The President is speaking about Iraq, and Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald has some initial impressions:
I have been watching someone on television positively hallucinating about “winning” some “war on terror” by sticking it out in a country called “Iraq” where there are citizens who think of themselves as “Iraqis” and who are eager to put into place what sounds amazingly like the American Bill of Rights, after decades of enduring terrible misrule at the hands of some strange regime apparently totally unconnected to the behavior of the gentle Iraqis themselves — possibly these mis-rulers arrived from outer space.
I didn’t catch mention, in this “important address to the nation,” of the words “Islam” or “jihad” or anything except some reference to the “murderous ideology” of “the terrorists.”
So I suppose Europe has nothing to worry about, just as long as it goes quietly, step by step, and islamizes the way a frog is cooked — by slowly turning up the heat, by indiscernable degrees.
I feel secure now in the knowledge that my leaders have understood the threat, and are not relying merely on brute force, and have decided to take their stand in Iraq, and after the military phase, to pour American aid in so as to create that Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations which is already having such major effects, we were told, because “elections have been held in Lebanon [where the Christians may lose their confessional arrangement, and the new head of Lebanon is an outspoken admirer of Saudi Arabia], in the “Palestinian territories” [yes, and what a success that has turned out to be, with the performance of Hamas, not to mention the corruption and meretriciousness of Mr. Abbas, the phony leader of a made-up people, who waits while Sharon helpfully writes out his own Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, and presents it with a little wink — please do not break until at least 6 months go by], and in “Saudi Arabia” [this must be a reference to the municipal election where the most fundamentalist of the usual fanatics swept the board — well done, democratic experiment in Saudi Arabia!].
Unmentioned went, for some reason, the election in Iran, where a former Teheran mayor, a tireless pothole-fixer, was elected, and will show the world that in his version of Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations pothole-fixing and fanatical Islam can exist in the same mind of the same maximum leader of the same totalitarian regime. This is something the smug speaker gave no signs of comprehending.