Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”

A new message from Osama bin Laden puts Europe on notice again, and as Reuters reports the story, “security analysts and officials” don’t seem particularly alarmed.

LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden’s latest message shows that he sees Europe as fertile soil for al Qaeda, especially at a time of tension between free speech and Muslim values, but is unlikely to signal an imminent attack.

Security analysts and officials say there is no evidence that bin Laden’s statements contain coded instructions to al Qaeda operatives and he has no track record of delivering warnings immediately before an attack.

No biggie, Reuters suggests, but notes a new twist:

But Wednesday’s message was striking in its focus on Europe as opposed to the United States, whose President George W. Bush earned only a passing reference as “your oppressive ally who … is about to depart the White House”.

It’s hard to see why Reuters is surprised by OBL’s stated target, considering that his new grievance is specifically against Europeans:

In the latest message, issued on the Prophet’s birthday, bin Laden said the [Mohammed] cartoons were “part of a new crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican had a significant role”.

The reference was part of a familiar bin Laden strategy to paint Islam and Western, Christian-rooted societies as being in a state of war with its origins dating back to the Middle Ages.

One European security official explained Al Qaeda’s tactic according to Al Qaeda’s mind-set [e.a.]:

“It’s the logic of the crusade. The Pope, in the imagination of the Islamists, may appear as the head of the crusade, which is clearly absurd but may have meaning for some Muslims and the Islamists. I do think it may indicate the Pope is a target,” said Claude Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

He said the Pope’s presence in Rome was one factor making Italy a target for al Qaeda. Other European countries in its sights included Denmark, because of the cartoons row, and the Netherlands, where right-wing politician Geert Wilders is set to release a video next week that is expected to condemn the Koran.

By the “logic of the crusade,” OBL targets anyone who displeases his perverted notion of Islamic justice. This is the Al Qaeda ideology: global vigilantism in the name of Allah.

But OBL has his vulnerabilities, as Wretchard notes:

 The rule of thumb in a fistfight is when you land a blow which makes your opponent yell, hit him there again. And the louder he yells the more you hit him in that particular area. Osama Bin Laden has just said “ouch”.

And here’s one of the things that hurts [e.a.]:

What makes the Mohammed Cartoon attack on radical Islam so potent that Bin Laden himself must oppose it, is two things. First, anyone can make fun of radical Islam. Second, the Cartoons are aimed at the weakest point of the Jihad: its sources of authority.  …

The real message of organized nihilism is that “everything is permitted” except to make fun of nihilism itself. Every act is lawful in radical Islam: to bomb markets, kill children, lie, cheat and steal. Everything: except to publish the Mohammed Cartoons.

Are we in the West going to let OBL or Al Qaeda write the rules about what is and is not permissible to say in public in our societies?

Stay tuned.*** 

—————–

*** As long as American commentators like Joe Klein continue to misunderstand the nature of the threat and to make absurd claims—such as the assertion that there is a distinction between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the “real” Al Qaeda—we’re not going to get too far:

As it now stands, McCain believes that Iraq, where 150,000 U.S. troops are chasing after 3,500 Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia terrorists, is the “central front” in the war against terrorism–and he is on the record opposed to taking military action against the real Al Qaeda, which is actively working to destabilize Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and may be planning the next 9/11 in the mountains of Waziristan.

The next 9/11 is not the only thing threatening the West. One day perhaps more people threatened by Al Qaeda and other fanatical Islamists will understand that.

Visit the Georgetown Bookshop site to order your poster.

Whether the Dutch politician Geert Wilders stumbled into this tactic or meticulously planned the maneuver, he seems to have found a way to challenge both Islamist extremists (of all denominations: Sunni and Shia) and complacent Westerners, who seem not only willing but eager to give up the freedoms their forebears fought to attain for us all.

Der Spiegel describes how one man has been able to spark a “global panic.”

In late November 2007, Wilders announced that he was working on a film that would depict “the intolerant and fascist nature of the Koran.” Spokespeople from the Dutch interior and justice ministries expressed their concern about the project, but they also stressed that they had no power to dissuade the parliamentarian from going through with his plan or to prevent the film from being broadcast.

Since then, a film that no one has seen and of which no one can say that it will ever exist has become a daily topic of discussion and speculation in the Netherlands. Wilders is fueling the debate by occasionally announcing how far along the project is.

Predictably, this roused the ire of those it was intended to provoke—first of all the Dutch establishmen:

This triggered a panic in the Netherlands that could only be likened to the dread leading up to a massive storm. The Dutch ambassador in Malaysia warned that protests could lead to “dozens of deaths.” Dutch ambassadors in Islamic countries were instructed to increase security measures and distance themselves from the Wilders film, while counterterrorism experts at home began making preparations for the day of the broadcast. …

In early March, a few hundred Afghans demonstrated against the Wilders film in the northern Afghani city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where they burned Dutch flags and called for the withdrawal of Dutch NATO units from Afghanistan. This prompted NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to express his concern that broadcasting the film could have an “impact” on the troops stationed in Afghanistan.

It was when the fear had spread from the Netherlands and into the heart of the EU that Wilders struck his first rhetorical blow [e.a.]:

[T]he Dutch foreign minister asked the EU to support the Dutch position. He said that the Dutch believe in freedom of expression, but are against portraying all Muslims as extremists. At the same time, the “terror alarm” in the Netherlands was raised to its second-highest level. The government of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende appealed to Wilders to abandon his plan to broadcast the film. On the one hand, Balkenende said, “constitutional freedoms must be defended, while extremism and terrorism must be fought.” On the other hand, he continued, “we must consider the consequences of our actions and may not endanger the things that are valuable to us all.”

Wilders reaction was clear. “The cabinet is falling onto its knees before Islam and capitulating,” he said, characterizing Balkenende as “an anxious man who has chosen the side of the Taliban.”

But the fear of Islamist retaliation—blowback—had taken hold in the EU [e.a.]:

Hans Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament … called upon the media to impose a “code of behavior” on itself and not to publish anything that could be perceived as “derogatory” by members of religious groups. He also warned the Dutch not to “make a contribution to violence because of our freedom.” These clear words of appeasement, which the chief EU parliamentarian directed against the victims and not the perpetrators of violence, urging the former to be on their best behavior, were – as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote — the result of “anticipated fear” and sounded “dangerously like self-censorship.”

Wilders, who lives with around-the-clock protection because Islamist websites have called for his beheading, hasn’t yet released his film, and the internet is the only channel left open to him. Nevertheless, he has achieved one goal [e.a.]:

The truth is that the “provocateur” has already achieved his goal. Wilders has managed to portray the Dutch and the Europeans as cowards, shouting “we capitulate!” before the battle has even begun. …

They behave as if they want to protect the members of all religions against insults and abuse, all the while overlooking the fact that it is usually the members of one religion who respond aggressively whenever they are accused of having a propensity for violence.

Wilders could not have achieved more if his film had been shown.

Indeed.

And I note that Osama Bin Laden—remember him?—has been inserted into the global conversation again. This time he’s threatening the Europeans:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden denounced the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad and warned Europe that retaliation would follow in an audio message released late Wednesday.

Even if the message is canned, as all the reports suggest, it’s a timely reminder.

Whatever you think of him and his methods, Geert Wilders has exposed the West’s vulnerability to (and seeming desire to capitulate to) blackmail through Islamist-extremist terrorism.

Does America face an existential threat? Andrew Sullivan introduces the question by quoting Daniel Larison’s Pshaw response to Jed Babbin:

Rhetoric that speaks of an “existential threat” is simply not credible, and anyone who deploys such an over-the-top argument will rapidly lose credibility with everyone outside an intense core of true believers.

But what Babbin actually said was much more nuanced—and is also at least partially true:

The enemy is a two-headed monster. First, it is an ideology: radical Islam. Islam is a religion, radical Islam is an ideology. And like Communism and Nazism before it, it must be defeated. The second head is comprised of the nations that sponsor terrorism.

This brings the inevitable conclusion: Regardless of what happens to Iraq’s nascent democracy, a war must be fought to defeat the terrorist ideology, and to compel the nations that sponsor terrorism against us and our allies to cease doing so. Unless and until that occurs, the war goes on.

Babbin makes it sound like a bloody kinetic war that will go on forever. That’s not very smart. Thus, Larisan is correct when he warns that Babbin’s argument—which stresses a true threat to the West from radical political Islam backed by indiscriminate bloodthirsty carnage—even if the argument is true, will discredit you with most people outside a tiny circle of “true believers.”

But that doesn’t mean that the people inside that tiny circle are wrong—or that the vast majority of people who profess to think about such things and instead parrot one another inside a vast echo chamber—i.e., the biens-pensants—are right. What it means is that Babbin isn’t very adept at making the argument.

There are many ways to fight the battle, and we will need every weapon we possess, but there’s no doubt that there is a challenge—and a threat—to America and the West to freedom and democracy from radical political Islam.

Whether radical political Islam backed by blood-curdling intimidation tactics, aka “terrorism,” constitutes an “existential” threat is a semantic argument and, as such, a distraction.

The reality is that the freedoms we take for granted here in the West are under persistent attack from political Islam, in ways large and small. The other reality is that there seems to be only a small fraction of people who care enough to keep talking about it in public.

Here’s a group that is serious about getting the message out. It includes the Danish newspaper editor Flemming Rose, who first published the Mohammed cartoons.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, under constant threat of death by Islamists because she is an infidel and under attack in the Western press from disapproving so-called “liberals” and “progressives,” writing in today’s New York Times, stands firm in her commitment to exposing the atrocities committed worldwide in the name of Islam:

IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror. …

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. … We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. … Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. …

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done? [e.a.]

These questions have to be asked by someone in the “Judeo-Christian” West, where we—including even the Catholic Church—have compartmentalized our religious passions and submitted to the rule of non-denominational law.

Implicitly, we in the “Judeo-Christian” West have agreed—for the sake of the greater good of our societies—to evolve and to put the brutal practices of our ancestors behind us. (We trip up, and often, but these failings serve as useful reminders to us to try harder, and to keep trying.)

Apparently, Muslims have not decided to do this (i.e., evolve); nor is there a public movement to reform Islam. Being an atheist and uninterested in religion, I’m no expert. But as I understand it, doctrinally it is not possible to criticize Islam and to be a practicing Muslim. Doubt doesn’t exist: it’s an all-or-nothing deal—you totally submit to Allah or you’re an infidel.

Under such circumstances, I’m not surprised that Hirsi Ali would choose atheism over conversion to another religion. (Spengler, of the Asia Times, takes her to task for her atheism; that pisses me off. Like all other critics who are wrapped tight in the cloak of their belief, he seems unable to comprehend that atheists are not anarchists and thus responsible for the decline of Western civilization. We follow rules of moral and ethical behavior: the Golden Rule, for one. We just don’t believe that these rules—which are a matter of common sense—were commanded by “God.”

Anyway, back to Hirsi Ali, because I do have a point to make. In the most delicious and subtle thrust of today’s Times op-ed, she calls out her Western (and semi-Westernized) opponents:

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan.

Ramadan, of course, was the subject of an essay by Ian Buruma and is the subject of heated argument by Western “intellectuals.” Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash are Hirsi Ali’s fiercest critics, having attacked her as an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” suggesting that she, who exposes the brutality committed worldwide in the name of Islam, is no better than the brutes who rule over their people through intimidation and violence.

Is anyone surprised that Ayaan Hirsi Ali

would stand firm against this morally revolting accusation?

Is anyone surprised that she would fail to engage her most prominent rival, Tariq Ramadan?

Stay tuned. This is the fight of the century.

As Hitchens recently wrote:

the soft mainstreaming of Islamic imperialism is under way

Is anyone surprised that Iran’s new nuclear “negotiator” turns out to be … well, to say he’s “intransigent” would imply that he could eventually be moved off his position in order to advance the West’s ”dialogue” with Iran. But that’s not the case:

The first hour-and-a-half of the London meeting was described as a monologue, with Jalili speaking about the will of the Iranian people to support uranium enrichment, theology, God, even his doctoral thesis, according to several officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.

“Jalili said, ‘Everything in the past is past, and with me, you start over,’ ” an official said. “He said, ‘None of your proposals has any standing.’ ”

When Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said that he was under the assumption that there would be continuity in the talks, Jalili told him that was wrong. After the meeting, Solana abandoned his habitual optimistic stance, telling reporters that he was “disappointed.”

Remember that quote from a year ago—that dealing with Iran was like playing chess with a monkey, because he wouldn’t follow your rules?

Well, here we are a year later, says the NYT:

Iranian Pushes Nuclear Talks Back to Square 1  

The hard-line position from the Iranian side was clear confirmation that Iran would not compromise on this issue, the French official said, adding, “We have in front of us the real Iran.”

An official involved in the talks put it even more bluntly, “We can’t do business with these guys at this point.”

This lesson about Iran is being learned the hard way by the Europeans, who, unlike certain hot-tempered Americans, are predisposed to dialogue.

Who knows what will come of these “negotiations” with Iran. “Talks” are going nowhere fast.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing chorus of calls for Israeli engagement with Hamas.

That proposal is shot down here by Noah Pollak.

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

If you read closely, you’ll find buried in today’s New York Times the suggestion that things are indeed better in Iraq:

When sectarian violence soared in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan, or moved to safer areas in Iraq. But now that the American troop reinforcement plan and a new counterinsurgency strategy have helped reverse a rising tide of car bombings and sectarian killings, there are signs that Iraqis are starting to return.

Perhaps you missed the significance of this sentence because the word “surge” was missing?

Well, never mind, because “the surge is working,” says Congressman Jack “Let’s Cut and Run” Murtha. And, The Politico reports with glee, this could cause problems for the Dems.

Are you surprised that the absence of bad news coming out of Iraq is being read as good news by the public? You shouldn’t be, if you read my post just the other day. And you definitely wouldn’t be surprised about the better news coming out if Iraq if you’d been reading Engram’s blog for the past couple of months.

The public, as usual, is way ahead of our distinguished elected representatives.

So now the Dems are scrambling to position themselves as they realize that once again they’ve been caught by surprise.

The apparent shift in voter intensity about Iraq, also captured in some polls, shows how dramatically the political context of the war debate has changed from last summer.

Democrats believed then that mounting public pressure would soon force Republicans to take flight from President Bush, allowing Congress to impose a more rapid end to the war on an unwilling administration. It has not happened yet, and if anything it shows Democrats are facing a stiffer challenge at year’s end than they had at the beginning to frame the public debate on their terms. 

One Republican put it a little bit differently:

“Democrats made a strategic calculation last January that has proven to be dead wrong,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Their message of failure and retreat makes little sense in light of our troops’ remarkable progress, and the American people are responding to their successes.”

Well, yeah. Sorta.

What’s actually happening is that the changes for the better on the ground in Iraq are making way for a narrative of success. Which is of course something different from success.

But in the war against Islamist fanaticism, where the most important battles are fought in the media, a narrative of success for America matters. A lot.

Not having been subjected to his rule—and thus to the notorious spinning that came out of his office—I have the luxury of considering Tony Blair’s comments and arguments on their merits. He hasn’t moved an inch on Iraq:

In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this [WMD] issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Read the whole thing.

Daniel Benjamin examines the number of converts to Islam who have been involved in terrorist activities and asks what one thing has to do with the other. Here’s one of his conclusions:

Radical Islamism seems to have become the magnet for some of the world’s angriest people who feel the universe is out of joint and must be changed. For these converts, it is an ideology of revolt that is more attractive because of its crystalline hatred of the status quo than its theology.

It’s sure beginning to look as if Islamism is the new nihilist political revolution, attracting converts from everywhere. Oh joy.

“I can’t believe my son is a fanatic,” says the father of Dr. Mohammed Asha, one of the rage-filled terrorists who tried to disrupt daily life in Britain last week.

“My son is incapable of such acts,” said Dr Asha’s father Jamil Abdelkader Asha from his modest home in Amman, Jordan.

“My son was happy in Britain, he was always telling us. He didn’t feel he was the brunt of any negative sentiment as an Arab or a Muslim, on the contrary.

“And he is not the type to get involved in political issues – at university he wasn’t even a member of any student unions. He is a devout Muslim like the rest of us, but he is not extremely religious. He didn’t have time for religion because he was always studying.”

Obviously, the senior Mr. Asha didn’t see the 1999 movie My Son the Fanatic:

Synopsis: A Pakistani cab driver and a prostitute find their lives complicated when his Islamic Fundamentalist son decides to “clean up” their town [in Britain].

The movie, which does not have a happy ending, or even a resolution, came out in 1999—well before 9/11 and well before Iraq, which Andrew Sullivan tries to label as a “proximate cause” of the latest incidents involving Rage Boys in Britain.

Abdulla is clearly a Sunni, angered at US and UK support of Shia in Iraq. This paradigm reveals the real danger of our further enmeshment in a Muslim civil war: we can turn one or both sides against us. The imperative to get out before this compounds itself as a problem is urgent.

Sure, sure—let’s get out of Iraq. And let the Israelis get out of Israel. And then let’s us get out of Britain, too, while we’re at it, because they don’t like having us there, either.

Gabriel Schoenfeld on what we might expect in Gaza:

When Israel withdrew from the security zone it had established in southern Lebanon in 2000, there were numerous predictions, noted the Israeli analyst Gal Luft in 2003, “that the radical Shiite group Hizballah, whose forces had relentlessly attacked the occupying Israeli troops, would close up military operations and henceforth focus solely on Lebanese domestic affairs.”

But what actually happened? First, wrote Luft, Hizballah declared that its “objective was the liberation of the entire land of Palestine and the destruction of the ‘Zionist entity.” It then seized control of the entire buffer zone that had been occupied by Israel and turned it into “a de facto state within a state.” Hizballahland” was what Luft christened this territory as he pointed to the fact that the terrorist organization had “managed to amass an impressive stockpile of weapons, including 10,000 rockets and missiles capable of hitting a quarter of Israel’s population.”

That was 2003. By 2006, Hizballah had 20,000 rockets and missiles, and its depredations led Israel and Lebanon into a massive and bloody war.

What lies ahead for Hamastan? It is of course conceivable—anything being conceivable—that the newly empowered Hamas leadership will move in the direction of pragmatism; that is what our own pragmatic logic suggests they should do. But perhaps these Islamic radicals operate under a different system of reasoning. The spectacle of the losers of the Gaza power struggle—their fellow Palestinians—being tossed from fifteen-story buildings and shot in the knees before being shot in the head suggests that sometimes it is not only history that goes in cycles, but illusions about history as well …

Haniyeh is feeling the heat, apparently.

Martin Indyk understands why:

The failed state of Gaza that Hamas controls is wedged between Egypt and Israel. Its water, electricity and basic goods are imported from the Jewish state, whose destruction Hamas has declared as its fundamental objective. One more Qassam rocket fired from Gaza into an Israeli village and Israel could threaten to seal the border if Hamas did not stop its attacks. Hamas would then have to reach a meaningful cease-fire with Israel or seek Egypt’s help meeting the basic needs of the 1.5 million Gazans. Hosni Mubarak’s regime turned a blind eye to the importation of weapons and money that helped ensure Hamas’s takeover. But would Egypt allow on its border a failed terrorist state run by an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood with links to Iran and Hezbollah? Or will it insist on the maintenance of certain standards of order in return for its cooperation?

Whatever transpires, Gaza has become Hamas’s problem. It’s a safe bet that the real attitude of Abbas and Fatah is: Let Hamas try to rule Gaza, and good luck.

This turn of events would free Abbas to focus on the much more manageable West Bank, where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces. As chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is empowered to negotiate with Israel over the disposition of the West Bank. Once he controls the territory, he could make a peace deal with Israel that establishes a Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank and the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza could compare their fate under Hamas’s rule with the fate of their West Bank cousins under Abbas — which might then force Hamas to come to terms with Israel, making it eventually possible to reunite Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity living in peace with the Jewish state. It’s hard to believe that such a benign outcome could emerge from the growing Palestinian civil war.

Yes, it’s very hard to believe that a benign outcome is possible. Which is why I don’t believe it for a minute.

Posted: Sun, 03 Jun 2007

The AP reports that the Islamist-extremist intimidation campaign is now out in the open and in full flower. Female Palestinian TV broadcasters are now in the line of fire:

A Muslim extremist group threatened to behead female TV broadcasters if they don’t don strict Islamic dress, leaving the women terrified and marking a further downward spiral in Gaza’s anarchy.

The threat to “cut throats from vein to vein” was delivered by the Swords of Truth, a fanatical group that has previously claimed responsibility for bombing Internet cafes and music shops.

The new threat was the first time the organization targeted a specific group of people, and adds to a growing climate of extremism, fear and suspicion in Gaza.

The Jerusalem Post provides more details:

Members of the group are also responsible for splashing acid in the face of a number of young women who had been accused of “immoral behavior.” The Righteous Swords of Islam is one of three al-Qaida-affiliated groups that have popped up in the Gaza Strip over the past two years.

PA officials in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post that the presence of the extremist groups in the Gaza Strip would “eventually lead to the transformation of the Palestinian territories into a Taliban-style entity.”

According to one official, “The day will come when we will miss Hamas. These are extremely dangerous groups that are trying to take Palestinian society back to the Dark Ages.”

The threats being issued are very specific and very close to home:

The group warned that its members would strike with an “iron fist and swords” against the women who are refusing to cover their faces. “We will destroy their homes,” it announced. “We will blow up their working places. We have a lot of information about their addresses and we are following their movements.”

The leaflet concluded by threatening to “slaughter” the women for allegedly spreading corruption in Palestinian society by appearing on the screen with their faces uncovered.

“The administration and workers at Palestine TV should know that we are much closer to them than they think,” it added. “If necessary, we will behead and slaughter to preserve the spirit and morals of our people.”

This extremism is familiar to Iranians and Afghanis, both of whom have been brutalized by fundamentalists. Now it has come to the Palestinians.
Somehow I don’t think a “binational state”—i.e., the one-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem—is the magic cure. Three writers crocodile-feeders at The Nation do, however.

While everyone in Israel is angling for position now that Olmert has gotten a 0% popularity rating and Nasrallah is singing nyeh nyeh nyeh boo boo, I’m watching Gaza to see what’s going on among Israel’s putative partners for peace.

Here’s what’s going on: al Qaeda (or someone affliated with it, or involved in al Qaeda-type thinking) is pressuring Hamas, as evidenced by a Guardian story about abducted BBC journalist Alan Johnston. Apparently Haniyeh is in negotiations with Johnston’s kidnappers [e.a.]:

 The letters from Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh have sought to “clarify to these people [the kidnappers] that this issue doesn’t serve the interest of our people, and the Muslims,” said the aide, Ahmed Youssef. …

Youssef said the kidnappers had not demanded any ransom and suggested they were a militant Muslim group.

“Money is not the issue. The issue is an incorrect understanding of Islam, how to deal with foreigners in general, an incorrect understanding of Islam among some,” he said.

Youssef declined to discuss the kidnappers’ identities or ideology. “Any discussions about it will harm this issue,” he said.

 For what it’s worth, Abbas also released a quote:

“We know where the journalist is, and we want to preserve his life and we want to save him, and this needs time,” Abbas was quoted as saying by the official Wafa news agency.

They seem to be afraid to say anything more for fear that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers.

You’ll note that just a couple of days ago, al Qaeda was publicly provoking and goading Hamas. From a story published in the L.A. Times:

An Al Qaeda leader called on the Palestinian group Hamas to fight Israel with “bombs and fire.”

“Where is revenge, where are the bombs, where is the fire?” Abu Yahya al-Libi asked members of the military wing of Hamas in a video posted on a website used by Islamist militant groups.

Al Qaeda views Hamas as a moderate group that has compromised the rights of Palestinians for political gains.

A war of words between Hamas and al Qaeda has been going on for a while. Here’s one story from mid-March:

Hamas to al-Qaeda: Stop baseless accusations

 

Fury in Hamas after al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri ‘eulogizes’ the movement, saying it has surrendered and betrayed its principles. Hamas: ‘We will not forsake a single grain of the sand of Palestine’

Here’s another story from mid-April:

‘Al-Qaeda operating in Gaza’

 

PA security officials say global jihad group targeting Palestinian leaders, secular Muslims

Al-Qaeda is operating in the Gaza Strip and previously attempted to assassinate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other top leaders from Abbas’ Fatah party, according to Palestinian security officials.

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda is operating with total impunity in Gaza, where there are currently no Western reporters?

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda took Johnston hostage as leverage against Hamas, which has been deemed to be not sufficiently Islamic to suit al Qaeda? that al Qaeda is now trying to hijack the Palestinian cause, for its own ends?

I last wrote about “al Qaeda-type thinking” in Gaza a few weeks ago. That phrase ran in both the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune on April 16.

No one has picked up on it since. Because they’re afraid that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers. That’s how terrorism works: it’s extortion.

I’m sorry to be back to blogging. It was so much nicer to lose myself in the sights of downtown Manhattan for my impromptu photo project.

But no one else is writing about this—there’s a virtual news blackout—so it falls to me to document what I’ve been able to put together.

Ynet News is reporting that the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has been executed “by an al-Qaeda affilated Palestinian organization.” Ynet says the news comes from “an internet statement obtained by Ynetnews.”

In the message, the group said the British and Palestinian governments were responsible for Johnston’s killing, and vowed to release a video of the execution.

“The whole world knows of our just cause in demanding the release of our prisoners, who are waiting under the fire of the occupation,” the statement began. “Our demand was that all of those who are responsible for the journalist… release our prisoners who are being held in the prisons of the occupation,” it continued.

“The whole world made so much noise about this foreign journalist, while it took no action over our thousands of prisoners,” the declaration said.

“Our objective was to broadcast a clear message, and we were surprised by the position of the Palestinian Authority, which attempted to hide the case as much as it could and to present the case in an untruthful manner, leading us unfortunately to kill the journalist so that our message is understood,” the declaration continued.

According to the Ynet report, the BBC is aware of the internet report but has no independent confirmation.

I hope fervently that it’s not true, but I fear it is. And if so, we may have entered a new phase of the Terrorists’ War Against Us.

Via Power Line, one Marine tells us his reasons.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Sgt. Baker Brooks is ”reciting Republican talking points” or if he’s a ”warmonger” or if he’s hopelessly deluded or if he needs the Democrats in Congress to take him out of harm’s way, because they are so concerned about his welfare. Or if he’s just one of the many Americans who believe we are in a fight for our way of life and who are putting their lives on the line to defend it:

I say that it is the “Right war to Fight” and I mean it with every fiber of my being. America is in this fight now. Much like Israel is locked in war, we are now locked in war. It may be slow and protracted but it will remain.

You may be thinking that this is not the case and that the attacks on American soil were a fluke. I say to you that you are lying to yourself and are in for a rude awakening. Not only are you in for a rude awakening but your self deception will cost our nation dearly in mindset and readiness. You have become tired of fighting. But how can anyone become tired of fighting the right fight? Much like in a foot race you will begin to tire and hurt. You will begin to focus on what is happening to you now. You have lost sight of the goal as you focus on yourself. And the pain that consumes you now has killed your aspirations of winning. You will only be able to win when you keep your eyes on the end goal and you see past the now. But unfortunately our eyes, via the news, have been focused on the now far too long.

Read the whole thing.