President Obama Pulls Out a Plum

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said 'What a good boy am I!'

President Barack Obama, during his surprise visit to Iraq today, had this to say to American troops at Camp Victory:

"You've kept your eyes focused on just doing your job and because of that, every mission that's been assigned, from getting rid of Saddam to reducing violence to stabilizing the country to facilitating elections, you have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country. That is an extraordinary achievement and for that you have the thanks of the American people."

Do you really believe this, Mr. President, even if Iraq was a “dumb war,” and a “dangerous distraction” ?

Are you so small that you still refuse to mention the name of the Man who gave those troops every mission they were assigned, "from getting rid of Saddam to reducing violence to stabilizing the country to facilitating elections"?

Don’t get me wrong. The troops who fought in Iraq, and who are still fighting there, deserve every bit of this praise from their Commander in Chief, and from all of us, and more.

But am I the only disgusted by the way Obama gets away with the pretense that he’s the one initiating plans to get our troops out of Iraq and letting the Iraqis take over their own defense?

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11, 2005 "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," President Bush told reporters following a meeting today with his national security team in Crawford, Texas.

The president met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers. He said the Iraqi push to write a constitution is on track for release Aug. 15.

Bush said the constitution is a critical step for Iraq. "Iraqis are taking control of their country," he said. "They are building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself."

. . . .Bush said the mission is a tough one because the enemy understands the stakes. "A free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will deliver a serious blow to their hateful ideology," he said. (“Bush: As Iraqis Stand Up, U.S. Will Stand Down”).

Two years later, Obama's biggest supporters were still saying the war in Iraq was lost.

I just want to see credit where it's due.

Bush-Free History in Iraq

The BBC and the LA Times and NPR have managed to report on an historic election in Iraq--and in the Middle East--without once mentioning the name of the man who made it possible, George W. Bush.

Imagine a book about the Civil War that makes no mention of Lincoln. That's how journalism rolls these days.

Missing Saddam

As the Bush administration winds down, Democrats are actually increasing their attacks. It’s like Wile E. Coyote just found out ACME was going out of business, and he only has two days left to catch the Roadrunner.

Democrats are especially unhappy about Bush's success in Iraq. That's because they were wrong when he was right, and because he stepped up in a way they never would. In the closing hours they're redoubling their lying claims that Bush lied and broke the law to get us into Iraq, and repeating as often as they can that, in spite of apparent successes in Bush's “so called war on terror,” we still aren’t any safer.

Applying myself to this logic, I’ve spent some time trying to imagine how the world would look come Inauguration Day 2009 (aka “The Moment”), had we not made things so much worse by deposing Hussein. These are only a few things that would be much better now if we had only listened to Joe Wilson:

ITEM: Saddam would still be Dictator of Iraq (or “President of a Sovereign Iraq” as he is described in Middle Eastern studies departments).

ITEM: CNN would still be able to broadcast from Iraq, in exchange for slavish willingness to lie about Saddam’s popularity and his brutal methods of maintaining control.

ITEM: Instead of 17 UN resolutions Saddam would be disregarding, there would now be 25 or 30, still a low number compared to what’s been piling up against Israel.

ITEM: Uday and Qsay would still be in line to succeed their father, guaranteeing what the State Department calls “stability” in the region, and what sane people call “rape and murder” for thousands of female Iraqis and their spouses, for decades to come.

ITEM: Iran, still feverishly working on getting the Bomb, would now have Saddam and his nuclear scientists next door to provide a “balance of power” in the region, a “stabilizing” factor considering the last war between these two bitter enemies--even without nukes--cost 300,000 dead and possibly 1-2 million casualties, or, as Reuters might report, was nearly as bad as the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza.

ITEM: The economies of the West Bank and Gaza would still be benefitting from Saddam’s $25,000 payouts to the family of every suicide bomber.

ITEM: Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan and his son, and myriad other international parasites, would still be receiving illegal Iraqi oil credits in exchange for applying pressure through the UN to get rid of sanctions “containing” Iraq.

ITEM: By now, the sanctions/”containment” regime (long since denounced by the world as “American genocide against Iraq”), would have been lifted, with a resulting flood of medicine, foodstuffs, and dual-use technology flowing into the grateful hands of a small number of Baathist black marketeers, Saddam’s weapons scientists, and none of his people.

ITEM: The Shias in Iraq would not be suffering power outages as they sometimes do now, because Saddam would still be excluding them from the power grid.

ITEM: The Kurds in the North would not be suffering power outages as they sometimes do now, because Saddam would still be excluding them from the power grid.

ITEM: 28 million Iraqis would not be squabbling over political power as they do now, because they would be supporting Saddam’s re-election with 100% of the vote.

ITEM: Iran would not be forced to carry the burden of being the only Islamic nation in the region strong enough to wipe Israel off the map, as Saddam would still be able to make the same threats, too.

ITEM: Rather than suffer sectarian and religious divisions, Iraq’s Shia, Sunnis, Christians, and Kurds would all be united in the common national purpose of cringing in fear of the arbitrary madness of Saddam Hussein and his idiot sons.

ITEM: Rather than being forced into unemployment by colonial American powers, the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard would still be intact, and hard at work carrying out its duties of suppressing the Iraqis, punishing the Kurds, assisting in tortures and murders, having liaisons with al Qaeda, and firing anti-aircraft weapons at U.S. planes enforcing the No-Fly zone in the south for the 16th year in a row.

ITEM: Libya’s madman Khadaffi would not have been so “troubled” by U.S. actions in Iraq that he impulsively gave up his nuclear program.

ITEM: Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, in his guest suite at the Saddam House International Inn, would not have become so “troubled” by U.S. actions in Iraq that he shot himself in the head six times.

ITEM: Saudi Arabia would still be graciously welcoming the infidel U.S. Military (NO BIBLES OR CROSSES!) on Allah’s soil, as protection against another invasion from Saddam.

ITEM: We would not be hated by Frenchmen for our adventurism in Iraq. Instead, we would only be hated by Frenchmen for our liberation of their country in 1944 and 1914,

ITEM: We would not be hated by every Third World member of the United Nations for our adventurism in Iraq. Instead, we would only be hated by every Third World member of the United Nations for supporting Israel.

ITEM: Abu Ghraib prison, instead of becoming the notorious setting for prisoners forced to get naked or wear underwear on their heads on direct orders of Dick Cheney, would preserve its solid but little-known reputation as a place where Saddam’s torturers cut off people’s hands, tongues, heads, or genitals, and nailed their tongues to boards, and as the place where 30,000 Iraqis were murdered--but at least no one would have his junk pointed at by a girl soldier.


ITEM: Instead of Iraq becoming a gathering place for poorly trained al Qaeda operatives from throughout the Ummah, (“troubled” by U.S. actions in Iraq), and who promptly get martyred at the hands of coalition forces within days of arriving, the AQ fighters would have remained in their home countries, peacefully training, plotting, studying in madrasses, no threat to anyone or “troubled” by anything we’re doing (except maybe that military base in Saudi thing, or the support for Israel thing, or the infidel thing, or the 72 virgins thing, or the Crusades thing).

ITEM: Instead of America’s image abroad being that of a “cowboy nation” that “goes to war at the drop of a hat,” we would still be enjoying our immense pre-9/11 popularity as a “paper tiger” who either ignores terrorist acts of war, (out of sympathy for “root causes”), or defers to “international law,” (the UN Security Council) to guarantee our interests abroad and the safety of our homeland.

ITEM: Instead of exposing our “kids” in the armed forces to risk of death in combat in a war of liberation, we settle for exposing our “kids” in the armed forces to risk of being murdered abroad defenselessly in their barracks, on shipboard, or in discothèques or embassies by cowardly terrorists convinced we will never fight back.

ITEM: Seeing the logic of moral giants like Susan Sarandon (“What did the Iraqis ever do to us? (sob)”), we would not only refrain from invading Iraq, but we’d also promptly withdraw from Afghanistan and let it revert to the Taliban, because, to be fair, the Afghanis didn’t attack us on 9/11, either-- nor did the Taliban. Those hijackers were a lot of Saudis, a couple Egyptians, a Lebanese, and a guy from United Arab Emirates. America would thereafter try out a simpler, “fairness-based” terrorism policy by which we would only punish nations that actually produced terrorists who attacked Americans. But once we realized we’d still have to invade Iraq, in addition to Lebanon, Egypt, the West Bank, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, the UAE, Qtar, Somalia, Indonesia, and probably France, Canada, and Denmark, this short-lived policy would be revised so we could just let the UN tell us what we can do, the way they do with population control.

ITEM: Instead of relying on “cowboy diplomacy” as a defensive posture, America would have adopted the much less threatening “helpless townsperson” defensive posture. This entails State Department personnel gathering in coveralls and slouch hats, wringing their hands and wondering forlornly "when someobody’s going to do something about them goldurng Dalton brothers?" Inexplicably, neither the French nor the Arabs hate us any less when we act this way.

ITEM: During Hurricane Katrina, 150,000 troops who weren’t being wasted on national defense in Iraq would have been available to be deployed to New Orleans to stop a Force 5 hurricane. During the much larger rescue operation that would have become necessary when 150,000 soldiers became stranded as a result of being deployed below sea level in the path of a Force 5 hurricane, not to mention confusion caused by the headlong abandonment of the city by the New Orleans Police Department, the nation learns to its shame that race is still a very potent factor in the slow response to the rescue of minority troops. Jesse Jackson demands to know why the armed forces weren’t deployed out of the country where it was safe.

ITEM: Had we not invaded Iraq in March 2003, the media and Democrats, not one day later than April 1, 2003, would have begun denouncing the war in Afghanistan as a “quagmire.” They would dub it “Bush’s war,” “endless,” and “lost.” They would complain that it had already lasted longer than American’s involvement in World War I. They would charge that Afghanistan caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in the war on terror. They would say bin Laden was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, so why weren't we at war there?

Endless War Update

I’m no military strategist, but the reports coming out of Iraq about the progress handing over the defense of Iraq to the Iraqi Security Forces is downright encouraging.

On Sept. 1, Anbar Province became the eleventh of 18 Iraqi provinces to revert to Provincial Iraqi Control (PIC). Speculation as to when Babil and Wassit Provinces would follow has been all over the calendar, but all prior to December 2008. The latest 9010 Quarterly Report to Congress, released Sept. 30, states that Babil and Wassit will transfer to PIC in late-October and November respectively. The remaining five provinces are scheduled for 2009. This includes the four provinces with the highest numbers of attacks on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces over the last year: Ninawa, Diyala, Salahadin, and Baghdad. The fifth province is Kirkuk, whose status remains a point of contention between the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government and the central Government of Iraq. Of particular note, all of the provinces are scheduled to transition before June 2009. This indicates the remaining coalition forces are to be in overwatch by the end of the summer 2009, with Iraqi Security Forces conducting day-to-day operation throughout Iraq. “Iraqi Security Forces Order of Battle: October 2008 update.”

If all goes according to plan, that means US forces will not be involved in combat in Iraq after late summer 2009, less than one year from now. And all provinces of Iraq will have been handed back to Iraqi forces to defend.

As I said, I’m no military strategist, but if that doesn’t qualify as something like victory, I don’t know what would.

Yet the other night, when debating with Sarah Palin, Joe Biden still wasn’t ready to admit this war is nearly won. That admission clashes too harshly with the "no political progress, no military progress, no end in sight" motto of the Obama campaign. (Hey, how can I knock it as a campaign ploy? It seems to be working with a huge number of my countrymen).

Biden countered Palin’s account of McCain's successful approach to Iraq with that of Obama, the Master Strategician:

Gwen, with all due respect, I didn't hear a plan. Barack Obama offered a clear plan. Shift responsibility to Iraqis over the next 16 months. Draw down our combat troops. Ironically the same plan that Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq and George Bush are now negotiating.

Except this has nothing to do with what Maliki and Bush are negotiating. The military progress in Iraq isn’t being negotiated, it's being won by our troops. What Bush and Maliki are negotiating are the post-war military arrangements. Now necessary because the End Is Near for the This Endless War.

And the irony of what is happening now is not, as Biden suggests, that Bush and Maliki have now adopted Obama’s plan(?!), but that Obama came up with a new plan this past July intended to conform to the Iraqi reality (the outstanding success of the Surge and the sighting of final victory). We’ve already seen that another portion of his plan (shot down by Iraqi leaders) was to go to Iraq and try to get the Iraqi leaders to slow down the withdrawal talks.

Obama's last "clear plan" for Iraq, the won he ran on to win the primary, was the one he laid out last September:

Obama laid out his four-point strategy for Iraq today before a packed crowd at Ashton University in Clinton, Iowa. It is comprised of: 1) Commencing in an immediate withdrawal of one or two brigades (3,500 or 7,000 troops) a month; 2) a pressing effort for political stability, with aid from a United Nations constitutional convention; 3) increased regional diplomacy, especially with leaders of Syria and Iran; and 4) humanitarian intervention and financial aid to help stem the effects of current and future sectarian violence.

In other words, 1) withdraw 2) ask UN to help draft a new constitution 3) hat-in-hand talks with Syria’s al-Assad and Iran’s Ahmadinejad, and 4) a humanitarian surge to bury bodies and provision refugee camps in the terrorist chaos that ensues in the wake of an American rout.

You’ll notice that none of Obama’s points actually involved defeating the guys blowing up mosques, planting IEDs, and suicide-bombing marketplaces.

Even Obama's recent ad hoc plan, adopted in the face of inexorable victory in Iraq, still manages to miss the point. In July he said:

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country.

Obama confuses causes with effects. The current transitioning, and the political progress that can’t be denied--(though it can be seriously minimized in the media--ITEM “Iraqi parliament approves provincial elections law” buried in Saturday’s Free Press), is not the result of America redeploying (withdrawing) troops. It's the direct result of Petraeus's surge strategy, and eliminating all doubt that American forces were staying to finish the fight with AQI and the Shia insurgents. A fight that they have, now, nearly finished.

Why is that so hard for Democrats to understand?

Remember Iraq?

But there’s still time for a Tet II. Victory in Iraq is years away yet. This even as Afghanistan is heating up and a July ABC News/Washington Post poll found 45 percent of Americans think the conflict not even worth fighting. And that’s the “good war,” remember?
--Michael Fumento


What with all of the excitement of the nation seriously considering if Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, and Harry Reid should be given total control of the American economy, it may be a good time to catch up on some other pressing issues that have fallen off--way off--the media screens, like the War in Iraq. From Townhall.com:

"Remembering" When al-Anbar Was "Lost"

Michael Fumento
Monday, September 15, 2008

How strange! I spent all three of my Iraqi embeds in western Al Anbar because that’s where the war was worst. Birthplace of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and cradle of the Sunni insurgency, graffiti declared it “Graveyard of the Americans.” Indeed, I was in combat with the first two SEALs to die in Iraq, including the first to win the Medal of Honor (posthumously). I talked strategy with Army Cpt. Travis Patriquin, designer of “The Awakening” that turned enemy Sunni tribes into allies against AQI, while none of this was possible without tremendous help from chief Anbar Marine Public Affairs Officer Maj. Megan McClung. An IED blast killed them both.

So how can it be that last year AQI fled the province and now we’ve handed military control of a pacified al Anbar to Iraqi forces, in what the AP properly called “a stunning reversal of fortune?”

Further, how could this have occurred just two years after the Marines themselves, who were in charge of Anbar military operations, admitted in a classified report that “there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation” and we were “no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency” or “counter al Qaeda's rising popularity . . .”

The answer is they didn’t.

What we knew of the report, by Marine intelligence office Col. Peter Devlin, and which instantly became “the conventional wisdom” on al Anbar, came via essentially a single source. That was Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks, in a Sept. 2006 article “Situation Called Dire in West Iraq: Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says,” and a follow-up in late November, “Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker.” It’s obvious now that either the report itself or the Ricks’ presentation of it missed the mark worse than an F-16 bombing Baghdad and hitting Basra.

Yet even at the time, articles from Al Anbar itself (not Ricks’ roost in D.C.) contradicted the Post’s presentation. These included my November 2006 Weekly Standard article Return to Ramadi (My original title: “Retaking Ramadi”) and an extensive piece in Britain’s most prestigious newspaper, the Sunday Times, titled “Fighting Back: The City Determined Not to Become al Qaeda's Capital.” Both appeared over a week before the “Clearer and Bleaker” Post story. Milbloggers like Bill Roggio interviewed officers who’d seen the report and said Ricks’ presentation was essentially false. Maj. McClung couldn’t discuss the report with me, but her father tells me she, “thought it was a hoot that Anbar was lost.”

In “Return,” I relyied in part on my own experiences as contrasted with those reported from my Ramadi trip the previous April, when AP reporter Todd Pitman, with whom I was embedded, observed the "sheer scale of violence in Ramadi is astounding.” I observed both morale and tactics. I also conducted countless on-site interviews with non-politicized military.

My conclusion: “I believe we are winning the Battle of Ramadi. And if the enemy can be beaten here, he can be beaten anywhere.”

As to Ricks, he admitted to NPR “I haven't actually read [the report],” rather “I've had many people describe it to me.” You’d hardly guess that from his articles though, such that supporters of the war effort were just as likely to claim the report was “leaked” to Ricks as were opponents.

Instead what we got was a report as seen through two filters: First, Ricks selected his interviewees who, since by definition they agreed to discuss a classified document, probably held a grudge against current military actions. The second filter was Ricks himself, hardly the epitome of even-handedness as author of the best-selling book about Iraq whose title says it all: Fiasco.

Much of what Devlin did write was certainly meaningless to readers without background knowledge. “If you're thinking this doesn't reflect doomsaying media interpretations of [Devlin’s report] indicating there's no functioning government in the Anbar, you're right,” I wrote in “Return to Ramadi.” They have no EPA or Department of Education certainly. We're not going to change that system soon and there's little reason to do so.”

Perhaps Ricks was trying to pull off an Iraq version of the media’s Tet Offensive offensive, a battle that crushed the Viet Cong and yet the media declared it a terrible U.S. defeat. Life imitated art as portrayal sucked the life out of our war effort. In any case, others in the mainstream media seemed to have that idea.

NPR relied on Ricks to pronounce “we’ve lost the fight” in Anbar. “The message is, stay the course,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann declared, “But in the huge Anbar Province, word from our military is that we've already lost there politically.” Jim Miklaszewski told NBC Nightly News viewers that "The top secret report . . . says there's no chance the U.S. military can end insurgent violence in al Anbar” and “the U.S. is preparing to eventually concede a large piece of Iraq to the enemy . . . ” CNN’s Michael Ware used Ricks’ “revelations” to opine “we only have a third of the troops there that are needed to even begin to make a dent in al Qaeda.”

Democratic Maj. Leader Harry Reid (D.-NV) embellished the myth. “We have had, this week, the colonel in charge of Anbar Province say that it's a civil war; it's been lost,” he said during the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, thereby giving Devlin a huge promotion and tossing in “civil war,” which nobody claimed was in the report.

Most important, Reid suggested that had there been a Senate Democratic Majority (as there is now), it would try to force withdrawals that year. It would indeed have been Tet déjà vu.

But there’s still time for a Tet II. Victory in Iraq is years away yet. This even as Afghanistan is heating up and a July ABC News/Washington Post poll found 45 percent of Americans think the conflict not even worth fighting. And that’s the “good war,” remember? Ricks’ rotten reporting and the slavish devotion to it in the mainstream media dare not be forgotten.
###

The Wrong War?

This is something I could have said any time, but I think I’ll say it now after being reminded yet again how the Left repeats that we shouldn’t have fought against Saddam, but only against "the guys who hit us on 9/11."

Taken to its most literal extreme, the guys who hit us on 9/11:

1. All died in the crash, except one, who was arrested and is at Gitmo, where the Left today battles for his release. Ergo, there’s nothing more we can do about guys who hit us on 9/11 except remember 9/11 as a “tragedy” and go back to ignoring Islamic fascism. Except, naturally, for the surviving 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani, who should be granted all the due process rights for which our forefathers died, and then released with an apology and US citizenship, and a chair in Middle Eastern Studies at a prestigious American university as reparations for keeping him all this time at Gitmo.

2. 15 of the 19 were Saudis, and none of them Afghanis. The leader, Muhamad Atta, was Egyptian, and the remaining non-Saudis were from UAE and Lebanon. Ergo, we should not have invaded Afghanistan, who, even taking into account their criminal government the Taliban, were not technically “the guys who attacked us on 9/11.” They were only sympathizers, providers of material support, and enablers of terrorists. In other words, they’re no worse than the New York Times, CAIR, or the administrators of Columbia University. Ergo, we should never have attacked Afghanistan. Instead, we should have attacked and deposed the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Lebanon.

Oh, and of Columbia University.

The way I see it, there either were only 20 guys who hit us on 9/11 or, as I sincerely believe is closer to the truth, 20 million guys, or 30 million, or more, scattered across the Islamic world and in the West and praying and plotting daily for a chance to hit us again, and again, and again: Iranians, Afghanis, Saudi, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans--with names like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Baathists, and on and on and on.

The attack on America on 9/11 entitled us to establish the best defensive perimeter we could--a line inside which the enemy could not operate--and outside of which we can monitor and respond to the enemy's moves.

Al Qaeda proved to us that that perimeter did not end at our shores. Nor, even as we have seen in Afghanistan, is it limited to the borders of that country. How big should it be? As big as it needs to be. It certainly encompassed Saddam's Iraq.

This thing is still big folks. George W. Bush saw it was big on the first day, though he faced huge political hurdles that kept him from flinging out America's defensive boundaries as far as we needed them to be. And now after 7 years America is tired and wants to wake up again on 9/10/2001, a dangerous situation threatening to shrink our perimeter even more.

But when our perimeter gets smaller, the enemy's perimeter gets bigger.

I want somebody in charge who understands all this.

How Obama Spun O’Reilly

“I think history will show [that Iraq’s] the wrong battlefield, okay? And I think that you were perspicacious in your original assessment of the battlefield.” -- Bill O’Reilly during his interview with Barack Obama. (3:41.)

Right after Governor Palin’s shots heard ‘round the world on Wednesday, Barack Obama decided to relent in his boycott of Fox News and sit for an interview with Bill O’Reilly.

Some accused Barack of doing it when he did to bogart John McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday. I don’t believe so, as the interview ran more than 90 minutes before McCain spoke, and Obama’s advisors would have known that.

But I do believe Barack made the decision in direct response to being so badly exposed by the Axis of Cheerful on Wednesday night (Giuliani--Thompson--Palin) as a man whose election would be as effective a guarantee of foreign and domestic policy disaster as the country can imagine.

I also believe that Barack knew that he had little to fear from O’Reilly. I’m sure Barack’s decision to grant a mutual audience with O’Reilly had been vetted long before he finally agreed to face him, with full reassurances from his crack political analysts that O’Reilly--in spite of being the figurehead of all the fascist lineup at Fox News--had plenty enough blind spots to allow Obama to escape serious damage. There simply are things that O’Reilly doesn’t get, and Iraq is one of them.

As seen above from O’Reilly’s words when he raised the topic of Iraq, it turns out that the most powerful man at Fox News holds the identical opinion that Iraq is “the wrong war at the wrong time” as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Nancy Pelosi. How could O’Reilly possibly confront Obama effectively about the latter’s policy judgments on Iraq when he shares the same errors himself? Obama knew all this about O'Reilly in advance, because O'Reilly's been repeating his "wrong battlefield" opinions for a couple years now. Obama had no fears that on the one foreign policy issue on which he is most vulnerable, he would risk nothing by facing O’Reilly.

Can you imagine anyone who understands the peril we face from global Islamic jihadism describing Barack Obama as “perspicacious”? Did I really hear O'Reilly say that after all the sturm und drang our country has been through over Iraq, Barack Obama was the only one who got it right?

O’Reilly also blew it when he let go unchallenged Obama’s statement that Iran was not part of the same network of Islamic enemies that America has been trying to respond to since 9/11--merely because there are differences between Shia and Sunni. Nor did he slap down Obama’s ridiculous contention that the Bush administration hasn’t been working hard enough with the Europeans when it comes to Iran. Both statements were demonstrably false, and they went by unchallenged.

Defeat of Terrorism Actually Mentioned in Section A!

Who says there's no progress on Iraq? Time was when a claim we'd defeated terrorism there--or even dealt it a serious blow- wouldn't have made it into the front section of the Detroit Free Press at all.

Not that it was front page news today, either. That was dedicated to huge story of a pattern of sexual harassment lawsuits at the Jeep Assembly Plant in Toledo. Then of course there's a timely story about the price of gas.

But then there it was, down at the bottom of page 4A:

Terrorism defeated in Iraq, leader says
ASSOCIATED PRESS • July 6, 2008

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's prime minister said Saturday that the government has defeated terrorism in the country, a sign of growing confidence after recent crackdowns against Sunni extremists and Shi'ite militias.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched the crackdowns to extend the authority of the government over areas in Baghdad and elsewhere that largely have been under the control of armed groups since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it," al-Maliki said. "But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them."

He was speaking at ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the 2003 assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a leading opponent of Saddam Hussein who was killed in a truck bombing in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf after returning from exile in Iran.

Such attacks plagued Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion, but violence in the country has now fallen to its lowest level in four years. The change has been driven by the 2007 buildup of U.S. forces, the Sunni tribal revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq and al-Maliki's crackdowns, among other factors.

So Happy Birthday, President Bush.

'Tax Paid in Lieu of Being Slain'

The official Newspaper of Record has taken notice of an integral Islamic principle in its treatment of non-Muslim minorities and conquered peoples--the charging of the jizya, the poll-tax on non-Muslims, a tax “paid in lieu of being slain.”

The Times was reporting on the fate of the murdered Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho in Mosul, slain after he stopped paying “protection money” to "a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation." (“For Iraqi Christians, Money Bought Survival”):

As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation.

“What else could he do?” asked Ghazi Rahho, a cousin of the archbishop. “He tried to protect the Christian people.”

But American military officials now say that as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq. That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February.

Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul, the biblical city of Nineveh.

The Times’s explanation of the jizya is misleading, suggesting jizya was being misused “Mafia-style” by insurgents to fund their activities. But there is this unusual moment of clarity in the article's account of jizya's history:

For more than 1,000 years, northern Iraq has been shared by people who for the most part believe and worship differently: Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Assyrian Christians — of whom the Chaldeans are the largest denomination. (The Chaldean Church, an Eastern Rite church, is part of the Roman Catholic Church, but maintains its own customs and liturgy.)

Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya — and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.

Officials say the demands could be hundreds of dollars a month per male member of a household. In many cases, Christian families drained their life savings and went into debt to make the payments. Insurgents also raised money by kidnapping priests. The ransoms, often paid by the congregations, typically ran as high as $150,000, several priests and lay Christians said.

Andrew G. Bostom at American Thinker picks up the thread the New York Times is too bashful to follow. Rather than being merely an ancient "tax payable to permit diversity," Bostom explains that jizya, in its very etymolology, was always meant to be extortionate and punitive, indeed, a Koran-imposed "tax paid in lieu of being slain." Far from the recent case being a Mafia-style misuse of jizya as a "cloak" for extortion, from Mohammed's time the jizya was always intended to lay low its subjects:

Here is a classical formulation of the jizya -- the cornerstone of the repressive system of jihad-imposed dhimmitude -- from, coincidentally, a seminal Baghdadian jurist, al-Mawardi (d. 1058). In his monumental The Laws of Islamic Governance, al-Mawardi examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel "dhimmi" (which derives from both the word for "pact", and also "guilt" -- guilty of religious errors) population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya)-the tax paid in lieu of being slain-based on Koran 9:29. Al- Mawardi notes that:

"The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation... Reconciliation and security last as long as the pavment is made. If the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes."

The "contract of the jizya", or "dhimma" encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim "dhimmi" peoples. Collectively, these "obligations" formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims -- Jews, Christians, [as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists]-subjugated by jihad.

Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims

It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Shari' a. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative, and prominent feature of the Shari'a:

...the dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.. .Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]...on offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]... They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells...their houses may not be higher than the Muslim's, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths...[dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized in A.S. Tritton's 1930 The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects, a pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis:

...[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings, and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries...dhimmis...always lived on sufferance, exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob...in later times..[t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of the crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished. The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and only Islam counted...Indeed the general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for the dhimmis.

S.D. Goitein, in essays published three to four decades later (i.e., 1963, and 1970), highlighted the economic and other adverse social consequences of both the jizya itself, and the attendant regulations of the system of dhimmitude:

..consideration [of] the immense extent of poverty and privation experienced by the masses, and in particular, their persistent lack of cash, which turned the 'season of the tax' into one of horror, dread, and misery. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was mal al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws...As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence...In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

Ignoring the expected New York Times bowdlerization of the actual doctrine and history of this brutally imposed blood ransom [note to New York Times: the Mafia analogy is completely consistent with doctrinal and historical reality, and not some sort of modern aberration], the non-editorial information provided illustrates clearly, in real time, the horrors of the system of jihad imposed-dhimmitude as applied across the length and breadth of Islamic societies, since the advent of Islam.
(“Jizya, Jihad, and the Murder of Archbishop Rahho”)

Coulter Gives Bush an A++

Ann Coulter is heaping much-deserved praises on W, just as the party he's led for seven years tries to pretend they don't know him:

Bush's America: 100% Al-Qaeda Free Since 2001

Ann Coulter
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.

I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents.

Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I'll consider downgrading Bush from "Great" to "Really Good."

Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: "We're the Rape Room People!") constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did -- and I'm including remembering Monica's name on the sixth sexual encounter.

But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.

It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That's 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK -- or a landmark building, for that matter.

We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan -- the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible.

The Iraq war has been a stunning success. The Iraqi army is "standing up" (as they say), fat Muqtada al-Sadr --the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism -- has waddled off in retreat to Iran, and Sadr City and Basra are no longer war zones. Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country.

The Iraqis have a democracy -- a miracle on the order of flush toilets in that godforsaken region of the world. Despite its newness, Iraq's democracy appears to be no more dysfunctional than one that would condemn a man who has kept the nation safe for seven years while deifying a man who has accomplished absolutely nothing in his entire life except to give speeches about "change."

(Guess what Bill Clinton's campaign theme was in 1992? You are wrong if you guessed: "bringing dignity back to the White House." It was "change." In January 1992, James Carville told Steve Daley of The Chicago Tribune that it had gotten to the point that the press was complaining about Clinton's "constant talk of change.")

Monthly casualties in Iraq now come in slightly lower than a weekend with Anna Nicole Smith. According to a CNN report last week, for the entire month of May, there were only 19 troop deaths in Iraq. (Last year, five people on average were shot every day in Chicago.) With Iraqi deaths at an all-time low, Iraq is safer than Detroit -- although the Middle Eastern food is still better in Detroit.

Al-Qaida is virtually destroyed, surprising even the CIA. Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported: "Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaida, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."

It's almost as if there's been some sort of "surge" going on, as strange as that sounds.

Just this week, The New York Times reported that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Southeast Asia have all but disappeared, starved of money and support. The U.S. and Australia have been working closely with the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, sending them counterterrorism equipment and personnel.

But no one notices when 9/11 doesn't happen. Indeed, if we had somehow stopped the 9/11 attack, we'd all be watching Mohammed Atta being interviewed on MSNBC, explaining his lawsuit against the Bush administration. Maureen Dowd would be writing columns describing Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a "wannabe" terrorist being treated like Genghis Khan by an excitable Bush administration.

We begin to forget what it was like to turn on the TV, see a tornado, a car chase or another Pamela Anderson marriage and think: Good -- another day without a terrorist attack.
But liberals have only blind hatred for Bush -- and for those brute American interrogators who do not supply extra helpings of bearnaise sauce to the little darlings at Guantanamo with sufficient alacrity.

The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush's rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant -- if that's not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush's third term. Then he might have a chance.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

'Al Qaeda on the Run'

From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

Al Qaeda on the Run

May 31, 2008

A year ago in July, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability," meaning it could be poised to strike America again. The political reaction was instantaneous and damning. "This clearly says al Qaeda is not beaten," said Michael Scheuer, the former CIA spook turned antiterror scold.
What a difference 10 months – and a surge – make.

CIA Director Michael Hayden painted a far more optimistic picture in an interview yesterday in the Washington Post. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," he said. "Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."

What happened? To certain sophisticates, this is all al Qaeda's doing: By launching suicide attacks on Shiite and even Sunni targets, and ruling barbarically wherever they took control, the group has worn out its welcome in the Muslim world.

There's some truth in this. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq was in part a reaction by local clan leaders against al Qaeda's efforts to subjugate and brutalize them. The Arab world took note when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ordered the November 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, in which nearly all of the victims were Sunni Arabs. Extremist Islamic parties took an electoral drubbing in Pakistan's elections earlier this year following a wave of suicide bombings, one of which murdered Benazir Bhutto.

It's also true that al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda's freedom of movement and command-and-control.

As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country "is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign." So it's all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits.

General Hayden was careful to say the threat continues, and he warned specifically about those in Congress and the media who "[focus] less on the threat and more on the tactics the nation has chosen to deal with the threat." This refers to the political campaign to restrict wiretapping and aggressive interrogation, both of which the CIA director says have been crucial to gathering intelligence that has blocked further terrorist spectaculars that would have burnished al Qaeda's prestige.

One irony here is that Barack Obama is promising a rapid withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we can't defeat al Qaeda unless we focus on Afghanistan. He opposed the Iraq surge on similar grounds. Yet it is the surge, and the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq, that has helped to demoralize al Qaeda around the world. Nothing would more embolden Zawahiri now than a U.S. retreat from Iraq, which al Qaeda would see as the U.S. version of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

It is far too soon to declare victory over al Qaeda. Still, Mr. Hayden's upbeat assessment is encouraging, and it suggests that President Bush's strategy of taking the battle to the terrorists is making America safer.

Al Qaeda/Obama Synchronize 'First Hundred Days'

This from Gateway Pundit:

Al Zawahiri Promises to Take Jerusalem After US Pulls Out of Iraq

For some strange reason this did not make any headlines...Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri released an internet video where he said that after the US leaves Iraq (The Obama Plan) Al-Qaeda will proceed from there and take Jerusalem.Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in his "A Review of Events" speech promises that al-Qaeda will take Jerusalem just as soon as the US pulls out of Iraq. (SITE Institute)Bloomberg reported:

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al- Zawahiri defended insurgent attacks in Iraq, Algeria and Morocco that killed Muslims and blamed the West for using them as human shields, according to a U.S.-based intelligence group. Zawahiri was responding to questions posed to him over the Internet after announcing the online interview in December, according to IntelCenter, based in Alexandria, Virginia...Zawahiri said he expected the jihad, or holy war, to move to Jerusalem when U.S. forces leave Iraq. "There is no doubt that the American collapse has begun," he said.

"The raids on New York and Washington were identifying marks of this collapse, but I point out that the collapse of empires doesn't come in a single moment."

Laura Mansfield has the transcript of the Zawahiri speech.
Here is the segment about Iraq and Jerusalem (page 30):

First: I expect the Jihadi influence to spread after the Americans’ exit from Iraq, and to move towards Jerusalem (with Allah’s permission). As for the militias mentioned, they have failed to eliminate the Jihad with the help of what is called the strongest power in the history of mankind, so will they succeed by themselves or with the help of Iran?

Saddam Was Always Thinking Outside the Box

Now we find out that the anti-war trip to Iraq made by Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California in 2002 (“The Baghdad Democrats”), was paid for by Saddam’s intelligence agency. (“Charity Official Accused of Spying”):

Muthanna Al-Hanooti, who worked as a top official at Life for Relief and Development a charity in Southfield, Mich. allegedly coordinated U.S. congressional delegations to Iraq at the direction of executed dictator's intelligence service between 1999 and 2002.

In return, investigators say he received payoffs via the United Nation's Oil for Food program.

Al-Hanooti is also a CAIR director, and was named last year as an unidicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. (“CAIR called 'turnstile' for terrorist suspects”).

Debbie Schlussel suggests that the third party mentioned in the indictment, but not charged, is Shakir Al-Khafaji, a Detroit- and Dearborn-area operator long known to have been a money-man for Saddam.

According to Steve Hayes,

Al-Khafaji first came to public notice after revelations that he gave former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter $400,000 to produce a film that criticized the United States for its role in the inspection process. Al-Khafaji, who is listed as a "senior executive producer" of the film, arranged meetings for Ritter with high-level officials in Saddam's government, a feat New York Times magazine writer Barry Bearak found "impressive." Ritter had previously been an outspoken critic of Saddam Hussein, and issued dire warnings about the status of the Iraqi dictator's weapons of mass destruction. His sudden flip--he is now a leading apologist for Saddam's regime--and revelations about Ritter's 2001 arrest for soliciting sex with minors have fueled speculation about the nature of his relationship with al-Khafaji. (“Saddam's Cash: And the journalists and politicians he bought with it.”).

According to the Detroit News, that unindicted co-conspirator was

a former officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and Al-Hanooti was paid by the Iraqi spy agency, the indictment alleges.

That Iraqi spy asked Al-Hanooti to publicize in the United States the harmful effects of U.S. sanctions against Iraq and to bring to Iraq delegations from the U.S. Congress, the indictment alleges.

Between 1999 and 2002, Al-Hanooti gave the Iraqi Intelligence Service a strategy on how to get the sanctions lifted and in 2002 he helped organize a trip to Iraq by a delegation of members of Congress, the indictment alleges.
(“Feds: Southfield Muslim charity official worked as Iraqi spy”).

The three anti-war Democrats have not been charged with anything. The feds say they were oblivious their trip was being underwritten by Saddam. I can believe it. The three were also oblivious that they were being used by Saddam as useful idiots. Saddam was trying to stave off military intervention while he continued to defy UN resolutions, and he wanted the sanctions regime to end so he could resume his WMD programs.


Bonior, McDermott, and Thompson were selected because Iraqi intelligence had identified them as weak links in American foreign policy. They could be used, (being oblivious the way they were), to sell the Iraqi line back home in the US that the sanctions should be relaxed or jettisonsed for the sake of the suffering Iraqi children.

A brief refresher might be helpful for some of our short-memoried countrymen.

After Operation Desert Storm, an international sanctions regime was put in place against Saddam’s Iraq, meant to choke off funding for his WMD programs, restrain his war-making impulses, and perhaps hasten the end of the Baathist dictatorship. This arrangement was necessary, in part, because the coalition nations had been unwilling to support US forces driving on to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam once and for all after liberating Kuwait. When Saddam realized we weren’t coming to destroy his Revolutionary Guards and arrest him, he promptly characterized himself as the victor of Desert Storm and began to, in modern parlance, "move on."

In addition to sanctions, there were supposed to be international weapons inspections to insure that Saddam got rid of and was no longer developing WMD. Then British and American forces had to set up no-fly zones to protect Shia in the south, and Kurds in the north, from being bombed by Saddam's air force. All of this just to keep Saddam "in his box."

The irony of all this now is that the only component of this arrangement that actually worked was the military one—the no-fly zones really did protect the people we were trying to protect.

But the sanctions weren’t otherwise so effective. Like every dictator could be expected to do, Saddam responded to the reduced oil revenue by simply using more of the remainder of Iraq’s assets for his own military, security, and palace-building projects, while the average Iraqis went without. The result was shortages of food and medicine, sick and starving children, and the international community blaming the USA for the effects of the sanctions instead of Saddam, who was the undeniable First Cause of the whole problem.

As writer Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in November 2002, “if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him.”

Exposing the flaws in what he called "unworkable deterrence," Marshall said:

Every year the burden of sanctions weighs lighter on Saddam--the regime gets to sell more oil for humanitarian and other non-military purposes. As the flow of revenue rises, more can be skimmed off for military objectives. And every year the diplomatic capital we must expend to keep the sanctions in place grows. The Muslim world blames us for the civilian deaths, the images of dying babies--even if these tragedies are mainly due to Saddam's manipulation of sanctions rather than the sanctions themselves. Similarly, we pay a heavy price for the garrisons that we maintain in the region to keep Iraq contained. One needn't be an Osama bin Laden appeaser to recognize that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia has been a major rallying cry for al Qaeda recruitment. All told, if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him. Yes, war against Iraq would be violent, destructive, and destabilizing. What supporters of containment often ignore is that their policy has quite similar results--just spread out over time.

The policies didn't work at all in making Saddam cooperate with the world community. By March 2003 he had flipped off the UN and their feckless resolutions 16 times.

And the liberals of the world hated the sanctions. Or, rather, they hated us and the British for being the only ones trying to enforce the sanctions. Just as the world community hasn't shown much pluck in helping out in Iraq now, they weren’t going to stick with the sanctions for much longer back then, either. (And that was even without knowing then, as we didn’t know in 2003, just how successfully Saddam was using the oil-for-food program to buy influence and corrupt the process: at the UN (Kofi Annan), amongst the weapons inspectors, (Scott Ritter), and to buy off international Western leaders, (Jacques Chirac).

Even those who weren’t being bought off by Saddam couldn’t pass up the chance to blame the effects of the sanctions on America. The truth is that liberals hated the sanctions, but not because they care about starving children: but because they never feel more alive than when accusing the United States of crimes against humanity.

By 2000 it was to the point where a supercilious Amy Goodman got to interrogate then-President Clinton this way:

AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, UN figures show that up to 5,000 children a month die in Iraq because of the sanctions against Iraq.

President Clinton, to his credit, flatly contradicted this, and explained that,

“If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children. We have worked like crazy to make sure that the embargo only applies to his ability to reconstitute his weapon system and his military statement.”

No matter. Goodman just came back with her next question.

"The UN says our policy is genocidal. How do you respond to that?"

(Oh, I don't know. How about: sanctions are the UN’s policy, too, Amy).
(“Bill Clinton on Sanctions Against IraqAmy Goodman interviews Bill Clinton”).

In 2001, four years before he crowned his career by becoming one of Saddam's defense attorneys, Ramsey Clark referred to the sanctions as “genocide,” and insisted they “must be completely removed immediately. Every day the sanctions continue adds to the death toll of the worst genocide of the last decade of the most violent century in human history.” (End Sanctions, Prohibit Assaults On Iraq).

Always a zealous prosecutor when indicting his own country, Clark charged that even America's efforts to resolve the worst effects of sanctions were stained with a criminal motive:

The U.S., realizing that world opinion will no longer tolerate the sanctions, is seeking to take credit for modifying them while its purpose will be to continue to control their implementation and cause their reinstatement for alleged violations by Iraq.

Then in December 2003 The Nation was crying that:

“The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions in a recent tirade against the United States. Critics of US policy in Iraq claim that sanctions have killed more than a million people, many of them children. (“A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions”).

Even the Vatican disapproved of the sanctions regime.

But now, after the Left has had five years to work out the kinks in their No War in Iraq at All Costs Policy, they discover that they love the sanctions. When challenged for their solutions to the ongoing instability Saddam's regime stood for in the wake of 9/11 , his threats to his neighbors, and his internal brutality, we’re told that “containment was working and that Saddam was still in a box”; wrote a repentant Jacob Weisberg at Slate recently, "[S]anctions were working…Saddam had given up his WMD programs.”
(“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I believed the groupthink and contributed to it.")

Containment, we're now told, was the obvious solution preferable to this “unnecessary war.” But the harping about the unnecessity of the war is just supposed to show that there was no necessity to do anything about Saddam, in 1992, 2001, 2003, or ever, which obviously wasn’t the case. But, reply the liberals--reply now, that is--military action was unnecessary, --because containment was working!

So are you able to follow this? Our criminal illegal war was unnecessary because our criminal, genocidal sanctions were working.

Which is intellectually unsatisfying, I find, as writer Jeff Weintraub points out:

Sanctions against Iraq are a crucial part of the "policy of containment." If the sanctions are criminal, then how can the policy be "working well"? And if the sanctions are removed, the "policy of containment" will collapse. You can't have it both ways.
(“Iraq sanctions & the moral contradictions of "anti-war" rhetoric”).

Jack Spencer at Heritage wrote,

Some claim we had Saddam "in a box" - that sanctions were working and war was unnecessary. How were sanctions working? Saddam kept a team of scientists on hand to resume WMD programs the minute the West looked the other way. His oppression and mass murder continued unchecked. The United States spent billions on its "no-fly zones" in the north and south, which ensured the Iraqi people would continue to starve even as their leader continued to build palaces and other monuments to himself. (“No Evidence of WMD Required”).

The fact of history, and fairly recent history, too, is that, short of removing Saddam's regime by force in what antiwar critics keep calling a “war without end,” we would have had sanctions without end, containment without end, US bases in Saudi Arabia without end, and, (big surprise), world resentment without end. Short of being made dead somehow by others, Saddam would probably have lived many more years, and Uday and Qusay would have survived, too, young, healthy, and ready to step into their dad’s hobnail boots. To paraphrase John McCain, under the sanctions policiy, we’d be in Iraq for 100 years.

The point is that sanctions hadn’t worked in to truly make Saddam harmless, except to keep him straining on his leash for several years. A leash that was ready to snap. Once the sanctions were gone, (since Saddam had already thrown inspectors out in 1998), he'd be back at it like a shot. (Again, this was what we already knew in 2003--before all the facts came out about the oil-for-food scandal, and the genius Saddam had for buying friends among world leaders to help him get around the sanctions.) As David Kay reported,

Saddam… had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction [and] intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.

And among the things Saddam did to get out from under the sanctions was to manipulate the American left. That’s where McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson came in: they were some of the useful idiots he could use to help get those sanctions lifted. The war intervened, no thanks to McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson.

And because of the war to depose Saddam we don't have to worry about the sanctions regime any more, nor weapons inspectors, nor no-fly zones, nor a re-arming Saddam next door to a nuclear arming Iran, nor, for that matter, Saddam, Uday, or Qsay.

They're staying in their boxes now.

UM-Dearborn Gets Empowered Over Iraq

In case you hadn’t heard, it was “Iraq Awareness Week” in Dearborn last week. (“Students protest on war anniversary”). Yeah, I didn’t know about it, either. Anyway, the Students United for Peace and Justice (SUPJ) are at it again, holding a protest last Tuesday at UM-Dearborn “to highlight the death and destruction of the Iraq war.”

“Five years ago, the United States of America began its war on Iraq without the permission of the United Nations in search for weapons of mass destruction,” said SUPJ President Rashid Baydoun. “Since then, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers have been lost. $500 billion later, the war is still an on-going issue which the current administration plans to put no stop to.”

It’s obvious Rashid has a bet going on campus as to how many misstatements he can cram into two lines. When a guy at a war protest even gets the cost of the war wrong by drastically underestimating it, I have to think he’s really not showing up for these things very well prepared.

Speaking of Rashid’s concern for “innocent…American soldiers,” he was the one who refused a polite request from Iraq War veteran and UM-D student J. David McHann, to remove offensive posters hung on campus by the SUPJ depicting American soldiers threatening Iraqi women and children with their weapons, and captioned: “Oppression.” How can Rashid’s be concerned for the innocent soldiers when he doesn't think there are any?

Considering that the stated goal of the effort is to “educate” the UM-D campus about the war, (as well as, of course, to “empower the campus about this war,” but that goes without saying), you’d think the organizers would trouble themselves to gather a fact or two.

Even guys who are paid to be prepared show up with notes scrawled in crayola. According to The Arab American News, last Wednesday’s lecture by Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil “The liquidation of Iraq: Five years later,” focused on “the impact of the war on the country, the destruction of the social and political structure.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d think that once you tipped your hand by speaking of Iraq as a place that had been “liquidated” five years earlier, there wouldn’t be much of an impact left to make? Or maybe it’s a really slow liquidation, like those 3-days-only sales Art Van has been throwing since 1966.

For all it matters, Al-Tawil is an Art History professor at Henry Ford Community College, and his criteria for a good society seems to be limited to whether or not the modern art scene is fluorishing. Apparently a scant few social institutions escaped Saddam's totalitarian bootheel, includng the modern art scene. As Al-Tawil tells it,

“Fine art in pre-occupation Iraq was thrilling since the sixties and seventies,” says Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil, Professor of Art History at Henry Ford College in Michigan and former Iraqi active artist and faculty member of the college of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad.

Dr. Al-Tawil said that Baghdad was the center of art activities on a national and international scale for over three decades, from the period of 1960-1990. Arab art Biennials, international exhibits and conferences, and national annual exhibits were commonplace in Iraq all year long.

“It [fine art] was hindered temporarily by the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), but was not affected substantially,” Dr. Al-Tawil told Fine Art Registry (FAR). “That cultural activity was severely wounded by the US bombing of 1990-91 followed by 13 years of brutal sanctions and isolation ended by the US-British invasion of 2003 which has paralyzed every cultural activity in the country.” ("Iraq’s Forgotten MODERN Art").

Things were great under Saddam, It was those fucking Americans and Brits who ruined everything.

Art activities weren't the only things Baghdad was the center of under Saddam, but Al-Tawil didn't seem to notice the mass killings, the secret police and torture, or the rape rooms, what with all the important artwork on display. Which proves one thing--Muslim, Christian, atheist, or Jew, art assholes speak the same language all across the globe.

I’m too tired to organize yet one more itemized list of how, even with all the violence and setbacks, (and even after the looting of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art, formerly known as the Saddam Center for the Arts), the social and especially the political life in Iraq has been on a steadily upward curve. Before March 2003 Iraq’s social and political life under Saddam were in a poison-induced, death-like sleep: not that mention of that is ever made up at these events.

At one point, according to The Arab American News, “’From sea to shining sea, we want Iraqis to be free,’ rang through the air.”

I agree completely. So why, I ask, should we abandon the Iraqis to their enemies?

No Surrender

From Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

No Surrender

By FOUAD AJAMIMarch 19, 2008

"I am the same man and do not alter, it is you who change, since in fact you took my advice while unhurt, and waited for misfortune to repent of it . . . But you must not be seduced by citizens like these nor be angry with me -- who, if I voted for war, only did as you did yourselves."
-- Pericles's funeral oration, "The Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides

Wars have never been easy to defend. Even in "heroic" cultures, men and women applauded wars then grew weary of them. This Iraq war, too, was once a popular war. It was authorized and launched in the shadow of 9/11. During the five long years that America has been on the ground in Iraq, the war was increasingly forced to stand alone.

At a perilous moment in early 2007, when the project was in the wind and reeling, the leader who launched this war doubled down and bought time. The polls -- and this might be the war most endlessly measured by pollsters -- tell us that two out of every five Americans are now willing to stick with this endeavor.

The tipping point came with "the surge." The new policy was marked by stoicism and an acceptance of the burdens of this war. For once, there was no promise of easy success. "Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved," President George W. Bush said when he announced the new policy some 14 months ago. "There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship."

In Iraq, America was surrounded by enemies who were sure from the start that the great foreign power was destined to fail. They could not be given the satisfaction of a hasty American retreat. The stakes had grown: We were under the gaze of populations with a keen eye for the weakness of strangers. It was apt and proper that the leader who launched this war did not give up on it.

Speaking in Nashville, Tenn., to the convention of National Religious Broadcasters on March 11, President Bush defended, yet again, the war in Iraq: "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency; it is the right decision at this point in my presidency; and it will forever be the right decision."

Mr. Bush made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause. He rejected laments that Arabs do not possess a freedom gene, and that they are fated to tyranny. "The liberty we value is not ours alone," he told this Nashville convention. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to all humanity."

This has been Mr. Bush's wager ever since the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ran aground, and the war and its sacrifices had to be defended and fortified. Grant Mr. Bush his due: He upheld his belief that liberty can stick on Iraqi and Arab soil, in the face of great doubts and misgivings.

In the five years that America has been in Iraq, this drawn-out war has seemed like a fight between American power and the laws of gravity. Sectarianism tested our souls and our patience; the fury of the region around Iraq was bottomless. Its misfits found their way onto Iraqi soil. We wanted a new life for that country, and there were sectarian hatreds beyond our comprehension.

For our part, we did not always fight this war most wisely and skillfully. It took us a while to get the right commanders and envoys on the scene. We did not have the linguists we needed, for the 1990s had not prepared us for wars of ideology and culture.

Even the bureaucracy itself -- the State Department, CIA -- was full of people who doubted the wisdom of this war and second-guessed it at every turn. Some of the very people dispatched to Baghdad were no friends of this project.

Still, five years on, this endeavor in Iraq is taking hold. The U.S. military was invariably the great corrector. In their stoic acceptance of the mission given them and in the tender mercies they showed Iraqis on a daily basis, our soldiers held out the example of benevolent rule. (In extended travel in and out of Iraq over the last five years, I heard little talk of Abu Ghraib. The people of Iraq understood that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were psychopaths at odds with American military norms.)

In those five years, the scaffolding of the war came under steady assault. People said that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, that no "smoking gun" had been discovered, and that the invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a breeding ground of jihadists.

But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.

Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein's choice -- and fate -- that he would not duck and stay out of harm's way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator's defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.

So we did not turn Baghdad into a democratic city on a hill, and we learned that the dismantling of Sunni tyranny would leave the Arab world's Shiite stepchildren with primacy in Iraq. A better country has nonetheless risen, midwifed by this American war. It is not a flawless democracy. But compare it to the prison it was under Saddam, the tyranny next door in Damascus and the norms of the region, and we can have a measure of pride in what America has brought forth in Baghdad.

This is not a Shiite state that we uphold. True, the Shiite majority was emancipated from a long history of fear and servitude, but Iraq's Shiites have told us in every way they can that their country is not a "sister republic" of the Persian theocracy to their east. If anything, the custodians of political power in Iraq have signaled their long-term intentions: an extended American presence in their midst and the shoring up of an oil state in the orbit of American power.

There has been design and skill in recent American endeavors. The Sunnis had all, but wrecked their chances in the new order. The American strategy in the year behind us worked to cushion the Sunni defeat. The U.S. now sustains a large force of "volunteers," the Sons of Iraq, drawn mainly from the Sunni community. This has not met with the approval of the Shiite-led government, but the attempt to create a balance between the two communities has been both deliberate and wise.

In the same vein, American power has given the Kurds protection and a historic chance in a neighborhood that had hitherto snuffed out all their dreams. But a message, too, has been sent to the Kurds. The condition of this protection is a politics of sobriety and a commitment to the federalism of Iraq. We have not re-invented that old, burdened country, but this war is the first chance Iraqis have had to emerge from a history of plunder and despotism.

In the past five years, the passion has drained out of the war's defenders and critics alike. Our soldiers and envoys are there, but the public at home has moved onto other concerns. Still, the public is willing to grant this expedition time, and that's for the good. There is no taste in this country for imperial burdens and acquisitions in distant lands. But Americans also know that the lands and sea lanes of the Persian Gulf are too vital to be left to mayhem and petty tyrants.

Mr. Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2006).