it take this learning-curve to begin to take off, as it still strains and strains and strains for lift-off?

[Posted by Hugh at December 22, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:34 PM

December 12, 2006

Fitzgerald: We owe the Iraqis exactly nothing

“Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled their homeland are likely to seek refugee status in the United States, humanitarian groups said, putting intense pressure on the Bush administration to reexamine a policy that authorizes only 500 Iraqis to be resettled here next year.”
—from this article

The American people should not be asked to pay, with further endangerment of their security, for the mistakes of the American government, or rather, for the inevitable Sunni-Shi'a friction and hostilities in Iraq. Those hostilities became inevitable because of the nature of societies suffused with Islam (and therefore unable to compromise and naturally aggressive not only toward Infidels, but toward all those who in some way were different, were not the same), once American soldiers undid the Sunni despotism of Saddam Hussein.

Americans have spent or committed close to half-a-trillion dollars in the effort to make Iraq a better place. They have discovered that far from demonstrating any real gratitude, the Arabs of Iraq, both Sunni and Shi'a, have been content to grab as much money -- fantastic sums -- and stuff of all kinds, and to watch the Americans, under hellish conditions, attempt not to "re-construct" but rather to construct all kinds of things for them, in a vain effort to pull them out of the primitive and aggressive and Hobbesian world in which they live.

It is not the Iraqis who have been doing much of the fighting to bring about a better Iraq. Many Iraqi soldiers routinely show up only to collect paychecks. Many run in combat situations, leaving the Americans to fight and die for a place called "Iraq" that the so-called "Iraqis" have no loyalty to, and on every occasion, by the testimony of so many of our fed-up and disgusted soldiers, have left the Americans in the lurch or substituted their own brutal methods of treatment of the population and ignored everything the Americans have tried to teach them.

We owe the Iraqis exactly nothing. We do not owe any Iraqis asylum at all. If asylum is to be given, it should be strictly limited to Christians and the handful of Mandeans and other non-Muslims. Not a single Muslim needs to come to swell the Muslim ranks in this country, adding to the security risk, adding to all sorts of worries.

To those who say, as someone does in the article linked above, that we let in Vietnamese refugees, the answer should be obvious. The Vietnamese Buddhists and Christians were fully able to integrate into American society. They were not raised on a belief system that counselled them, that taught them, to see others as their enemies and to work to dominate them, and to spread a belief-system that was inimical in every way to the legal, political and other institutions and arrangements and understandings of this country. That is quite different from the permanent problem posed by Islam.

Anyone who begins to prate about "what we owe the Iraqis" should be reminded of who has been fighting for the idea of "Iraq" over the past few years, who has been spending or committing a half-trillion dollars, receiving only more demands for more-more-more, and whining, and ingratitude, and the occasional smile as some "Iraqi" asks for a "Marshall Plan" for Iraq. Oh, they've had their Marshall Plan. They've had all kinds of things.

And they've got the oil wealth to live on, like all the other Muslim oil states that are rich through no effort on their own. They can stay there in Iraq. They can move about - Shi'a to Shi'a controlled regions, Sunni to Sunni controlled regions in Iraq, or outside Iraq, to other Arab countries. But examine the attitude of Iraqis toward the Americans who rescued them from a murderous despot who had ruled for 35 years, and whose homicidal sons were prepared to succeed him and to rule for another 35. Examine the behavior of both Iraqi civilians and the Iraqi soldiers and police, the former in often demonstrating indifference to or even taking pleasure in the killings of Americans, and the latter often neglecting their duties or running away, or selling the weapons supplied to them by the Americans on the black market, and almost in no case providing the kind of minimal aid that the Americans had, and have, every right to expect that people will offer. It is, after all, their country and supposedly it is they who care about it.

But we have had quite a demonstration of how the Iraqis think and behave. It has been edifying. And the officers and men of the American military, who have served in Iraq, ought to be consulted first about whether or not they think that we "owe Iraqis" something and whether or not they think tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Muslims should be allowed to settle in our country, or for that matter other Infidel lands.

The response of those officers and men should be instructive.

[Posted by Hugh at December 12, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:37 PM

December 8, 2006

Fitzgerald: The folly of the Iraq Study Group

The Iraq Study Group brings us nothing but another kind of folly. It states the obvious, that "we are losing in Iraq" by which it means that, given the Bush Administration's definition of "winning" (which apparently the Iraq Study Group is too unimaginative to question), then we, who are failing to achieve what would thereby constitute "winning," therefore "are losing." And this statement of the obvious is considered a great achievement. But the Iraq Study Group report is even worse than a mere statement of the obvious. For along with that statement of the obvious comes so much else that is even more stupid and potentially dangerous than what the Bush Administration it criticizes now offers, that one is left feeling colossally depressed.

There is, for example, the suggestion that Iraq and Syria be "talked to." On the face of it, who can object to "talking to" anyone? But in the Middle East, "talking to" lends legitimacy. It gives support to those regimes that one wishes to isolate or at least to cause to feel isolated. It is not as if there the views of these regimes are not fully known already. They are not hermetically sealed off, like the military regime in Burma. We already know what the regime in Syria wants: it wants as much protection from its enemies, as much power and money, as it can get. It wants to continue to dominate Lebanon. It wants to continue the Alawite dictatorship by doing the simultaneous bidding of both the Shi'a in Iran (who have declared the Alawites to be "true Muslims," which is not what the Sunnis think, and Sunni Muslims constitute 70% of the Syrian population) and the Sunnis, by allowing the latter free entry to leave Syria and go to fight (and, the Alawites hope, die) in Iraq.

As for "talking to Iran," the American government already knows perfectly well what Iran wants. It wants precisely to "talk, talk, talk" with everyone under the sun, in order to keep any attack from actually taking place that would stop its headlong rush toward obtaining nuclear weapons. Only a fool would think otherwise. And only fools would think that formal "talks" would add to the American store of knowledge, or would help the U.S. find out what "Iran really wants" when we know perfectly well what Iran really wants: it wants that weaponry, and the power and the threat that go with it. And the current regime, we have every reason to believe, is certainly prepared to use such weapons against Israel, in a final chiliastic frenzy. The suggestion that the American government "talk to" Syria and Iran sounds perfectly harmless, perfectly fine, unless one thinks clearly about what such "talks" would mean.

Of course, there are "talks" that could be brief, and could go something like this:

To the Syrian regime, the Americans could say: Alawites are not true Muslims. We know this, and the Sunnis know this, despite your attempts to hide behind that single fatwa from Iran claiming otherwise. The Saudis are prepared to use their money to broadcast through the Arab press, in the Middle East and in London, ably assisted by the Jordanians and the Egyptians, that the Alawites, those non-Muslims, must go. You think you can continue to rule, despite being 12% of the population. You think we will not support a Sunni Muslim effort to depose you. At this point, your behavior is such that we regard you as disposable. But it is not we who will do the disposing. It will be the Ikhwan within Syria. We will publicize your permitting Shi'a missionaries to come from Iran. We will have the Saudis and others display the pictures of Mary that hang in every Alawite village. Your Alawite generals will get more and more nervous. They do not all wish to be slaughtered -- which is what the real Muslims will do to you. You have a choice. Leave Lebanon alone. Stop helping Iran. Forget about the Golan Heights; you will never get it back. We will give you a free hand in Syria. But that is it. That is more than enough. That, or a Sunni uprising that will not end in a mere palace coup, but in the mass murder of Alawites everywhere. Your choice.

That would be the way to have "talks" with Syria.

And the "talks" with Iran? Something along the same friendly lines. Something like this: Fifty percent of your population is not Persian. There are Kurds. There are Azeris. There are Baluchis. There are Arabs in Khuzistan, where all your oil is located. We are prepared to arm, through Kurdistan, those Kurds. The mere existence of an independent and American-backed Kurdistan will inspire not only those Kurds, but also those Baluchis and those Arabs and, if we can make a deal with Azerbaijan, possibly even those Azeris as well. The Ottoman Empire dissolved after World War I. What remains of the Persian Empire -- that is, modern Iran -- can dissolve, or be shrunk still further. Could you put down simultaneous revolts among the Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, and Arabs? You don't think we dare do it? Why not? What do we have to lose? What could you do now that is still worse than what you are already doing? Let's be clear: we are not out to overturn the regime, but we can inflict such damage on your country that others, within, will overturn your regime. And kill the Mullahs in their luxurious homes. Do you want that? Do you want to lose the oil of Khuzistan to the Arabs? We wouldn't dare, you say? Why wouldn't we? Why should we care? We buy oil from wherever, and we pay the market price to you or to them. What reason do we have for keeping Iran together? Instability should worry us? Why? Why should it?

Something like that, to both Syria and Iran, would be the only kind of talks worth having.

As for the sinister business in the Iraq Study Group about Israel, it included all the cliches about a "two-state solution," courtesy no doubt of such operators as that virtual agent of the Arabs, Raymond Close (why has his participation, and his shadowy background, not been made the subject of discussion?). Also involved was Robert Malley, that full-time and tireless promoter of the "Palestinians," who was the behind-the-scenes organizer (the front man was Gareth Evans) of the International Crisis Group's little effort (one of those "signed by World Leaders" things) to demand renewed pressure for Israeli surrender. In that effort one of those
“World Leaders" was none other than Lee Hamilton, famously unsympathetic -- always has been, always will be -- to Israel, though not perhaps for the same reasons as Texas fixer and Saudi-connected ("Our friends in the Gulf") James Baker.

Oh, there's a good deal more to say about the Iraq Study Group, none of it good. The only good thing is that, along with much vicious nonsense, and of course without a hint of comprehension of the nature or scope or instruments of Jihad (these are all Yesterday's Men and Women, and far too famous and busy to have the time to learn, at this point, about Islam), it managed to state the obvious: that the Bush policy, on its own terms, is not "winning" in Iraq.

The more intelligent criticism, the one that requires examination of what should constitute "winning" for the United States in Iraq, was beyond that committee's capacity. After all, that would take real thought. That would take study, and reading, and time. That is not something to be asked of such busy busy people as James Baker and Lee Hamilton and all the rest. They had their "experts" -- such people as Raymond Close and Shibley Telhami. What did you expect?

[Posted by Hugh at December 8, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:39 PM

November 8, 2006
Fitzgerald: May both sides win

Keith Ellison, the new Muslim Congressman from Minnesota, "advocated quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq," according to this article.

My view exactly. Yet I am not a Muslim, and do not wish Islam and its Jihad well. Does this mean that I am dead wrong in my views, because I appear to agree with Keith Ellison, or he with me? Or is it something else? Is it what one might understand better if we stand back and think what, objectively, would happen if the Americans withdrew?

I think as soon as the Americans withdraw, there will be all kinds of shrill cries in Iraq, coming from both some Sunnis and some Shi'a, for the Americans not to go. The Sunnis will realize that it is the Americans who are protecting them from the Shi'a militia. Other Sunnis, possibly a majority, will be delighted, for they are convinced that somehow, though outnumbered three-to-one by the Shi'a, they possess the necessary training, the organization, the ruthlessness, and the ability to count on Sunni volunteers coming from Syria (70% Sunni, though Shi'a missionaries from Iran have been given free rein by Bashir al-Assad), Egypt, Jordan, and of course the Gulf. And they are relying, too, on equipment and money coming from the Saudis, who similarly supplied Saddam Hussein during his war against Shi'a Iran (why, I even know someone who painted over the markings on the American-supplied Saudi tanks then shipped to Iraq), not to mention the tens of billions that the U.A.E. and Kuwait "loaned" Saddam Hussein for his Sunni Arab crusade against "the Persians."

And some of the Shi'a, too, will suddenly be eager to have the Americans stay, for they calculate that they need the American soldiers to stay and fight and die just a little longer -- as long as they stick to killing Sunnis. And of course the training those Shi'a volunteers are receiving for what the Americans call the "Iraqi" army and the "Iraqi" police is also valuable. And finally, the longer the Americans stay, the more stuff -- money, projects, and above all military equipment -- is likely to be given to, or fall into the hands of, the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi government. Others, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, never cared for the Americans, and still others, including those disinclined to disarm the militias ("those Americans can't be serious, can they?"), may now feel it is time for those heretofore amazingly pliant and gullible Americans (well, no longer the officers and men, but the civilians in Washington whom those officers and men have been taught to unquestioningly obey) to leave.

And what will happen in the Muslim world? Oh, crowing, of all kinds. Crowing from somewhere in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yes, we won, we won, the Americans have had to leave. And that apparently is what some in the Administration are so scared of.

But they need not be. For if they leave, and when they leave, the natural centrifugal forces, whirring away, will cause Sunnis and Shi'a to be unable to compromise. Or if they do enter into any kind of compromise, it will immediately be broken by one side or the other or both, for it will be impossible for the Sunnis to accept their new status, and impossible for the Shi'a Arabs to share power and money in the way that the Sunnis demand. And if the Americans think that enlarging the pie by giving potentially-rich Iraq even more American -- i.e., Infidel -- money will bring about that spirit of compromise that is so foreign to, and so inimical to, Islam, they are only proving that their ignorance of Islam and the psychology of Muslims is nearly total. And being unable to compromise, they will fight.

And Muslims being Muslims, and Sunni Arabs regarding the land of the most glorious Abbasid Caliphate as important to their own history and their own identity, will never permit the Shi'a, those quasi-Persians, to win Iraq, and will offer their co-religionists every aid. And so will the Shi'a in Iran, which is not the same thing as saying that the Shi'a Arabs will necessarily wish their own state to be incorporated into a larger Shi'a state ruled from Tehran, just because they accept such aid -- money, men, materiel.

And as the American squandering of resources -- men, money, materiel -- is replaced almost overnight by a situation in which the squandering of resources is that of Muslim states and peoples whose money, men, and materiel are now being used up, the shrill voices expressing delight over "the defeat of America" will grow fainter. And as the conflict reverberates, as for example when the Shi'a in Bahrain, or Kuwait, or Al-Hasa become inspired by the conflict in Iraq to act up, and then to bring down the Sunni Arabs behaving as those Sunni Arabs will, and as the Sunnis in Pakistan attack, as they will, the Shi'a in Pakistan, and as Hizballah volunteers possibly march off to help fellow Shi'a in Iraq (and seen off at the station -- the one existing in their imaginations -- by deliriously happy Christians and Druse and even Sunni Muslims), and as the unstated American goal becomes, it is clear, no longer that messianic foolishness about making Muslim states happy and prosperous, but rather working to exploit the natural fissures -- ethnic and sectarian that are most obvious in, though hardly limited to, Iraq -- all sense of triumph over America, of having defeated America, will fade.

And then there is the matter of an independent Kurdistan. That too, spells trouble for the Arabs and for the unity of Islam. For Islam has always been a vehicle for Arab imperialism. Anwar Shaikh rightly titled one of his analyses of Islam "The Arab National Religion." An independent Kurdistan (with arrangements made for an enclave for Iraqi Christians, their safety to be guaranteed, on pain of loss of all American support, by the people and government of Kurdistan) will not only unsettle the Kurdish regions of Iran and Syria (causing migraines in both regimes) but ideally would raise, for non-Arab Muslims everywhere, the promise that they too might throw off Arab domination. Think only of the Berbers in North Africa, and think too of the Berbers in France, who might be turned against the Arabs in the same immigrant population, with useful results not least for the French security services.

The spectacle of internecine warfare not only promises to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. No, it will also serve as a Demonstration Project to Infidels. Let them see how, without well-meaning Infidels to bring aid of all kinds and to keep the peace and to prevent one side or the other from behaving with their wonted barbarity (just read the reports of the corpses found murdered by Shi'a or Sunni militias or insurgents or irregulars or, for that matter, by members of regular army and police units), Muslims treat each other.

For time now needs to be bought, and Infidels tutored in the ways of Islam. There is no better way than to remove the controversial American presence in Iraq that so gets in the way of a clear-sighted view from a distance, a pisgah-sight of Islam, that many Infidels need.

Oh, there'll be much mafficking among Muslims when the Americans leave. It will last a week, maybe a month, maybe two.

But not longer. And if the Administration has any sense, it will turn its attention to Western Europe, just as soon as the more-in-sorrow withdrawal is first announced and then quickly put into effect (with possibly just a very small force left in Kurdistan to help protect the Christians or oversee their exodus to Lebanon or possibly the "West Bank," but only as part of a population exchange with local Muslim Arabs). It will turn its attention to checking or disrupting in Europe the campaigns of Da'wa, and to changing immigration policies and supporting those in Europe who wish to do the same, and to engaging in propaganda to demoralize the camp of Islam and Jihad. (Hint: Karen Hughes is not the right person for this job; Ali Sina, and Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq should be consulted at every step on the staffing, and on the lines of information and argument to be disseminated; no more "life in America for Muslims is great" and no more rock music and other wonderful examples of Western decadence that do nothing to win or at least unsettle minds.)

So yes, I agree with Keith Ellison that the American forces should leave Iraq forthwith. But not for the same reasons.

Who do you think is right? Do you think an American withdrawal will be a victory for Islam, or do you think an American withdrawal will not only conserve our reserves, preserve or halt the degradation in the quality of our armed forces just in time, and help to divide and demoralize the camp of Islam and Jihad?

There are those who are indifferent to Islam, but not indifferent to the environment. Such people may have no interest in, or be completely unaware of, both the menace of Jihad and how important it is to reduce the OPEC oil revenues which supply the "money weapon" that is one of the main instruments of Jihad, without which the building and maintaining of mosques and madrasas all over the West, and the vast campaigns of Da'wa, and the employment of armies of Western hirelings to promote or defend Islam and the agenda of Islam, in government, in business, in the media, in the universities, would not be possible. But objectively, in their desire to rescue the world from environmental degradation, they are the allies of all those who are most concerned about the worldwide Jihad, or its local components.

And those who worry about the Jihad, and have concluded that the most important task is to reduce the use of oil and gas, may have little in common with members of some environmental groups, but objectively they will work for the very same goal -- a goal which will be pursued by some to save the natural world, and pursued by others to save, in a sense, the manmade world, or at least the world made somewhat better, somewhat more interesting, by all those names to be found in, say, the Index to Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence."

In similar fashion, some of those who want the Americans out of Iraq do so for reasons I deplore and abhor. One such person is Keith Ellison. But the policy in Iraq that he desires is exactly what I desire. For I know what will follow, and I welcome it. He does not know. He, just like many Sunnis in Iraq now convinced they will win, or like those people in the West who are convinced that "of course Iran will just take over" -- doesn't know what societies suffused with Islam are like. No compromise. Victor and vanquished. Until another despot comes along, to rule over this or that segment of what was once, but is unlikely to ever be again, Iraq.

And may both sides win.

[Posted by Hugh at November 8, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:41 PM

November 8, 2006
Fitzgerald: Baghdad: the sequel
You must remember this. -- Old Popular Song

The most celebrated movie in American history is Casablanca. That 1942 film stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick, an American living in the once-exotic city which, like the rest of Morocco, was still under French rule. He owns a nightclub, Rick’s Café Américain, where gambling and drinking and smoking take place, and where the band, at one point, will defiantly play La Marseillaise, and Sam, the band’s black American piano-player, at another point, will be asked by someone to play something again. Habitués include anti-Vichy French and refugees who have fled Occupied Europe. These desperate people exchange money and favors for passports and transit visas and tickets to Lisbon where they will go on to the safe haven of America. The commander of the local French police, Captain Renault, appears to have made a permanent accommodation with every side, including a contingent of German troops under Major Strasser. Renault stops in frequently to talk to Rick, whom he regards as a fellow recruit in the sauve-qui-peut brigade. He also comes to collect his prescribed payoff, in the form of winnings from rigged roulette games (“I’m only a poor corrupt official,” he explains), and it is understood that he will turn a blind eye to what goes on at Rick’s Café.

One day in walks Victor Laszlo, the legendary Resistance hero, accompanied by his wife, Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman). He, too, seeks to escape from the Germans, but only so that he might return to the Continent to continue the fight. Ilsa, as it happens, had a brief but unforgettable love affair with Rick in Paris. It ended when he left at 5 p.m. on June 11, 1940, on the last train out, just three days before the Germans came goosestepping through the Arc de Triomphe. In the 1930s, Rick had run guns, first to the Ethiopians fighting Mussolini, and then to the Loyalists fighting Fascists in Spain. He now claims that he had been doing it only for the money. At this point he is determined to avoid involvement in anything beyond his own immediate survival. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he tells Renault. And the Frenchman replies: “A wise foreign policy.”

Captain Renault does not much care for Major Strasser: “I told my men to be especially destructive,” he tells Rick. “You know how that impresses Germans.” Major Strasser reserves his special contempt for the American. He admonishes Captain Renault: “You give him credit for too much cleverness…he is just another blundering American.” Renault replies: “But we mustn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.”

What happens to Rick is the story of what happened to the United States. One tends to forget that in the 1930s its army ranked, in size, eighteenth in the world; well into 1941 many Americans still averted their eyes from what was happening elsewhere. Casablanca takes place in late 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Great Britain and France, having first tried appeasement, had been at war with Nazi Germany since September 1939. Great Britain and the Free French were still fighting. Only when attacked by Japan did the United States finally become a combatant, but still it took time for Americans to fully understand the nature and aims of both Nazis and Japanese militarists. Those seemingly disparate enemies, whatever their putative differences, shared an implacable hatred of Western democracy and Western civilization. Their ideologies were remarkably similar and mutually reinforcing, and offered no quarter to those who refused to be subjugated.

More than sixty years have passed since the original Casablanca, and many in the film world have dreamed of a remake. A few tried, but none has succeeded in attracting audiences quite like the made-for-television mini-series, a Franco-German co-production, with its mise-en-scène transferred from North Africa to New York City, that was broadcast to audiences worldwide during the winter of 2003 from studios overlooking the East River. Though many deemed the series utterly forgettable, there are those who will recall some of its details. The producers decided they could best evoke the exotic flavor of the original film by giving it an even more exotic, Thousand-and-One-Nights title: Baghdad. Purists will argue that in important ways the made-for-television film did not always remain true either to the letter or spirit of Casablanca, but it certainly managed to capture the atmosphere of the original, its suspense, its passion, its pain.

Both film and mini-series were shot largely at a single locale (with Rick's Café replaced by Kofi's in the remake), though in the latter there were occasional shots of city streets, and one at an airport. Both contained references to earlier events: flashbacks are employed, old conversations recalled. The set of the mini-series was more spacious, less smoky, but otherwise essentially the same: a single room full of people of various nationalities, sitting at tables. More than a few have trouble with English. In the film, there were silent fez-wearing Arab waiters; in the mini-series, Arabs also circulated, but not as waiters and, instead of tarbooshes, they were wearing military caps and keffiyehs, and this time they were talkative. The people at the tables in the mini-series engaged in sometimes furtive and even, at times, unseemly negotiations, only some of which we, the audience, could overhear. In both cases, lives were at stake.

As in the film, the television version had a Swedish actor playing a major role. Instead of the ravishing Ingrid Bergman, this Swede, a colorless functionary, directed a brigade of Keystone Kops who were told, just like the police in Casablanca, to “round up the usual suspects.” At times, they were ordered, as in the film, to look more effective by “rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.” And in both cases the result was farcical.

Viewers of film and mini-series became aware of a menace waiting in the wings: a megalomaniacal and murderous dictator, armed to the teeth, who had tortured and killed and attacked at will, and who was prepared to attack and torture and kill some more, directly or through others like him, whenever he felt the need. And in the East River mini-series there were also rumors of war and resistance; the fog of indecision; defeatism and delay; appeasement camouflaged as prudent statecraft; and fear.

In both versions, the Swedish actor disappeared from view just before the denouement. Those who remained then revealed their true characters. Casablanca derived its dramatic force from the initial irresolution, and then, after a certain delay, the final resolution, in which Rick demonstrated moral clarity and invited it in others. By the end of the film, he and Renault have chosen sides – the same side. It is the beginning, Rick predicts, “of a beautiful friendship.” In the mini-series, made more than a half-century after the movie, the Frenchman shoots the American in the back -- fatally, he assumes -- and walks off, arm in arm, with a smiling Strasser.

Thoughtful critics who found Baghdad unsatisfying were initially gratified by the just-released Baghdad: The Sequel, shot on location in the Middle East. This, like the original, is a made-for-television series. The American, who had seemingly been put out of action at the end of Baghdad, had in fact only been grazed, and reappears on center stage. Even props from the past show up again: the decks of cards that kept being shuffled and dealt at Rick's Café reappear, with a face-lift, and with a different game in mind: Fifty-Two Pick-Up. There are mysteries aplenty. Intense searches are conducted, especially for the villains who are disposed of, one by one -- including the biggest villain of them all, uncovered in a lair from which he is dragged in humiliating circumstances. He is turned over to the local sheriff so that justice may be done. For many of those being sought, the suspense is killing.

The sequel began with some spectacular special effects. And it only manages to get more riveting, with unexpected twists and turns that fill virtually every episode: night-time acts of derring-do, cross-border raids, spectacular thefts, hot-pursuit chases, revenge killings, bounty hunters reaping huge rewards, deep-delvèd bunkers, incriminating files stumbled across, treasure troves lost, and found, and lost, and found again when serendipitously stumbled across. The tension comes from the determination of the heroes, so often hindered by their own scruples, so often dealt with not only ungratefully but treacherously by the very people they have managed to free when no one else in the world would help them. That lawman-who-all-alone-rescues-the-ungrateful-townsfolk is right out of High Noon, and like High Noon, it would be a mistake to call this merely an action film. The ultimate outcome is something I won’t reveal. Some say that the townsfolk settle down to a life of peace and prosperity. Still others say that, as in more than one famous Western, the sheriff finally becomes sick and tired of all their squabbling and whining and even shooting at him, and just like Gary Cooper, throws down his badge and walks out of town, leaving the unworthy cattlemen and sheepmen to fight with each other as they have always done. Perhaps the real story turns out not to be one of innocent victims being rescued, but something darker and deeper, with some of the victims insisting they were never threatened in the first place, and now claiming, outrageously, that the sheriff himself was a greater threat all along. And the sheriff knows he can’t stop to argue, he has to be moving on, because he has plenty to do outside this impossible town, in places closer to his own home town that are now being menaced by some of the same forces to be found in this town, and all over the neighborhood of this hopelessly wild east.

Baghdad: The Sequel, like Baghdad, like Casablanca itself, becomes a kind of Bildungskino. A Western Everyman acquires slowly, and at great cost, knowledge he did not possess at the beginning. In Casablanca he learns to distinguish clearly, unambiguously, Good from Evil, and chooses Good. In Baghdad: the Sequel, he learns that on the same planet there exist a plurality of worlds, and that one of those worlds poses a permanent threat to all the others. He comes to understand that the gulf separating those worlds is not to be bridged by pontoons, physical or spiritual, thrown up by any corps of army engineers working in the Land of the Two Rivers. He abandons the effort to win, whether by constant accommodation that grades into appeasement, or by the distribution of Cargo-Cult largesse, those hearts and minds that turn out to be unwinnable. His bleak recognition of reality proves bracing. Finally coming to understand what is dearest to him and what is most vulnerable, he abandons his course of innocent blundering and squandering and instead becomes a different kind of lawman, intent on countering every instrument of the menace that he had for so long failed, almost willfully, to understand. And then Baghdad: The Sequel takes an entirely different turn, and the tone becomes resolute, unswerving, intelligently ruthless.

Would that this were not a review of a non-existent sequel. Would that this were true.

[Posted by Hugh at November 8, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:44 PM

November 5, 2006
Fitzgerald: What has already been said about Iraq

The soldiers being trained in Iraq are unable or unwilling to be members of the “Iraqi” army or “Iraqi” police. They cannot be relied on, cannot be trusted, to fight alongside the American troops who are now doing almost all of the real fighting. (The Iraqis, of various kinds, have been great at kidnapping and torturing people of other various kinds, and then leaving their bodies, dismembered or intact, here and there throughout Baghdad and the rest of the country, but that’s not what one means by fighting.)

Nor can they be relied on, without the Americans being present, to actually behave semi-decently toward civilians or the prisoners they take, and furthermore, to do their fighting for an ideal called “Iraq.” That is an ideal that the American soldiers are imbued with (or at least they were until reality began to set in) far more than are those “Iraqis” who run away, or who fire wildly, or who show up only to pick up their paychecks but never for the real battles – and that takes care of a great many of them, especially of the Arabs rather than the Kurds. No, they are not fighting for “Iraq” but, when they fight at all, almost always for the possibility of inflicting damage on others who are not of the same sectarian or ethnic background. This ineluctable problem has been pointed out in many articles and in hundreds of postings at Jihad Watch for nearly three years. Many have been quite detailed.

Here is just one of the more recent examples – a mere 14 months old:

Iraq's doomed police training Paula Broadwell writes in the Boston Globe, with thanks to Hugh Fitzgerald.
IN SEPTEMBER 2003, the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs constructed the Jordan International Police Training Center outside of Amman to train Iraq law enforcement personnel. Sixteen nations provide a total of 352 police trainers for the center. The camp has a capacity to train 3,000 Iraqi police recruits in an eight-week basic police skills course and graduate 1,500 new police every month. New Iraqi police come away with a coveted paycheck ($150) and sufficiently trained and equipped to counter foreign intelligence operations, pandemic lawlessness in an anarchic society, and insurgents who target US troops or collaborators.

In April 2005 I had the chance to visit the center, the world's largest international police training camp. I am a military officer and have been deployed throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but this was one of the nicest training posts I have ever seen. However, the comprehensive training I witnessed was disheartening. The Iraq coalition constituency deserves to know why this mission is likely to fail.

There are three main reasons why these forces will never be ready to defend their country: The wary, uncommitted recruits are immature and lackadaisical about the mission; the parsimonious training is inadequate; and accountability once recruits return to Iraq is inconsistent at best and lacks the return on investment that one would expect.

The recruit pool. According to international instructors at the camp, the troops are often recruited from among intimidated teenagers or disillusioned, desperate unemployed men left with few job prospects in their chaotic country. We aren't always getting the highest quality ''volunteers" because many of those have already joined the insurgency. Others are understandably concerned about their life expectancy if they join the police. In spite of most of the high-quality, experienced instructors, I learned that a clan relative of the Jordanian terrorist mastermind Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi was also an employee at the camp, adding an interesting element to operational security.

Return on Investment. Purportedly, about 40 to 60 percent of these graduates never actually join the Iraqi police force when they return from Jordan. They defect, taking their coveted pay and their new skills to the insidious insurgency, according to liaison officers in Iraq. Some are forced to give up the weapons they were issued at this camp to corrupt local police chiefs; these often end up on the black market. Others lose their firearms in insurgent raids on police stations. Sadly, too many are targeted immediately upon return to Iraq. Forty-six newly returned graduates on a bus were executed point-blank by insurgents this spring; more than 1,500 of those who have made it into the police force have died just this year..."

[Posted by Rebecca on August 30, 2005 01:19 PM]

Three subsequent postings under that thread elaborate upon the significance of Bradwell’s observations (I have slightly edited them here, for readability only; you can read the originals here to see that the substance of the analysis remains unchanged):

#1.
“This article points out the near-hopelessness of the situation. It is cruel to force the entire weight of the Administration's misunderstanding of both Islam and Iraq onto the soldiers, the officers and men who are supposed to train "Iraqi" police and an "Iraqi" army when there is no such feeling for "Iraq" – not, at least, outside of a handful of people, the very handful of unrepresentative Iraqis whom, outside Iraq and inside, the Americans have met and assumed were the "people of Iraq." But Rend al-Rahim Francke, Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya and all the rest had spent decades abroad. They were mostly well-off and well-educated and, whether Sunni or Shi'a, largely secular. For their own good and sufficient reasons, they wanted the Americans to depose Saddam Hussein. This the Americans did.

But these completely unrepresentative "Iraqis," and the way they plausibly and pleasingly offered prospects of things to come in a Light-Unto-the-Muslim Nations Iraq, are not Iraq. The real Iraq, the Iraq that the soldiers have to deal with, is much more primitive and much more determinedly hostile to Americans -- except insofar as they can be temporarily bought off, like a tribal leader here or there, by infusions of American cash. Are we to keep transfusing that cash to the endlessly corrupt "Iraqis"? And if so, what will we really be getting in return, save for a temporary cessation of hostilities in this or that small area of a large country?

In her discussion of the treacherous nature of the recruits, the author of the article for some reason does not mention so many of them who take the cash and the weapons and the training all supplied by the Americans, and then promptly join the most violent enemies of those same Americans. Then there is the intractable problem of Kurd mistrust of Arabs, of Shi'a mistrust of Sunnis (and both with good reason, solidly based on experience over a long period). Perhaps she had not been thinking on those lines. If she has the leisure to think at the Kennedy School this year (despite the Kennedy School, not because of it) perhaps she will take a moment to read Bat Ye'or on The Dhimmi, and even more relevant to Iraq, Elie Kedourie's "The Chatham House Version." One needs officers in the army to educate themselves about Islam and about Iraq. It is too bad it has to happen so late in the day.

[Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2005 03:07 PM]

#2.

"The Iraqis won't forget those who fought for them"
-- from a posting above

“No, the Iraqis will be just as grateful, no doubt, as the Egyptians have proven to be over the past 25 years during which they have received $60 billion from the American taxpayers, or as the "Palestinians" have proven to be for the billions they received (“and somehow managed to misplace, so pretty please send us more right away to make Gaza bloom, because otherwise we might have to get nasty and that would be bad for the road-map and the two-state solution and...."). They have already forgotten what the Americans did for them, and are doing for them.

Oh, I'm not saying all Iraqis are like that. There is Kanan Makiya. That's one. There's Rend al-Rahim Francke. That's two. There's Ahmad Chalabi. That's three. Gosh, I could go on all night, and I bet if I put my mind to it I could name all -- what, 20,000 Arabs in Iraq who are genuinely grateful, and seem to understand the West and appreciate its ways. (The Kurds are another matter.) Why, of course they do -- they've all spent at least 25 years in that West. But what about the rest of the Muslim Arabs in Iraq, the 20 million or so (deducting for the Kurds)? Out of those 20 million, let's not stick to 20,000, but make it 50,000. No, let's go wild -- let's say there are 100,000 Muslim Arabs (i.e. not counting the Kurds, and not counting the Christians who worked as the house staff -- cooks, drivers, etc. -- for Saddam Hussein and then did the same for the American generals and high civilians in the Green Zone) who are truly grateful.
Well, that just isn't enough. That just is not enough on which to base a policy. There are some very nice Iraqis, and the Americans in Washington and in Baghdad have met every single last one of them. That's what they have to realize. Emerson wrote something called "Representative Men." Well, the problem with the Iraq policy is partly that it was based, and continues to be based, on "Unrepresentative Men." And women too -- like that girl who hugged the dead Marine's parents at that Washington soiree. Sentimental, a crowd-pleasing, and the most unrepresentative Iraqi you could possibly find. Fun for the crowd, but cruel for the spectators at home, who were being offered the equivalent of a Potemkin-village Iraq.

[Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2005 08:41 PM]

#3.

"After the dust settles we attack the winner...Is that so wrong?"
-- from a posting above

Not wrong, but not necessary. The dust will not settle. The Sunni-Shi'a split will remain, with the fault line not along the Iran-Iraq border, but within Iraq. Let the Sunnis and the Shi'a receive outside help. The Shi'a help is likely to consist of basijis, True Believers. Those who hate the Islamic Republic of Iran will be glad to see them go, as cannon fodder, making their own task of undoing the Islamic Republic easier. In the mess, the Americans can concentrate on destroying or heavily damaging Iran's science project -- which must take precedence over everything else.

The dust will not settle, and there will be no winner to "attack." But there will be resources of all kinds, and upheaval of all kinds. And we want upheavals. We should welcome upheavals all over the Muslim countries, one damn upheaval after another, until the Infidels or enough of them have taken their crash courses in Islam, and a new understanding of what needs to be done can be shared between North America and Western Europe. The spectacle of intra-Muslim warfare, with the traditional ways of that warfare (no more American kid-gloves, Geneva-convention stuff -- that's for Infidels), will do much to spoil the Da'wa pitch that is being made to vulnerable Infidels in the West who are casting about on a spiritual search, or on a search for some ready-made vehicle to express their alienation, even hatred, of their circumambient society -- and along comes Islam to fit the bill.

No, the dust won't settle. It can't. But American troops right now are being asked to move heaven and earth to create an "Iraqi" army, and an "Iraqi" police, and to move heaven and earth to make sure that Sunnis and Shi'a create a democratic Peaceable Kingdom. Why? Why would that help us contain Islam? What is the sense in this? It is machiavellian in reverse. How ignorant of Islam and of Iraq must some of the policymakers be, and how blind to the possibilities (blind because willfully timid) of other, more effective, less profligate, policies?

[Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2005 10:30 PM]

A good deal, perhaps almost everything, that can or needs to be said about Iraq has already been said at Jihad Watch. This includes: what was rational and justified, and what was not, in both the initial invasion and then in what that invasion and occupation turned into; why the war was won long ago (and “victory” claimed on these pages); why the “Iraqis” do not exist and in any case will never compromise as required with one another, and why this is not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing; and how ethnic and sectarian fissures and economic fissures are already present in Iraq -- they do not have to be created or even encouraged by Infidels (and the third main fissure, that between haves and have-nots, may also turn out to be relevant). These fissures need only be exploited by the merest act: the act of withdrawal and thereby ceasing to prevent such fissures from growing and being acted upon, as they already are.

Press and Pentagon, to find what you want, on any topic you need, just google away. Saves time, saves effort. And just as the evidence suggests that more and more members of the press are not only visiting this site regularly and, not surprisingly, by dint of constant repetition certain themes have been introduced permanently into their consciousnesses, then the same can hold true for the Pentagon, even the State Department. At the Pentagon and State one hopes that those on the European desks will begin to express their anxiety about the islamization of Western Europe, and do battle over the right policy to be adapted toward Islam and the instruments of Jihad with those who, until now, have been in charge of such matters -- that is, those who have been in charge, often disastrously, of the Middle Eastern desks. Why not just put whatever subject you are looking for into the Search Box, click, pull up, read, and then circulate, or crib if you wish, to your heart’s content?

That would cost nothing. It might save one hundred billion dollars. Or two hundred billion. But who’s counting?

[Posted by Hugh at November 5, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:47 PM

November 2, 2006
Fitzgerald: If we leave, will "the jihadists win"?
Sunni Arab Jihadists come in various kinds. There are those who have received the most attention in the American press: the volunteers who arrive from outside Iraq, and who are considered to be part of the local succursale of Al Qaeda. There are the supporters of Saddam Hussein and his regime (often called Ba'athists). There are those Sunnis who are Iraqis, who were never treated well by the regime, but who nonetheless do not wish to see a transfer of power (and thus of money) to the Shi'a.

Many, in all three groups, are convinced that if only the Americans leave, they will be able to inherit Iraq. But they are wrong. And it is wrong to simply assume that they know what they are talking about, and that an American withdrawal would lead to a "victory for Jihadists" (i.e., for Sunni Arabs -- we'll get to the Shi'a in a minute).

Why? Why should we all be fearful of withdrawing, or fearful of voting for candidates who support such a withdrawal, if such a withdrawal will not lead to a "victory for Jihadists" but rather to such constant warfare, of all sides against all sides, that in the ensuing chaos there will be no chance for some "Jihadist victory"?

Those who blackmail us into supporting the continued American presence in Iraq keep referring to the "victory of the Jihadists." They appear, that is, to share the convictions and predictions of the Sunni Arabs who are now fighting against the Americans as the symbol and support of the current Shi'a-dominated regime. But if the Americans leave, what will happen? Will the Shi'a Arabs be readier to compromise? Or will they be able to unleash their own forces without the staying hand of the American soldiers, who carefully observe all the rules of warfare and try to get the hopeless Muslim soldiers to do the same?

Will the Shi'a, who outnumber the Sunni Arabs by more than 3 to 1, suddenly cease to outnumber them? Will the weaponry they have acquired, from Saddam Hussein's armories, from the Americans, and from the Iranians, suddenly cease to exist? Will the training they have received as "Iraqi" soldiers and "Iraqi" police over the past few years simply be forgotten? Will they not know how to defend themselves, or to go on the offensive? And what country shares the longest and most important border with Iraq, the one most easily reached and most easily crossed, the one that is not reached by a long trek through the desert? Is it Sunni-populated Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Syria, or is it rather Shi'a-populated Iran?

Many simply do not think beyond the horizon of whatever phrase is repeated to them often enough. Told again and again that "if we pull out, the Jihadists will win," they then proceed to believe, or to think, or to think they think, "yes, that's right, if we pull out the Jihadists will win, won't they, and we musn't let that happen." How many will ask: what does this phrase "the Jihadists will win" mean? Who are these "Jihadists"? Is it the Sunnis? Is it the Shi'a? Is it various kinds of Sunnis and various kinds of Shi'a? What does it mean when the word "Jihadist" is used to apply to some Muslims, but not others, in Iraq or elsewhere? And if the "Jihadists" are, say, Sunni Arabs, and if the Sunni Arabs constitute only 19% of the population while the Shi'a Arabs constitute 60-65%, with almost all the rest being non-Arab Kurds who have their own need to supplant the Sunni Arabs in Kirkuk and Mosul, then just how easy will it be for those "Jihadists" to prevail? And with Shi'a Iran next door, will they be able to prevail? Or will they instead have to rely on aid -- money, volunteers, and weaponry -- from such Sunni states as Egypt, Jordan, and above all, Saudi Arabia? And if that is to happen, won't Iran supply the same to its co-religionists? And then what?

Does it matter "then what?" Does it matter if the Muslim states are forced to use up their men, their money, their war materiel, their attention, and to worry about Shi'a revolts in eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and worry about Hizballah volunteers arriving? And wouldn’t the Maronites, and the Druse, and the Sunnis of Lebanon, breathe a sigh of relief as those Hizballah volunteers marched off to Iraq?

Impossible, you say? Not at all.

Bad, you say, because Turki al-Faisal and King Abdullah and Mubarak and all their friends and sympathizers -- James Baker, Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton (no, he's more in the 'two-state-solution' line, the line being promoted everywhere behind the scenes by the very active Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group) e tutti quanti -- say it would be bad?

"Instability" is bad in the Muslim countries, is it?

Was the Iran-Iraq War a good thing or a bad thing? Tell me.

I mean, of course, good for Infidels, not good for the Camp of Islam. Please don't confuse the two. Not now. And not ever again.

[

Posted by Hugh at November 2, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:48 PM

November 2, 2006
Fitzgerald: Obvious questions

The question directed this week to the National Security Council press office was straightforward: "Has the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met with any American official, either military or civilian, since the U.S. invasion in 2003?" The answer reveals the extent to which the Bush administration is now, and always has been, out of its depth in Iraq. – From this Bandar Beacon (Washington Post) article, October 27, 2006.

What should have been an obvious question about why Sistani never ever met with Bremer or any American official save for Khalilzad (a Sunni but still a Muslim in Shi'a eyes -- the reverse is not always true), was not asked in the so-called Major Media (Bandar Beacon, New Duranty Times, etc.) until a few days ago. No one wanted to puncture the comforting balloon of illusion. No one thought that perhaps the Shi’a Lobby that had been so successful could have been mistaken. No one thought that the claque that had applauded the Great Sistani at My Weekly Standard (Gerecht and Schwartz, especially) and National Review (Lowry) could possibly be leading them astray. (That claque also included certain Shi’a commentators, such as the too-influential Fouad Ajami. In his tellingly mistitled “The Foreigner’s Gift” – it should have been “The Infidel’s Gift” and Ajami, if he reflects, will admit at least to himself the correctness of that observation – he tells of how deeply impressed he was with Sistani, who of course had no objections to meeting with fellow Shi’a Ajami.)

Now the Shi’a Lobby has had its day, having through a whole series of charming and plausible and of course westernized and secularized and deeply unrepresentative men (Makiya, Chalabi, Allawi, and others) managed to charm and inveigle those making American policy into invading Iraq, as the Shi’a very much wanted. They have also made sure that nothing was done early on to prevent the transfer of power, through whatever means necessary (even that purple-thumbed affair, about which the Shi’a were so enthusiastic, and for such obvious, but apparently not obvious enough, reasons), to the Shi’a. And now, although the Shi’a Lobby -- Taheri, and Rend al-Rahim, and Vali Nasr -- are still in there manfully pitching their woo, it is the time of the Sunni Lobby to step forward.

And it is. It is headed by Turki al-Faisal, ambassador of Saudi Arabia, and ably assisted by James Baker -- whose Commission will offer a face-saving way to get out of Iraq, if only Bush will take it. But it will also offer the same dreary and dangerous mixture as before, complete with doing the bidding of the Saudis, and making sure the Sunnis in Iraq are protected instead of welcoming the natural growth of Sunni-Shni’a hostilities, and not only in Iraq. And, not to be overlooked, it will recommend renewing pressure on Israel by means of that idiotic (because ignorant of Islamic triumphalism) policy of pushing that "two-state solution" -- a policy that squares with the four who make up that infamously windy “Quartet.”

Visitors to Jihad Watch knew all about this long ago, and were told serenely the truth about Sistani, even when the likes of Tom Friedman were suggesting that Sistani was just the man to receive the next Nobel Prize for Peace. Remember? Or have you forgotten?

If you have, here is one among many discussions of Sistani that sustained you all along:

MARCH 21, 2005
Fitzgerald: Sistani for Nobel?

Everyone will have his own startling encounter with Islam -- the real thing, not what Muslim apologists, hoping to give everyone a carefully-circumscribed "peek into the Koran" (and let's make sure that none of these unwary Infidels manages to read anything beyond the Michael Sells "Approaching the Qur'an" and by all means, keep them from looking into the Hadith or the Sira), have on offer. It is almost always limited to highly selective quotation from the Qur'an. The Hadith, and the Sira -- sorry, off limits for now.

One keeps being surprised at how little people think they need to know before making grand pronouncements. Yesterday, amused by the latest display of vacuity and portentousness by Tom Friedman, nominating -- modestly -- Ali al-Sistani for the Nobel Prize -- I went to www.sistani.org to look around. There, between Sistani's complete banning of chess (and to think that checkmate is merely the Persian "shakh mat"), and his discussions of all the usual subjects that inquiring Muslims wish to know about, from whether it is okay to marry the sister of a man you have sodomized, or who has sodomized you (I forget which) to whether your canonical prayers count if you haven't performed the wudu (ablutions) correctly -- you know, all the stuff that you want to know, was something else, and that something was all about what is considered by Sistani and those who seek his guidance to be "Najis" or "unclean."

If you click on "Muslim Laws" on the left, and then, once a list comes up, click on "najis things," you will get a list -- #84 -- and if you then go a little further, and click on the menu where, among those unclean things, the "kafir" (which is to say, the Unbeliever, that is to say -- You and I, Dear Reader) you will get a further discussion of how, in the wonderful, "moderate" Islam of the al-Sistani variety, the Unbeliever, the Infidel, the Kafir (guilty of "kufr" or "ingratitude" for failing to receive the Revelation of the Last of the Prophets in the right, accepting, submissive way) is viewed.

So here, for everyone out in Ames, Iowa, is just a little sample of what you are missing, and what one suspects that Mohammed Fahmy, and Tariq Ramadan, and Hamid Dabashi, and Zeinab Bahrani, and a cast of hundreds of millions, would prefer that you not inquire into too deeply. And please, whatever you do, in order to accommodate them, at least promise that you will NOT read the websites www.dhimmitude.org and www.faithfreedom.org and www.co-jet.org and www.jihadwatch.org, and certainly do NOT read anything by Bat Ye'or, but especially do not read "Islam and Dhimmitude" or "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam." And do not read Ibn Warraq's "Why I Am Not a Muslim." And let's not even talk about Robert Spencer. These books will only confuse you. And never pay attention to a man named Ali Sina or any of those ex-Muslims who appear at his website. Never google the name "Habib Malik" to read what he has to say about the historic relationship of Islam to Christianity; never read a similar article by James V. Schall, a professor at Georgetown; never take a peek at Western scholars of Islam whose work may be sampled in the anthology The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

Here is what you can find at www.sistani.org:

"84. The following ten things are essentially najis: 1. Urine 2. Faeces 3. Semen 4. Dead body 5. Blood 6. Dog 7. Pig 8. Kafir 9. Alcoholic liquors 10. The sweat of an animal who persistently eats najasat [i.e., unclean things].

108. The entire body of a Kafir, including his hair and nails, and all liquid substances of his body, are najis.

109. If the parents, paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of a minor child are all kafir, that child is najis, except when he is intelligent enough, and professes Islam. When, even one person from his parents or grandparents is a Muslim, the child is Pak (The details will be explained in rule 217).

110. A person about whom it is not known whether he is a Muslim or not, and if no signs exist to establish him as a Muslim, he will be considered Pak. But he will not have the privileges of a Muslim, like, he cannot marry a Muslim woman, nor can he be buried in a Muslim cemetery."

So who wants to second the nomination of Al-Sistani for the Nobel Prize? Anyone out there in Ames, Iowa?

[Posted by Hugh at November 2, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:50 PM

Whats funny about the lets stay in Iraq forever crowd not one of them has given a coherent reason to stay or how Iraq benefits us outside of some Bushco oneliners.

Hugh's lookin pretty good by comparison, at least he's done his home in comparison to those who are slaming him.

Posted by: waltc at September 10, 2007 10:53 PM

October 20, 2006
Fitzgerald: Realists and fantasists

Much has been made in Washington about so-called "neo-cons" and their presumed connection to the Mearsheimer-Walt fantasm, that "unified Israel lobby." But the two lobbies that have mattered most in the tarbaby Iraq disaster are the Americans who, instead of seeing Islam as it is, have either cheered for the Shi'a (sometimes without quite realizing it), and those who wish to do the bidding of Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

In the former category we have many who write for My Weekly Standard: Reuel Gerecht, the ineffable Stephen Schwartz, and less naive than the others but still a cheerleader for the Iraq business, Amir Taheri. Others who have thought the Americans have a stake in making Iraq safe for Shi'ism, rather than in weakening the camp of Islam by allowing Iraq to dissolve into permanent sectarian and ethnic hostilities (at whatever level), include Fouad Ajami and Vali Nasr. Indeed, the latter's soft-voiced presence at one of the military schools no doubt inhibits his colleagues even from considering the idea that the task of American policy is not to strengthen this or that branch of Islam, but to do nothing to dampen, and to do everything to exploit for the sake of Infidels, the sectarian and ethnic divisions that present themselves on a platter in Iraq.

In the latter category we have the so-called "realists" of the James Baker school. These people are Yesterday's Men, who knew little and cared less about Islam, and who continue to think of the problem as manageable if only we throw Israel to the wolves -- or rather, if only we do as the Sunni rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia wish us to do. Yet they themselves and their countries continue to be described as "staunch allies" of the United States. Baker is a Sunni Arab man -- that is, he's all in favor of listening and believing Mubarak, and Abdullah, and above all the daggers-and-dishdasha plutocrats of Riyadh, when they tell us (and what else would you expect them now to be telling us?) that:

1) we have to stay in Iraq or somehow arrange a conference that will allow in other -- i.e., Sunni-- Arab forces. In other words, we must shore up the Sunnis in Iraq, lest the "Shi'a crescent" solidify; and

2) we must push Israel harder and harder to give up more territory in order to win a victory for our "staunch allies" among the "moderate" Sunni forces -- "moderate" Saudi Arabia leading the pack -- so that they can win back those on the Sunni Arab street who may be tempted to see Iran and the Shi'a as their champion against Israel.

All perfectly predictable, all perfectly plausible -- if you ignore the promptings and full menace of Islam, and in so doing fail to understand that we should work to divide and demoralize the camp of Islam in Iraq and outside Iraq (if it is allowed to happen within Iraq, it will automatically happen outside Iraq). Those two points make sense if you fall for the latest scheme to have the Americans and Europeans, in the hope of buying time, devote their efforts to winning hearts and minds, or to something else as yet unthought-of: throwing Israel to the wolves, not for the first time and not for the last.

Wouldn't it be useful for the Lands of the Infidels, if in addition to the pedagogic spectacle of Sunnis and Shi'as in violent conflict over power in Iraq, that that conflict would have spillover effects in neighboring countries, and as the Shi'a-Sunni battles in Iraq are observed by Muslims, there will be inevitable repercussions, in Pakistan, in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, even possibly in Yemen.

And the same split might be observed among those who, in this country, have failed to take "weakening the camp of Islam as their goal" but rather, in supporting the "good" or "moderate" or "less political" Muslims, with some favoring Shi'a, and some Sunnis, and others favoring a class they describe, without more, as "moderate Muslims." In this corner one would have Gerecht, Kagan, Kristol, Schwartz, Vali Nasr, and others who found all those Shi'a in exile -- Chalabi, Makiya, Rend al-Rahim Francke, Allawi, attractive figures, secular figures who have spent decades in the West and who, even when they were in Iraq, were part of a Baghadi intellectual (and social) elite, from families prominent even before the arrival of Saddam Hussein, and who often benefitted from the Jesuit-run Baghdad College, which allowed them to become, in a sense, more secular,less narrowly Islamic, than would have happened had they remained in the schools of Muslim Iraq. These people managed to convince so many -- Bernard Lewis and Richard, among those not in the government, and Cheney and Wolfowitz in the government -- that the Americans would be greated as "liberators," that wonderful things would happen as that "liberated" Iraq would express its gratitude toward the Americans in unfeigned and permanent friendship, the whole country now to be skillfully guided politically and rewakened morally by such people as the political figure Ahmad Chalabi, the writer Kanan Makiya, and many others. It also helped that Fouad Ajami, the one Arab commentator whom members of the Administration trusted, a Lebanese Shi'a by descent, was also an enthusiast for the American takeover of Iraq. That this would lead to one "wonderful" thing -- the transfer of power to the Shi'a from the Sunnis -- should have been clear. What was not understood is that is what these plausible Shi'a supporters wanted, and they were prepared to ignore, or had forgotten, or as by-now thoroughly Westernized men themselves could not quite believe, the nature of Iraq, the aggression, the hostility, the refusal to comrompise with political enemies, the meretriciousness, the deep and permanent hostility toward Infidels -- none of which should have surprised them, but these secular westernized people got their own country wrong, got the nature of Islam itself, and the attitudes that naturally arise in societis suffused with Islam, wrong.

But if in this corner were those Americans persuaeded or inveigled by the unrepresentative representatives of Shi'a in Iraq, in that corner were all those still so wrongly described as "realists." These were and are not "realists" but rather, appeasers of Islam, those who for years made not a move to diminish OPEC revenues, who still seem oblivious to such weapons of Jihad as Da'wa and demographic conquest (the islamization of Europe is something of which they appear to be entirely unaware, or at least unconcerned), and include the usual suspects -- Scowcroft, Brzezinski, James Baker. If these people were opposed to the Iraq War, they were opposed for all the wrong reasons. They were opposed not because they knew that Bush was so obstinately stupid that he would actually seek as a goal the very opposite of what he should have been seeking to achieve, and to squander lives, money, and materiel in order to dampen sectarian and ethnic divisions rather than recognizing that such divisions are ancient and unavoidable (for Islam does not encourage any spirit of compromise with one's enemies but rather a mentality that sees victor and vanquished) and from the Infidel point of view are most welcome. These "realists" were or are not happy about the Iraq War, but for all the wrong reasons -- that the transfer of power to the majority Shi'a weakens Sunnis in Iraq and offends Sunnis outside Iraq, and that it worries "our Egyptian friends" and "our Jordanian friends" and above all "our Saudi friends."

Let them go at it. Let those in this country who fell for the Shi'a arguments and who still think that Al-Sistani is practically Albert Schweitzer go to polemical war. This includes the contributors and editors at My Weekly Standard -- see Fouad Ajami's remarks in his last book, the one tellingly titled "The Foreigner's Gift," when it should more accurately have been titled "The Infidel's Gift." But of course Islam is the one subject Fouad Ajami will not touch, can not touch, and that is why he has had his uses but is severely limited now in his value in explaining things to us: he can't touch the main subject, and won't. Let these men go to polemical war against the Baker-Scowcroft-Brzezinski brigade of completely unrealistic "realists" -- unrealistic because they still remain, after so many years, unable or unwilling to comprehend the real nature of Islam and the islamization of Western Europe (which is surely the most important problem, after the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran).

Let them knock each other out, checkmate each other.

Meanwhile, those who are disappointed and alarmed in their own ruling classes and elites who have failed to study Islam and failed to instruct others in the nature of Islam, and have already gone off to study on their own (and their numbers are increasing every day), are giving new, legitimate meaning to that otherwise obnoxious bumpersticker: Question Authority.

When the "authorities" are at the level of such former CIA analysts as Michael Scheuer or Reuel Gerecht, or such former high officials as James Baker, Brzezinski, Scowcroft, then their authority deserves to be questioned -- from first to last. They have not earned, and in fact they have un-earned, any claim on our attention or respect.

[Posted by Hugh at October 20, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:53 PM

Personally, I’m enjoying the show. It’s probably not alcohol. More likely something like a Scarface “Say Hello To My Little Friend” moment.

Life gets easier when you just resign yourself to the realities of late term democracy though. It becomes less painful to watch. The absurd begins to make sense.

Posted by: pez at September 10, 2007 10:55 PM

October 4, 2006
Fitzgerald: Dividing the enemy

Tens of millions of Muslims have been permitted to settle within the lands of Western Europe during the past several decades. They have even been extended every conceivable government benefit and kindness to do so – subsidized housing, free education, free medical care. No matter what the nation-state, no matter what its political orientation (liberal or conservative) or where it rates on the level of social tolerance, no matter whether the Muslims in question have arrived from places with some kind of historic, even if at times tenuous connection, to the Infidel land (Pakistanis in England, Somalis in Italy) or with no connection at all (Kurds in Sweden, Moroccans in Holland), the results have been remarkably similar all over Western Europe. Large communities of people are now in place, consisting of adherents of a belief-system that is much more encompassing than anything that the Western world now understands by the word “religion,” and that teaches them to regard as enemy-held territory the various Infidel lands behind whose lines they have been permitted to settle.

And behind those enemy lines, they are not required to abandon their often fanatical and hostile faith, and few do abandon it. Often the later generations cling ever more fervently to it, and implacably make demands for changes in the legal and political institutions, and social arrangements, and cultural assumptions, that characterize the advanced liberal democracies of the Western world. Even when such demands are rebuffed -- as in the grotesque and repeated attempts to limit the Western practice of freedom of speech, whether by a Danish newspaper, or by a Dutch politician or film-maker, or an English civil servant, or a French lycee’s philosophy teacher (the indispensable “prof de philo”), or even by the Pope himself -- they nonetheless are made unembarrassedly and pursued relentlessly. The constant pressure naturally affects the practice of free speech, which should be natural and has now become a self-conscious act of defiance -- defiance of those who come from outside, who would not have produced, nor have tolerated for one minute, the individual liberties enshrined in the American Constitution or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and who are trying, as cunningly as they can, to destroy those individual rights within the Western countries in order to ensure that there is no freedom of conscience (so as to prevent Muslims in the West from leaving the religion), and to render Islam immune to all potential criticism. Calibans are attempting to order Prosperos about, an undertaking made easier because so many can no longer tell Caliban and Prospero apart.

Within the Infidel lands, the Infidels now must endure daily lives far more unpleasant and unsettled and constrained, far more expensive, and far more physically dangerous, than they were before the large-scale presence of Muslims in their lands. The Camp of Islam, as represented by Muslims in the West and their rich and powerful supporters in the oil states, have also worked to divide the Western alliance. And they have been successful in distancing the countries of Western Europe from their historic ally and political and military rescuer, the United States of America. To this end, Muslims and their collaborators within Europe, who are sometimes paid for their efforts and sometimes merely reflect an overlapping of views, have played upon the pre-existing mental pathologies of anti-Americanism and antisemitism. In France anti-Americanism appears to be a feature of long standing. Antisemitism, meanwhile, has been a permanent fixture among an irreducible percentage of the population in any Western country, impervious even to the now-recognized consequences of what happened between the period 1933 and 1945, beginning in, but hardly limited to, Nazi Germany. The divisions that have been caused as a result of these appeals, and the rivalry for the fat contracts that Saudis and other Arabs can dangle in front of businessmen from different nations should their respective countries promote Saudi or larger Muslim Arab interests, hold a lesson.

The lesson is: Two Can Play That Game. It is extraordinary how little attention -- none, really -- has been paid in the discussion of Jihad and Islam to how to sow divisions within the Camp of Islam, or at least do nothing to hinder the natural divisions from widening. Causing divisions will lead in turn to a general demoralization that will weaken the Camp of Jihad.

But so far one side has only wielded the division weapon. Division has been accomplished in the West in a few decades, and threatens to change the moral and political landscape of Europe if trends are not halted and reversed. The Camp of the Infidels has never been united. India, the country that suffered the most from conquest by Islam, for decades appeared to be seen by the American government purely in Cold-War terms. Nehru, and especially his foreign minister Krishna Menon, were seen as too sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Partly this was a function of misperception, of confusing studies in England in the early part of the last century with the influence of the Fabian Society, and later, a subscription to the Left Book Club of Victor Gollancz. Overlaid upon this was the Bandung Conference, where the “non-allied” nations allied themselves, in their worldview, with the foreign policy and attitudes most favorable to the Soviet Union, least favorable to the United States. And the American government, beginning with the Dulles brothers, saw Pakistan as a natural ally. Unlike those slippery fellows Nehru and Menon, those Pakistani generals could be counted on in the Great Campaign of the Cold War. For what was Islam? Islam was this: A Bulwark Against Communism. The Baghdad Pact became CENTO, a “Mutual Defense Pact,” by which fiction the Americans and the British supplied military training and equipment to Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, and those countries, in turn, took the equipment and had their soldiers receive the training.

CENTO collapsed formally in 1958 (it had collapsed before that) when the body of Iraqi “strongman” Nuri es-Said was dragged, and mutilated at each stop, through the streets of Baghdad, and Iraq pulled out. Turkey continued to be an ally, because for Turkey the Soviet Union was simply the latest embodiment of its historic enemy Russia. Iran stayed an ally, of sorts, until the Shah, like Nuri es-Said, fell. But Pakistan never stopped being a favored recipient of American aid of all kinds, including lots of military aid (even F-16s). It continued to be so for decades, even when the Taliban were first hatched in Pakistan’s madrasas, then sent back to capture Afghanistan, and were given diplomatic and other kinds of support by the government of Pakistan. The cushion provided by American military and economic aid permitted A.Q. Khan, once he had returned to Pakistan from stealing nuclear secrets in the West, to pay for the nuclear program that led, finally, to the production of the “Islamic” bomb which made A. Q. Khan the national hero of Pakistan, and the one untouchable figure in the entire country.

And in the Western alliance itself, over the past thirty years, Arab Muslims, wielding not the “oil weapon” (no such weapon exists, for they are eager to sell the oil) but rather the “money weapon” (that is, the revenues that come from the sale of that oil), have dangled contracts, bribed officials, bought up journalists, and arrived at secret covenants. In short, they have done all the things that have turned much of public opinion in the Western world against Israel -- cunningly painted not as a victim of the endless siege or Lesser Jihad being waged against it but as an aggressor, denying “national” rights to a “Palestinian people,” as the local Arabs in Gaza and the “West Bank” were deliberately renamed after the Six-Day War. The results can be seen all around us. Appeasement of Islam continues at the level of the nations and especially in the upper reaches of the E.U., where such people as Javier Solana, Chris Patten, Miguel Moratinos, and Romano Prodi (now back in Rome), have parroted and further promoted the Eurabian line on foreign policy.

Matters have not been helped, of course, by having as the American President a gauche and inarticulate figure who fits the European stereotype of a limited American, and who -- even when he is right -- cannot make his case convincingly. A different person, with a different and smoother presentation, aware of and able to appeal to the various fashions or mental vanities of Europeans, could do much to repair relations that must be repaired.

But what is most strange is that the ability of the Muslims to exploit or even to cause or widen divisions in the Camp of Infidels, has not caused anyone in Washington to think that two can play this game, and that the most intelligent way of proceeding is, wherever possible, to divide the Camp of Jihad and Islam. The divisions that most obviously present themselves are three: sectarian, ethnic, and economic. By sectarian divisions, one means primarily the long history of hostility between Sunni and Shi’a. The Americans in Iraq have not caused such hostility; it predates the founding of the American Republic by about a thousand years. It can be seen in the attacks on Shi’a in Pakistan over the past few decades, on the attempt by the Sunni Taliban to wipe out the Shi’a Hazara in Afghanistan, in the contumely with which the Wahhabi (Sunni) Arabs treat the Shi’a in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, in the clashes between Sunni and Shia’ in Yemen and Lebanon, in the growing fury of the Shi’a who make up 70-75% of the population of Bahrain at attempts by the Sunni ruler and local Sunnis to keep the Shi’a permanently down. And in Iraq, whether the Sunni despotism took on the protective coloration of “Ba’athism,” just as in Syria the Alawite dictatorship took on a similar camouflage, the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein made inevitable what the Administration still keeps thinking it can prevent: a struggle, certainly involving killing, and possibly involving open and continuous warfare between Sunnis who will never acquiesce in their loss of power to the Shi’a Arabs, and Shi’a Arabs who will never return to the Sunnis the power they, the Shi’a, at long last possess – political power, and the control of the nation’s wealth that flows automatically from that.

The constant Sunni-Shi’a strife within Iraq is not to be deplored, but to be welcomed, by Infidels. That civil war could attract outside support by Shi’a in Iran and among the Hizballah of Lebanon, who might send volunteers, arms, and money to their co-religionists, while the Sunnis, though greatly outnumbered within Iraq, can expect great sums of money from the rich Arab oil states (especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the U.A.E.), and Sunni volunteers from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, to come flocking in to make sure that the Land of the Two Rivers, the land of the historic Abbasid Caliphate, is not permanently controlled by the “Rafidite dogs” (as Zarqawi called them) the Shi’a. All this ensures that all this violent energy is not being directed at Infidels.

The second great division within Islam, also visible in Iraq, is that between the Arabs and the non-Arab Muslims. Islam has universalist claims but within that pretend-universalism, it is the Arabs, the “Best of Peoples,” to whom, and in whose language, the right revelation of the Qur’an was given, who have always used Islam as it was intended to be used by those who created it: as a vehicle to both justify and promote Arab conquest of more advanced, wealthier, more settled, more numerous non-Arab populations. Everything about Islam promotes the idea of the desirability of being Arab. Non-Muslim Arabs pray five times a day turning toward Mecca in Arabia. They emulate a seventh-century Arab in his mores and manners, or those of his Companions, and do so even when they are the descendants of Hindus and Buddhists in the distant East Indian archipelago, or some misfit in Marin County who has converted or “reverted” to Islam as the Last Stop on an increasingly desperate Spiritual Search. And finally, the taking of an Arab name – so exciting for some Western converts -- and even the manufacturing of a false Arab lineage (sometimes including direct descent from Muhammad) -- helps convince non-Arab Muslims, those wannabe Arabs, that they have managed to become that splendid thing, an Arab.

But the linguistic, cultural, and political imperialism of the Arabs, which is part of Islam, is not universally welcomed. The Berber writer Kateb Yacine, possibly the most important Berber cultural figure, refused to write in Arabic, and in the French he chose was scathing on the subject of Arab domination of the Berbers. Arab militias supported fully by the government of Sudan have now murdered 400,000 non-Arab black Africans of Darfur. Sudan, in its attempts to pursue its policies and avoid Western constraints, is fully supported in turn by Egypt and other members of the Arab League. That point needs to be emphasized -- not the Sudanese government’s genocidal campaign, but the Arab League’s unanimous support for the Sudanese murders of black Africans. In Malaysia, in Indonesia, even among some Pakistanis in the West (though not in Pakistan itself) there are expressions here and there of dismay or even disgust at the forced arabization, or even the self-arabization, of so many Muslims. In Iraq, the attitude of the Kurds toward the American forces, the unfeigned friendliness of many does reflect the understanding that only the Americans have protected the Kurds from the Arabs. But it may also reflect something else. As non-Arabs, the Kurds have another identity to which to appeal -- an identity which may rival, or at least undercut, their identity as Muslims. Arabs have no such other identity; Arabness, Uruba, reinforces the Muslim identity. Indeed, it even helps to persuade Christian Arabs to adopt as their own the Muslim worldview, so entangled is the notion of “Arabness” with the idea of Islam. This helps to explain the well-known phenomenon of the islamochristian Arab, who parrots the Muslim line on Israel, and also defends, or attempts to defend Islam from any criticism in the West.

What would an independent Kurdistan do for the Infidels? It would have immediate consequences in Iran. For the Kurds of Iran would be inspired to rise up against the Persians who rule them, and to attempt not merely greater autonomy, but to free themselves from Iran and to become part of Kurdistan. This would use up Iranian energies and war materiel. The Americans could supply the Kurds with whatever equipment, training, and other help they wished, and could also offer diplomatic support by intervening with Turkey, to assure it that the American government would extract from the Kurds a guarantee that whatever territorial demands were made on Iran or Syria, none would be made on the Turkish-populated areas of eastern Anatolia. This could be presented as an offer the Turks (whose army has been trained and equipped by the Americans) will see the wisdom of accepting now that the Cold War is over, and Turkey is no longer necessary to American policymakers in quite the same way.

Kurds in Iran becoming bolder in their attacks on the forces of the Islamic Republic, and possibly aided by Kurdistan (in turn aided by the Americans), would have effects in Iran itself on other disaffected minorities -- Baluchis, and Arabs in Ahwaz and elsewhere in Khuzistan, where Iran’s oilfields are located. Barely half of the population of the Islamic Republic of Iran is Persian. Should even the Azeris join in, it will be impossible for what remains of the Persian Empire to hold together. And in attempting to hold it together, the regime in Tehran will necessarily have to divert all kinds of resources and attention that might make it easier to halt, or slow down, its nuclear program. In any case, members of disaffected minorities are more likely to want to prevent the Iranian government from acquiring such weaponry, as well as the attendant power and glory that would accrue to the regime from such acquisition. They might aid in sabotaging or at least reporting on the nuclear program.

Finally, an independent Kurdistan would or could be a model to other non-Arab Muslims, beginning but not ending with the Berbers of the Kabyle (and the Berbers of France, who might find less appeal in Islamic unity if their resentments of the Arabs can be encouraged).

And finally, there is one last great division in the Camp of Islam. That is the economic division between the sparsely populated and fabulously rich oil-and-natural-gas states -- Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, Libya -- and the poor ones, which is to say every Muslim state that does not have the bonanza of that accident of geology that has made the Camp of Islam, over the past third of a century, such a threat to Infidels.

The sectarian and ethnic divisions within Islam are best exploited by Infidels doing nothing. Indeed, they can only be exploited fully when the American government pulls its troops out of Iraq and lets the real, unavoidable, permanent hostilities -- or ineffectual attempts to dampen them -- begin in Iraq, and to have the inevitable effects on Muslims outside Iraq, that they will have.

Similarly, the last of the three great exploitable divisions within the camp of Islam, the economic gap between oil-and-gas rich states and all the others, can be best exploited for Infidel purposes not by doing something, but by doing nothing. By ceasing to support Muslim states with great and continuing amounts of aid of all kinds -- economic and even military -- the Infidel world will end what has become a disguised Jizyah, received by Muslims as by right, and given by Infidel donors as if by necessity, to be continued for fear of offending Muslims, for fear of the Muslim reaction. The Americans have given Egypt more than $60 billion. In return, Egypt remains a world center of anti-Americanism and antisemitism. Its population, in every opinion poll, consistently shows itself to be imbued with hostility toward America. The Egyptian government, with its double game, has done everything it can to stymie efforts to effectively protect the black Africans of Darfur. It has also steadily allowed and even possibly encouraged the smuggling of weaponry into Gaza. It has done everything to inveigle the American government to “deal with Iran” by -- of course, what did you expect? -- pushing Israel to yield still more territory, to make still more concessions, in order to weaken the supposed appeal, as the Egyptians put it to credulous American officials, of Shi’a Iran to Sunnis in the Middle East. No matter what the issue, of course, the Arabs will always find a way to reinterpret and present events as dependent on further Israeli concessions.

If the Western world stops giving Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and the “Palestinians” aid, that will clear the psychological air. And what is more, it will force the poorer Arabs to go to the rich Arabs for support. The “Palestinians” who by the tens of thousands are in these competing “security services” should be forced to give up their violent idleness and forced to work. They should no longer able to count on permanent Western aid, as so many of them do in their overpopulated, self-primitivized, permanently unviable statelets -- whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by the constant infusion of Western, Infidel, aid. They should be made to cease to treat such aid as akin to the protection money that was the Jizyah (the payments by Infidels to Muslim masters). They should be made to ask their “Arab brothers” for aid. Then two things can happen. The support can be forthcoming. The support can be denied. If forthcoming, it will never be enough for the poorer Arabs, who will resent more and more the unfairness of having to ask for such aid from those who, as fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya, ought to willingly give it. And if such support is given, more will always be requested. And the rich Arabs and even Iranians, if they continue to give, will more and more resent those whom they support. Consider, for example, all the reports of fury in Iran over Iranian aid being sent to Hizballah -- when Iranians at home are suffering.

The other possibility is that such aid will be denied, or nearly denied, with grand promises made (as always), and then no follow through. And that, too, will increase the intra-Muslim resentments and fury.

If one wishes to exploit the divisions within the Camp of Jihad and Islam, then, two things must be done:

1) The Americans must leave Iraq, and leave it promptly, using as an excuse the need to “let the Iraqis make the necessary compromises with each other as people must in a democratic society.” It won’t happen. It can’t happen. But something good for the Infidel camp and bad for the Camp of Islam will be the inevitable result. And the spectacle of internecine warfare, just like the spectacle of internecine warfare in Gaza, is useful for Infidels to observe: it helps give those who need to know it a little taste of what Islamic societies, uncushioned by vast wealth or by Infidel aid, tend towards. That will increase the sectarian and ethnic divisions within the Camp of Islam.

2) The Americans and other Infidels must cease the further transfer of Infidel wealth, beyond the ten trillion transferred so far to pay for oil and gas from Muslim countries since 1973, and the trillions still to be transferred through such sales. That is, the Jizyah of foreign aid to all Muslim polities and peoples must end, and those poorer Muslims forced to get such aid, if they get any, from the fabulously rich Arab and Muslim states of OPEC. That will increase the awareness of stark economic divisions within the Camp of Islam.

Is there more that can be done? Of course there is. But start with #1 and #2. The good results will be visible -- very shortly.

[Posted by Hugh at October 4, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:56 PM

September 13, 2006
Fitzgerald: What did you think of the Iran-Iraq War?

What did you think of the Iran-Iraq War? Did it bother you? Did it please you? Did it please you to know that for eight years the two most aggressive Muslim states were using up money, men, and materiel fighting each other? Did it please you to know that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. lent $60 billion to Iraq in order to shore up the Sunni despotism ("Ba'athism") there in its fight with Shi'a Iran? Are you sorry that war ended?

What would you think if within Iraq Sunnis and Shi'a fought? Would this displease you? Would you be worried that in this or that area, while fighting for their lives, the local Arabs in, say, Anbar Province, somehow were -- as Bush and Cheney direly warn us -- to have time to create a little Al-Qaeda empire? Would it also have to fight the Shi'a, or would they give it a pass? Or would this new terrible terrorist training ground, that we are trying to avoid, be created rather in the territories where the Shi'a control?

But wait -- don't the Shi'a involved in terrorism already control an entire country, called Iran? Why would it be so very important to "stop the terrorists over there" [in Iraq] because "otherwise they will follow us over here" [in the United States], when they have already followed us over here? They need very little space in which to plan subway bombings -- a flat in south London will do, or an apartment overlooking Prinsengracht, or in Alcala de Henares. No, the worry over Iraq becoming a "terrorist center" is absurd; they will all be fighting one another, and soaking up that money, that men, that materiel, that attention.

But the Administration can't admit that. It is wedded to its "Iraq the Model" notion. Just the other day Cheney announced that "even if it had been known" that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would still have supported the invasion of Iraq. Why? In order to help one group of Muslims get out from under another group of Muslims? In order to ensure the transfer of power from the Sunnis to the Shi'a, which became inevitable as soon as the Sunni despotism of Saddam Hussein was undone?

Why?

The Iran-Iraq War was a good thing for Infidels. The proxy war in the Yemen between Nasser's Egypt and Saudi Arabia was a good thing for Infidels. The threats to the assorted regimes in the Muslim world, which local despots usually manage to deflect outward toward Infidels (Israel, the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, the Pope, anyone or anything at all that smacks of the Infidels), when they are directed at the local regimes, with bombs going off, and security headaches everywhere, are a good thing -- for us, for the Infidels, not for the locals.

And that's all we should care about. Dividing, demoralizing, weakening the Camp of Islam. It can be done. In Iraq it requires only that we stop being there. In other places -- such as with the so-called "Palestinians" -- it requires only that we permanently shut off the Jizyah of foreign aid, and force them to go to their fellow Arabs for money, money that those fellow Arabs have so much of (ten trillion dollars since 1973). It requires that we force other Arab and Muslim states, similarly, to ask for handouts from Kuwait, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Qatar -- and whether the handouts are given, or not given, it doesn't matter: resentments on both sides will grow and grow, just as in Iran many people are furious with the government for what they see as "wasting" Iran's money, their money, on Hizballah and on the "Palestinians."

Ethnic, sectarian, and economic divisions are there, waiting to be exploited. Waiting to be observed by Infidels who, especially in Western Europe, need the kind of spectacle such violence will provide. Do you know what is now going on in Abu Ghraib, since the Iraqis took over? Do you know how desperate the inmates are for the Americans to return? And do you know how the Shi'a militias will behave once the Americans are no longer around? Of course you do. And you don't find yourself terribly anxious about this prospect, do you?

The Administration is obstinate and stupid, almost unhinged. It must be forced out of Iraq, coute que coute. It must not be allowed to deprive us, the inabitants of Infidel world, of the real fruits of our victory, the fruits that were made inevitable by the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime -- and the Administration must be persuaded somehow to stop trying to prevent what it should welcome.

[Posted by Hugh at September 13, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 10:58 PM

That's a year of articles, with a few no doubt left out, and a few no doubt accidentally posted moe than once, on the subject of Iraq. I'll stop there.

Posted by: Hugh at September 10, 2007 11:00 PM

.
As a contribution towards better Humanity, I decided to make an educational video on Kosher & Halal here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDFL6t1jwA
I consider Kosher & Halal Anti-Humanity, now bust me or please, give food a break, stop the nonsense that divide people!
.

Posted by: Live2Eat2Live at September 10, 2007 11:38 PM

Just to crack you up:

Moonbat Fashion:

Giorgio Yer’mami Presents The Essential ‘Peace Scarf’

http://sheikyermami.com/2007/09/10/moonbat-fashion-giorgio-yermami-presents-the-essential-peace-scarf/

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at September 10, 2007 11:39 PM

I'm asking for y'all to forgive me in advance.

Premature withdrawal = combatus interruptus

Posted by: Pelayo at September 10, 2007 11:58 PM

Thank you Hugh.

I had no reason to read those articles, for I have read them all before, most more than once, but the point was well-taken.

The progress of the troop surge in Iraq is real, but is is also short-lived.

Patreus, like every other politician who has mismanaged this war to date in Iraq, and it's ever-changing mission objectives, are guilty of one thing, and one thing only...the failure to comprehend the ideology of Islam and it's adherents...period.

The war should have ended when Hussein was pulled from his spider hole.

Patreus, an admirable career military man, is trying desperately to save face here. He knows damn well of the carnage that will ensue when, not if, the US withdraws from the region, at least as far as 100,000 plus boots on the ground is concerned.

People are finally starting to talk about Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, too little too late I am afraid, and no amount of grandstanding of "they have to get over that historical rift" by the effectively irrelevant Condeleeza Rice at this point, can offset that inevitable end.

Hugh is and has been 100% correct, for YEARS now. He did his homework years before "shock and awe" was even in it's infancy stages of development. Nearly no one else has however, at least not those who were charged with the task of doing so in the first place.

War and morality have no business being conjoined...they never have. Whatever will weaken the Islamists in the long haul benefits the West in totality. Reagan did it in the 80's playing both sides. Why not exploit that advantage again?

The Islamists will undoubtably declare victory after the US withdrawal. This is certain, unless the US kills every male Islamist in the region, which they have neither the will nor the means to accomplish....So what?

The Islamists, specifically Hezbollah, declared victory against Israel the summer before last simply because Israel quit the fight, ceding to global MSM pressure and weak internal leadership. We in the world of the sane know otherwise.

Let them declare victory all they want. Let the world see the Middle East, now unencumbered by US imperialism, that which dimwits like Michael Sheurer say is the reason for all this mess in the first place, see Islam and the Islamists as the dutiful practitioners of the "religion of peace" that they are, killing their own without pause.

I understand Hugh's frustration and share in it myself. There are many here at JW who are simply predisposed to disagree, blinded by old-school US patriotism during wartime, a time that expired in the 1940's for a variety of reasons.

These very same people, in spite of the current events of each passing day in Iraq, are the same people who essentially have not determined a tangible end to declare "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and for good reason....none exists.

The war is not lost, but simply won by the simplest of moves. A move of attrition that will serve the US going forward, for this war against Islam does not end here in Iraq.

One more thing. Message to the esteemed Foehammer. I fully agree about having to deal with Iran's military and uranium-enriching infrastructure before we leave the neighborhood, but Iran and Iraq are effectively, apples and oranges.

Posted by: awake at September 11, 2007 12:03 AM

It’s September 11th.

After six years, a critical mass in the West understands Islam. Thanks to Robert, Hugh, and company for everything you do.

The War in Iraq is a disaster, but it has been a daily learning experience. At $1 trillion over six years, that works out to around $800 per American per year, or about a quarter of our health-care expenses. Thoughts with the military and their families, the ones making the true sacrifices.

Posted by: pez at September 11, 2007 12:17 AM

A few comments on the above,

Posted by: Triumphant_Paladin

"It's not about us giving up against the jihadis but more about how to take the fight to them in a smarter and more meaningful way."

And just what is the “smarter and more meaningful way”?

Paladin doesn’t really know but what he does know is:

“The Americans will be defeated, it's just a matter of when”

This is because (like so many on the left) he does not have the imagination to SEE anything but American defeat.

And then there’s Hugh – my god what a mountain of knowledge he has! And it leads him to all the wrong conclusions. So knowledgable is he that those who do not see the world as he does should be shut up as in (learned a new word here!):

“There should be an epuration of the so-called "conservative media" of such loyalists”

Such loyalists as the ones that believe we must complete the mission in Iraq.
You see it is just to hard and costly to win as in:

“We're tired of it. The voters are tired of it. The soldiers are tired of it. We're sick of it. 880 billion dollars later, 3,350 killed and 25,000 wounded later, we're sick of it.”

Actually, people once exposed to Islam can never be taught to accept democracy, something permanent happens in their heads that makes it impossible as in:

“The belief in the possibility, even the ease of transplanting "democracy" to Iraq ignores the nature of Islam, and how mere mortals, Believers, are not the sources of political legitimacy. The source of political legitimacy is Islam and only Islam. If the ruler is Muslim, he must be obeyed.”

So its just impossible but Hugh agrees that American defeat is really victory as in:

“For Victory, Rightly Understood, Stands Shining Before Us, if Only We Get Out.”

So apparently we are dealing with some form of mutant swamp dwelling human here in that the Islamists will never, ever, be capable of reform or modern democracy, such as:

“The people in Iraq do not believe that it is the expressed will of the people that matters, but rather the will expressed by Allah in Qur'an (and glossed by the Sunnah).”

So the course of action prescribed is to pit the alligators against each other and hope that maybe they won’t come out to eat us. Of course they desparately want to eat us and they are multiplying like crazy and we can’t win and we keep telling ourselves that we can’t win and it’s to costly anyway and besides that WE ARE LOOSING!

Anybody think it might be a good idea to drain the swamp? As in teach the Islamists the democracy dance which requires individual thought and critisism of leaders and that whole analytical thought thing before voting? Maybe stay in Iraq until they at least sort of get it going – anybody think that might diminish the tyranny of Islam – maybe a little?

Anyone remember how many lives it took and how much it cost to teach democracy to that other swamp dwelling subhuman race (that had no history of it and could not POSSIBLY learn it) - the Japanese? 'course it did requre a couple nukes
but then, you do what is necessarry if you want to win.

Posted by: Davegreybeard at September 11, 2007 12:20 AM

When we Invaded Iraq, Saddam had a conventional army that about 80,000 Troops with 40,000 follow on forces destroyed within 30 days

Give 176,000 Troops the same rules of engagement, with the same Issue of weapon systems. Few Iraqis will be left alive. To think we couldn't control Iraq and actively use it's land and Air space to confront Iran. Is one unwilling to give the Military its proper due.

Posted by: flowerknife_us at September 11, 2007 12:31 AM

To all our Europeans allies who will be in the protest on 9/11:

Godspeed.

Posted by: atheling at September 11, 2007 12:36 AM

“teach the Islamists the democracy dance”

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
-The Author of the United States Constitution, James Madison, Federalist #10

Madison later speaks of the proper electorate for a Representative Republic being a ‘chosen body of citizens’, by which he meant lien-free landowning males.

Pure democracy in Iraq is delusional.

http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

Posted by: pez at September 11, 2007 12:43 AM

"Pure democracy in Iraq is delusional.”

As it was with America in 1776 and Japan and Germany and France and South Korea and Taiwan and Italy and South Korea and The Philippines and to many more to mention.

Learned men said these things were impossible then and they say the same thing now – funny how some things never change.

Posted by: Davegreybeard at September 11, 2007 1:18 AM

$70 trillion in unfunded liabilities;
Growing by $3 trillion a year and accelerating;
Gold $700/ounce and rising;
Shed 64,000 goods producing jobs last month;
Importing dependent voters by the millions;
2008 Democratic platform;

Hope you’re right Davegreybeard. We should compare notes in twenty years. In the interim, my kids will learn marksmanship. James Madison was brilliant.

http://coburn.senate.gov/ffm/index.cfm?FuseAction=LatestNews.NewsStories&ContentRecord_id=9476b916-802a-23ad-4bf0-2b4dcee57331&IsPrint=true

Posted by: pez at September 11, 2007 1:40 AM

You are right Pez, it’s to soon to tell yet.

If we come to feel that freedom and democracy cannot win, we will loose. This attitude has never been the feeling of most Americans – but I must admit the defeatist attitude that I see today, particularly in the democrat party has me worried.

The bad news is that Islam is incompatible with democracy and freedom.

The good news is that democracy and freedom is incompatible with Islam.

As we extend and defend democracy and freedom (even imperfectly) Islam will be diminished.

I think the Jihadis recognize the above truth more than we do – it is time we relearned what we used to know about ourselves.

(My grandchildren will also learn to shoot, safely and well)

Posted by: Davegreybeard at September 11, 2007 2:05 AM

Dave,
it's also known as TRUE gun control...lol

Posted by: jcom972 at September 11, 2007 2:32 AM

Back to topic...
Healthy dissent is one thing...but this all-time low BS by "moron.org"?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/09/018424.php
That's not dissent...that's beyond the pale.
Typical of george "the capo" soros who owns them anyway (by their own admission), so...*yawn*.
Scumbags like that have bastardized the term "debate" as they obviously don't know what it means... and lack of efforts by the left to have the riotous scumbags removed from civility told a LOT, too (forget the fact they attacked the General before they even got the preview of his comments!)
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/09/10/showdown-in-the-senate-petraeuscrocker-testimony/
...and they wonder why their "approval rating" (which they're loathe to admit for obvious reasons) is only HALF (14-18%) the "historically low approval ratings" they love to run into the ground of the Presidents (low 30s)...LOL.

Sad, too

Posted by: jcom972 at September 11, 2007 2:54 AM

He sounds like Westmoreland. "Devastating" my ass.

Devastating to whom? Iraq was more stable under Sadaam. Let's pull out and if "they" become a direct threat to the U.S. or our interests we should send our air force over there and bomb the crap out of them.

Stupid Army general protecting his Army turf and area of expertise: THE GROUND. I expected more from him.

Posted by: Bingo at September 11, 2007 4:08 AM

Hugh beat me to it, by several hours:

"Devastating" for whom?

"Robert" said

Democrats want to surrender to Islam, Republicans want to fight.

Fight against whom? And for the benefit of whom? Just flailing about against a few random "bad guys" throughout the world may compensate for a testosterone deficiency, but it is no strategy: you first identify the enemy, then select the appropriate weapons (not necessarily military) to weaken the enemy, then you attack without mercy against the enemy. We are doing none of those in Iraq.

Cornelius said

Yet, here is Hugh, insisting that America - hightailing it from the region and leaving Iraq to our enemies

As if Iraq is some impartial prize that can be won from a "few radical extremist" "enemies". As if Iraq is not filled to the brim with people who have goals and values antithetical to our own; as if Iraq's people have any desire to fulfill our wishes for how their society will behave towards each other and what rules will govern their society.

Davegreybeard said

Anybody think it might be a good idea to drain the swamp? As in teach the Islamists the democracy dance which requires individual thought and critisism of leaders and that whole analytical thought thing before voting?

Again with the assumption that the ones we should be assisting are the Islamists, instead of our own citizens. The assumption that we need to "save" the Iraqis and Afghans by getting them to accept our goals and values (democracy, freedom, etc.), because our values are "universal" values that everyone in every culture must secretly share, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The assumption that Muslims want to learn to dance the "democracy dance" or the "freedom jig" or the "tolerance two-step" or any other kind of dance. The failure to accept that for some cultures, dance is haram, period.

I understand Hugh's re-posting of every article of the last year related to Iraq. I understand the frustration. Listening to General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker; listening to the inane questions and comments from those Senators opposed to the war and those supporting the war; listening to the commentary of "Middle East Experts" in the media: all of it is so far off track, all of it is premised on so many false assumptions. Even after the past eye-opening decade, this was to be expected. However, I am a little surprised today that even here at JW/DW there is so much disagreement on the most basic issues. I'm not sure if posters have not been reading the articles for the past few years, or if they have some worthy rebuttal that I somehow missed. Iraq is only an early (badly chosen) skirmish in the larger conflict; but we can't even get that right. How will we succeed against the larger jihad if we still think the "enemy" is the opposing political party instead of the jihadists whose goal it is to destroy all political parties? Or if we think that the ones we need to save are the Muslims instead of the infidels? Or that this is some kind of "pissing contest" where we need to show that we can out-Islam Islam, instead of recognizing and defending our own values?

Posted by: special_guest at September 11, 2007 5:05 AM

"The War in Iraq is a disaster"

Well, that's about it really. Nice and succinct.

What's really funny is there are people - some posters here too - who think it's the West's duty to spend untold trillions and 1,000s of lives so that muslims can experience the wonders of freedom and democracy.

Typical self-hating Western thought.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 6:22 AM

My dear pez -

given your remarks about 'lien-free landowning MALES'...a line you are fond of repeating...

I must confess that as a sober Christian matron, mother of four children, who (like my mother and my grandmothers before me) has prayerfully, thoughtfully and thankfully exercised her vote in many a state and federal election in the Commonwealth of Australia, I feel decidedly less than excited about the prospect of people like yourself imposing what you obviously think would be a Good Thing - in particular, the disenfranchisement of every woman in the western world.

Frankly, my friend, unless you're prepared to at least grant the vote to 'lien-free landowning FEMALES' as well, you might be in some trouble with the women in your life. Do you talk about the Evils of the Female Franchise, or the Wickedness of Universal Suffrage, in their presence? Do they agree with you? (If they do - why?).

Hey, all you ladies who post at this site (some of whom, I understand, can shoot as straight as the next man) - 'pez' would like to strip you of the vote. He seems to think that somehow this would Help Save America from the Jihad. What do you think of that?

Personally, pez, rather than dreaming of how you might deprive women of the vote, for instance, what matters right now is getting through the heads of Western women - EVERY Western woman of voting age! - the seven special kinds of hell that a Muslim takeover would mean for her; and what our politicians, church leaders, and everyone else needs to do to defeat the Jihad. Then turn the ladies loose!

And please, don't waste your time sneering at the working poor, the guys who have low pay and no land, or the small farmers who work hard for little return, burdened by debt - instead, how 'bout exercising your wits to work out how to teach them how much WORSE OFF they would be under a Muslim despotism? Because they most certainly would be.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at September 11, 2007 6:24 AM

My dear pez -

given your remarks about 'lien-free landowning MALES'...a line you are fond of repeating...

I must confess that as a sober Christian matron, mother of four children, who (like my mother and my grandmothers before me) has prayerfully, thoughtfully and thankfully exercised her vote in many a state and federal election in the Commonwealth of Australia, I feel decidedly less than excited about the prospect of people like yourself imposing what you obviously think would be a Good Thing - in particular, the disenfranchisement of every woman in the western world.

Frankly, my friend, unless you're prepared to at least grant the vote to 'lien-free landowning FEMALES' as well, you might be in some trouble with the women in your life. Do you talk about the Evils of the Female Franchise, or the Wickedness of Universal Suffrage, in their presence? Do they agree with you? (If they do - why?).

Hey, all you ladies who post at this site (some of whom, I understand, can shoot as straight as the next man) - 'pez' would like to strip you of the vote. He seems to think that somehow this would Help Save America from the Jihad. What do you think of that?

Personally, pez, rather than dreaming of how you might deprive women of the vote, for instance, what matters right now is getting through the heads of Western women - EVERY Western woman of voting age! - the seven special kinds of hell that a Muslim takeover would mean for her; and what our politicians, church leaders, and everyone else needs to do to defeat the Jihad. Then turn the ladies loose!

And please, don't waste your time sneering at the working poor, the guys who have low pay and no land, or the small farmers who work hard for little return, burdened by debt - instead, how 'bout exercising your wits to work out how to teach them how much WORSE OFF they would be under a Muslim despotism? Because they most certainly would be.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at September 11, 2007 6:29 AM

"The War in Iraq is a disaster"

Well, that's about it really. Nice and succinct.

What's really funny is there are people - some posters here too - who think it's the West's duty to spend untold trillions and 1,000s of lives so that muslims can experience the wonders of freedom and democracy.

Typical self-hating Western thought.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 6:29 AM

"Premature withdrawal in Iraq would be 'devastating' says Petraeus"

If you will forgive the expletive (or even if you don't), this is crap. "Devestating" to whom?, to the USA?, to its allies?, continuation of this deadly farce will lead to our collective devastation.

Get out of Iraq, get out of Afghanistan, find some new leaders who may have half a clue and vote for them.

No good to the west has come from this entanglement, no good shall come from its continuation. More good lives lost, more money wasted, for absolutely no end benefit.

Does anyone really, seriously, believe that continuation of this engagement will bring any benefits to our infidel nations? The "War on Terror", ie., the war against Islamic jihadism, will not be won through conflict. Are we so completely bereft of ideas that we can't figure out an approach to manage this problem?

Follow Israel's example, build walls, keep the buggers out, and leave them to stew in their own noxious juices. Send in a probe every 50 years to see if they are ready for contact with civilisation again.

It's time for new international treaties and agreements, a "Commonwealth of the West" if you will, whereby all civilized nations agree to live in peace with each other, and all parties are bound to assist any member nation which may call for assistance against a virulent Islamic outbreak.

Leave them, pack up and go home, we shouldn't be spilling our blood nor our dollars for our "leaders" grandiose and deluded flights of fantasy.

Posted by: Ozi_bloke at September 11, 2007 6:30 AM

"The War in Iraq is a disaster"

Well, that's about it really. Nice and succinct.

What's really funny is there are people - some posters here too - who think it's the West's duty to spend untold trillions and 1,000s of lives so that muslims can experience the wonders of freedom and democracy.

Typical self-hating Western thought.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 6:34 AM

My dear pez -

given your remarks about 'lien-free landowning MALES'...a line you are fond of repeating...

I must confess that as a sober Christian matron, mother of four children, who (like my mother and my grandmothers before me) has prayerfully, thoughtfully and thankfully exercised her vote in many a state and federal election in the Commonwealth of Australia, I feel decidedly less than excited about the prospect of people like yourself imposing what you obviously think would be a Good Thing - in particular, the disenfranchisement of every woman in the western world.

Frankly, my friend, unless you're prepared to at least grant the vote to 'lien-free landowning FEMALES' as well, you might be in some trouble with the women in your life. Do you talk about the Evils of the Female Franchise, or the Wickedness of Universal Suffrage, in their presence? Do they agree with you? (If they do - why?).

Hey, all you ladies who post at this site (some of whom, I understand, can shoot as straight as the next man) - 'pez' would like to strip you of the vote. He seems to think that somehow this would Help Save America from the Jihad. What do you think of that?

Personally, pez, rather than dreaming of how you might deprive women of the vote, for instance, what matters right now is getting through the heads of Western women - EVERY Western woman of voting age! - the seven special kinds of hell that a Muslim takeover would mean for her; and what our politicians, church leaders, and everyone else needs to do to defeat the Jihad. Then turn the ladies loose!

And please, don't waste your time sneering at the working poor, the guys who have low pay and no land, or the small farmers who work hard for little return, burdened by debt - instead, how 'bout exercising your wits to work out how to teach them how much WORSE OFF they would be under a Muslim despotism? Because they most certainly would be.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at September 11, 2007 6:34 AM

"The War in Iraq is a disaster"

Well, that's about it really. Nice and succinct.

What's really funny is there are people - some posters here too - who think it's the West's duty to spend untold trillions and 1,000s of lives so that muslims can experience the wonders of freedom and democracy.

Typical self-hating Western thought.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 6:38 AM

Oops. Sorry about the triple posting, folks. For some reason typekey is being really slow on me this evening. (I'm lucky to be online at all - for some reason my broadband connection has been randomly dropping out during the past month or so; it was off all afternoon, today).

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at September 11, 2007 6:39 AM

Me too. Double posting. It's all typekey's fault. I'm above reproach.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 6:45 AM

"Premature withdrawal in Iraq would be 'devastating' says Petraeus"

If you will forgive the expletive (or even if you don't), this is crap. "Devestating" to whom?, to the USA?, to its allies?, continuation of this deadly farce will lead to our collective devastation.

Get out of Iraq, get out of Afghanistan, find some new leaders who may have half a clue and vote for them.

No good to the west has come from this entanglement, no good shall come from its continuation. More good lives lost, more money wasted, for absolutely no end benefit.

Does anyone really, seriously, believe that continuation of this engagement will bring any benefits to our infidel nations? The "War on Terror", ie., the war against Islamic jihadism, will not be won through conflict. Are we so completely bereft of ideas that we can't figure out an approach to manage this problem?

Follow Israel's example, build walls, keep the buggers out, and leave them to stew in their own noxious juices. Send in a probe every 50 years to see if they are ready for contact with civilisation again.

It's time for new international treaties and agreements, a "Commonwealth of the West" if you will, whereby all civilized nations agree to live in peace with each other, and all parties are bound to assist any member nation which may call for assistance against a virulent Islamic outbreak.

Leave them, pack up and go home, we shouldn't be spilling our blood nor our dollars for our "leaders" grandiose and deluded flights of fantasy.

Posted by: Ozi_bloke at September 11, 2007 7:56 AM

Best thing we could do to Iraq? Saturate it like a western informed culture whth prosperity while promoting individual destiny. The fundamentalist-Islam-o-fascist-murder cult ideology spreads like flies on rotting garbage over poverty, backwards societies & lack of vision for personal destiny of the individual.

Posted by: SoteriA at September 11, 2007 8:20 AM

Great body of work Hugh.

(which could blind anyone)

(as you're brought kicking and screaming, against your will, across the victory goal line)

(like two of the three monkeys who will see no good and hear no good)

Screw the Dems the DNC and other surrender monkeys.

Talk about needing a political housecleaning in the next election (on both sides of the aisle).

Maybe not forever, but we are the champions, and this dog will hunt.

Posted by: dgene at September 11, 2007 8:31 AM

"However, I am a little surprised today that even here at JW/DW there is so much disagreement on the most basic issues. I'm not sure if posters have not been reading the articles for the past few years, or if they have some worthy rebuttal that I somehow missed."
-- from a poster above

Some are impervious to facts and logic. Some will not do their homework. Some will not think, or do not know how to think, and simply refuse to read, or to begin to understand, what is set out before them.

If one actually reads, one recalls that the argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein set in motion an inevitable clash between Sunni Arabs (who would when Saddam Hussein was upended, lose the power they had held during the entire history of modern Iraq), and the Shi'a Arabs (who by now constituted 60-65% of Iraq's population, and inew it), and between Kurds (who like all non-Arab Muslims, have been oppressed by the Arabs), and the Arabs (both Sunni and Shi'a), was not made in a vacuum.

It was important, I wrote endlessly, to do other things to make sure that the Muslims were semaphored that this was not a "retreat" but the sign of a much harder, much more ruthless campaign to protect the West, and that it would no longer be based on sentimentalizing about a non-existent "Iraq" and non-existent "Iraqis," nor on the idiotic notion that somehow the time it was taking in "Iraq" was "just like the time it took to create the young American Republic" and suchlike nonsense.

I kept giving lists of the kinds of things the American government could do at the same time that they withdrew, the changes in immigration policy, the possibility of seizing the southern Sudan and Darfur with a few thousand troops "as a humanitarian measure, in order to halt the bloodshed" and to hold that territory until a referendum on independence can be held (leading to a clear signal that the Jihad of Islam in East Africa will be halted militarily, and heartening black African Christians everywhere), the support to be given this time if the Christian peoples of Africa declare their independence in a new Biafra (in the 1967-69 war, the West -- save for Israel -- completely abandoned the Christians of Nigeria), the imposition of large and steadily increasing taxes on gasoline, announced by the President as necessary "both for environmental reasons and in order to diminish the resources available to the world-wide Jihad," the reading of the riot act to the Saudis and other rich Arabs, telling them that they would no longer be permitted to transfer vast sums to groups in the West in order to spread Islam, because such spreading was a threat -- a permanent threat -- to Infidel political and legal institutions and to the physical wellbeing of all non-Muslims who were unwilling to submit, and so funds for mosques (see the Freedom House report on what is distributed by those mosques), madrasas, and such groups as Hizb ut Tahrir or Tablighi Jamaat, not to mention the widespread corruption in Washington that has resulted from the buying up of ex-diplomats, journalists, academics (see those "Centers" for the Study of Thisorthat having to do with Arabs or Islam), businessmen with contracts dangled before them, and of course, influence-buying right up to the Bushes, to Carter, to Clinton, tutti quanti. And then of course I suggested that Iran's nuclear facilities be bombed from on-high -- no boots-on-the-ground madness -- and that there were offers, as well, that the government of Pakistan could not refuse if it wished Pakistan to remain economically viable, offers involving its nuclear weapons which the West so negligently allowed to be acquired through theft.

And I argued that it would be easier to deal with Iran with American troops no longer within range of retaliation by Iranian agents, or collaborators with Iran, already inside Iraq. That is quite a different view from those who assume that the American presence in Iraq makes an attack on Iran more likely.

Furthermore, I suggested that a withdrawal from Iraq did not mean that, when deemed necessary, attacks -- mainly one hopes from the air -- could not be made on forces inside Iraq, for example in support of the Kurds, or to protect an Assyrian enclave in the north, if the Kurds betrayed a promise we might extract from them to protect those Christians. Some appear to think that an American withdrawal commits us, forever, never to attack a target inside Iraq, never to provide military equipment, say, to the Kurds or even to the Christians for their self-defense. Why is such an assumption made? On what basis?

Yet all of that, and much more, endlessly repeated (and I have yet to re-post what was written about Iraq for the years 2004, 2005, 2006) has, on a few, little effect. A few posters have had their same objections rebutted. I presume they read those rebuttals, and yet, one would find them back. a few days or weeks or months later, with the same already-demollished objections, as if I had not dealt with them before, as if none of the rebuttals mattered.

Such, for example, is the poster above (quoted by another poster later on, but not favorably) who continues to offer the same idiotic line:

"Yet, here is Hugh, insisting that America - hightailing it from the region and leaving Iraq to our enemies."

Really? Is that what the postings from 2004-2007 show? That I insist that Ameria "hightail" it from the region and "leave Iraq to our enemies"? Is that a fair characterization of what I would do, a useful way to describe the ruthless exploitation of the pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam as exhibited in Iraq, by no longer trying to patch up those fissures at great, incredible cost (for how else can one describe the $880 billion, and climbing, that has been spent so far, a cost that exceeds the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, that the United States ever fought?), with this unpopular war confusing and disheartening many, and making it politically harder to do the necessary things at home vis-a-vis surveillance of Muslims and a cracking down on Muslim immigration, and distracting the attention -- apparently quite limited -- of those who presume to protect and instruct us?

Is that a fair summary of my views -- that I merely wish to "hightail" (!) it out of Iraq and to "leave it to our enemies."

What depths of misreading and wilful misunderstanding must one endure?

Posted by: Hugh at September 11, 2007 9:03 AM

Great post as per usual, Hugh.

From Ozi-bloke:

"Follow Israel's example, build walls, keep the buggers out, and leave them to stew in their own noxious juices. Send in a probe every 50 years to see if they are ready for contact with civilisation again"

Quote of the day.

But, according to Petraeus we simply can't do that. You see, it's the duty of Infidel soldiers to die so that Iraq can have a Koran-based Constitution. Oh, and we must pour our had earned money into building mosques and schools and roads. Meanwhile our bridges are falling over and our cities are being washed away.

You see, Petraeus, Dubya and all those blowhard "Iraqi Freedom" proponents think that Infidels are lesser than glorious Islamists.

Posted by: ewha1 at September 11, 2007 9:12 AM

WASHINGTON - Republican support for the Iraq war remained on shaky ground in Congress but wasn't lost after a four-star general recommended keeping some 130,000 U.S. troops in the country through next summer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq
======

12 months x 20 billion dollars = 240 Billion Dollars
12 months x 100 dead US Soldiers = 1200 Dead
12 months x 250 casualties = 3000 casualties

FOR WHAT?
answer=George Almighty Bush

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at September 11, 2007 9:50 AM

I want to reiterate three points that Hugh keeps emphasizing...and that amply display his disconnect from reality...

1) (already articulated) He believes America - walking away from its fight against extremists in Iraq - can prevail upon the Turks to betray their own stated policy and allow the Iraqi Kurds independence...and to boot, encourage them to look the other way while the Kurds establish the precedent of incorporating Kurdish regions of other countries into their new polity...(which is essentially Turkey's worst nightmare).

2) He wants us to invade Darfur on behalf of that region's Muslims...at the same time that he wants us to walk away from the fight in Iraq. What will happen to the Darfurese after "the referendum on independence"? Will we stay on indefinitely to protect these people.

Certainly Khartoum will continue prosecuting their Jihad until the region returns to the fold. In short, Hugh's advocacy for a brief invasion of the Darfur is a recipe for disaster for these folks. Only a sustained commitment would protect them from Khartoum's counter-offensive. And like Iraq, Hugh is not interested in a sustained commitment, only in stirring up the pot. The big losers will likely be precisely those he is trying to help: the people of Darfur.

3) Hugh believes that Americans will withdraw from Iraq...watch the agonizing pictures of the last helicopter leaving the embassy compound with thousands left behind...witness the subsequent slaughter of all those who cooperated with the Americans...and THEN folks, our policy-makers will be eager to RE-INVOLVE ourselves on behalf of the Kurds in northern Iraq!!!

It simply won't happen. Like Vietnam thirty some years ago, America will suffer 'Iraqi syndrome'...an unwillingness to have anything to do with the country for years.

While Hugh doesn't himself advocate leaving the Iraqi Kurds high and dry, he doesn't seem to grasp that American policy-makers and the American public will have no stomach whatsoever to re-involve the US with Iraq once we withdraw. He currently paints the proposed withdrawal with the Machiavellian emphasis on exploiting differences in the Muslim world, but the truth is, America and the world will perceive it as an American defeat, with all the attendant psychological and strategic consequences.

Let's just be clear about this folks: withdrawing from Iraq may indeed be the best course of action available, but IT WILL NOT BE WITHOUT NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES for the USA and the West. If you're being told otherwise - AND YOU ARE - you're being sold a bill of goods.

Posted by: Cornelius at September 11, 2007 10:21 AM

It is not Bush. It is everyone who refuses to see things correctly. It is all those who oppose the war but cannot arrive at the right reasons, present the right arguments -- not those of appeasers but of those who want an American withdrawal "not because Islam is not a threat, but because it is" -- for opposing the war, reasons which are unanswerable, and which would put so much pressure on the Bush Administration that it would be forced to recognize, to admit, to the superior sense of that argument.

Why can't those, including most Democrats, dare to explain why we should leave Iraq because what would ensue would weaken the Camp of Islam? Because they don't want to mention "Islam" or "Camp of Islam." They don't want to be in the position of advocating using pre-existing fissures against an enemy they will only vaguely recognize. They don't want to talk about Da'wa and Demographic Conquest in Western Europe, though the Money Weapon is something they will gingerly approach, as long as it can be put in moore-ish terms as some kind of "Saudi-Bush-family" matter, and not something that implicates a whole army of past, present, and would-be future Western hirelings of Muslim states or institutions or organizations or individuals.

That's why.

So there is a silence, and the most convincing reasons for leaving Iraq -- reasons that would appeal both to those who are desperate for us to leave (that is, most of the American population) and reassure those who are desperate to make sure that it is done for the right reasons, in the right spirit (that is, those who understand the menace) -- are left to this website, or other websites that may exist, to present.

Posted by: Hugh at September 11, 2007 10:23 AM

Why would it be such a disaster to pull out soon?

I suspect that the real reason we have to sacrifice more troops and waste more billions on this hopelessly naïve folly in Iraq is that Bush doesn’t want the inevitable descent into bloody chaos in Iraq to happen while he’s in office – makes him look like the incompetent fool he’s been to try to bring democratic order among hot-blooded Muslim factions. Probably Iran will move in after enough idiotic Iraqi Muslims kill each other for Allah; probably the mid-East Sunni nations will feel obliged to join in also. The UN and other bodies will call for a negotiated peace while most of the world will in fact be at least secretly cheering simultaneously all sides to fight on to the last Muslim zombie. The mid-East zombies will keep selling their oil to the West to keep buying the weapons for the great multi-umma self genocide that would make world a better place.
Am I being too optimistic?