James Joyner, at Outside The Beltway has posted on the new, classified policies for interrogation being set up by the U.S. Army, which the New York Times speculates will anger U.S. Senator John McCain(R, Arizona) as he is presently negotiating with the White House and the House of Representatives on a set of guidelines to prevent cruel treatment of prisoners taken in the Global War On Terror(GWOT).

Joyner writes,

Not having seen the rules, I have no view on whether they go “too far.” I would note, however, that by definition having precise legislative guidelines means there is a line between legal and illegal conduct. So, if going “right to the edge” is a problem, that line needs to be redrawn.

Further, the Army, like any government agency, will naturally issue regulations for their employees giving them precise guidelines to stay within compliance with the law. While doing so may have the effect of giving them encouragement to go right up to the limits of the law, that is not necessarily the intent. Indeed, from the little information provided by the article, it would seem the opposite is true:

From the Times: One Army officer expressed exasperation that senior military and civilian officials were failing to articulate a coherent approach toward interrogation, saying much of the confusion centered on disparate definitions of abuse. “Everybody’s talking past each other on this,” the officer said. ” ‘Cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment’ is at the crux of the problem, but we’ve never defined that.”

The new manual, the first revision in 13 years, will specifically prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, keeping them in stressful positions for a long time, imposing dietary restrictions, employing police dogs to intimidate prisoners and using sleep deprivation as a tool to get them to talk, Army officials said. In that regard, it imposes new restrictions on what interrogators are allowed to do. Those practices were not included in the manual in use when most of the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in the fall of 2003, but neither were they specifically banned.

I’m not all that sure a fixed set of interrogation guidelines is what is needed here, at least not one that is uniform for all prisoners.

If, say, our(or the Iraqi) forces capture a terrorist from al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, one who has been involved in the bombing murders of children and the beheading of innocent abductees, and it is believed that the man possesses information that can be valuable toward saving the lives of soft targets or coalition troops or further damaging the terrorist infrastructure, I see absolutely no reason to accord that animal any rights whatsoever when it comes to extracting information from him. I’m all for doing whatever it takes to wrest the intelligence from him, and I could care less what becomes of him afterwards. This is war, not a game of patty cakes, and you can be damn sure that if the roles were reversed, he would do the same to you, and probably laugh in your face in the process. These are not human beings as we know human beings, they are rabid murderers who kill for the sake of killing and use religion as their justification.

Making nice and making it law that we make nice will only embolden them further. It has been proven time and time again that whenever we show mercy to Islamofascist terrorists, they perceive it as weakness and as a victory for themselves, and their attacks increase both in volume and viciousness.

By upstaging the senator’s efforts with their own set of rules that might be deemed legally acceptable (if possibly slightly more harsh than Mr. McCain’s own suggestions are likely to be), I believe the Army is, in effect, doing the right thing, especially in keeping their proposed interrogation methods a secret to prevent the enemy from being able to devise ways to resist them. The people do not have a “right to know.” Terrorists watch CNN, too.

I am not, by nature, a vicious person, but I believe that certain circumstances, particularly those dealing with the defense of the innocent and of country against an enemy such as the one we face in the GWOT, require realism-based responses.

Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, in a speech on Monday at Johns Hopkins, very easily, calmly and well, chastised the media for their partisan reporting on the war in Iraq.

The other question I posed is of critical importance: why does Iraq’s success or failure matter to the American people?
Consider this quote: “What you have seen, Americans, in New York and Washington, D.C., and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes.”

The speaker is Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior member of the terrorist group al Qaeda and a top leader in the effort to defeat U.S. and coalition forces around the world. The terrorists’ method of attack, simply put, is slaughter. They behead. They bomb children. They attack funerals and wedding receptions.

This is the kind of brutality and mayhem the terrorists are working to bring to our shores. And if we do not succeed in our efforts to arm and train Iraqis to help defeat these terrorists in Iraq, this is the kind of mayhem that a terrorist, emboldened by a victory, will bring to our cities again–let there be no doubt.

Indeed, the most important reason for our involvement in Iraq–despite the cost–is often overlooked. It is not only about building democracy, though democracies tend to be peaceful and prosperous and are in and of themselves good things. It is not about reopening Iraqi schools and hospitals or rebuilding infrastructure, though they are proceeding apace and are desirable and essential to ensure stability.

But, simply put, defeating extremist aspirations in Iraq is essential to protect the lives of Americans here at home.

And he tells the media,

So I suggest to editors and reporters–whose good intentions I take for granted–to do some soul searching. To ask: how will history judge–if it does–the reporting decades from now when Iraq’s path is settled?

I would urge us all to make every effort to ensure we are telling the whole story. To take a moment for self-reflection and reassessment.

Further it is worth noting that there are 158,000 Americans in uniform who are sending e-mails back to friends and families, telling them the truth as they see it. And much of it is different than what those in the United States are seeing and reading about every day.

Yes, this is an angle the liberal Mainstream Media doesn’t seem to be considering all that much — that while they are now playing footloose and fancy free with the news they deliver to the American public, when the smoke of Iraq clears and all the truths are lain on the table of public scrutiny, they will be exposed before the American people as purveyors of half truths and downright lies who misled their trusting readers, viewers and listeners in order to peddle their liberal agendas.

This alert from Moving America Forward actually arrived the other day, but I was behind on reading email due to much busy-ness of late.

The author of the alert, Joseph Williams, is a Vietnam vet himself and the father of a United States Marine who died fighting for the continued freedom of the Iraqi people.

Fellow Americans:

I’m so very proud of my son who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He knew the mission was important, and he understood that the war in
Iraq was central to the war on terrorism.

Sadly, my son (Lance Cpl. Michael Jason Williams) lost his life in
combat in this war. My life changed forever when I got a knock at my door,
informing me that Michael had been killed in action. My son is my hero.

As a father, I can’t tell you what a gut-wrenching blow it was, and
still is. Not a day goes by I don’t think about my child. But the
Anti-American, anti-war crowd that pretends to ’support the military, but not
the mission’ are a pack of liars.

Some people, like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, have tried to
exploit the death of Michael and others who lost their lives in Iraq, in
order that they might advance their far left political agenda.

If we don’t stand up to the Cindy Sheehans, Michael Moore’s and the
politicans who are using Michael’s death to further their agenda of
undermining our Commander-in-Chief, then Michael Jason William’s devotion to
this great country will be rendered meaningless.

I know from bitter experience.

I am a Vietnam veteran.

I don’t know what is so hard for the people in today’s anti-war
movement to understand. Radical Islamic Extremists are determined to kill
Americans and destroy our way of life.

In Iraq the terrorist insurgency is led by a fellow named Zarqawi, his
position is the leader of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” yet the anti-war crowd
marches through our streets proclaiming that the war in Iraq has nothing
to do with the war against terrorism.

Well, I’ve had enough of the misguided, anti-military and even
anti-American rhetoric from the anti-war crowd. They seem to be rooting for
our enemies more than our own troops at times.

So I’ve decided to help fight back.

I’ve leant my voice and my story - and the story of my son’s sacrifice
for his nation - to Move America Forward, for them to use in a national
radio ad campaign.

You can hear the ad here:
http://www.moveamericaforward.org/Link/audio/7452

Right now we’re trying to raise enough money to purchase the time on
radio stations around the country to make sure this message is heard.

Please, support this effort by making a contribution to help pay for
the airtime for this radio commercial. I would be honored to have you
help get this message out.

Contribute online here:
http://www.MoveAmericaForward.org/Contribution

Or mail in a contribution to this address:

Move America Forward
ATTN: Pro-Troop Holiday Ad Fund
P.O. Box 1497
Sacramento, CA 95812

Thank you for reading my letter.

Sincerely Yours,

Joseph Williams
Vacaville, California

What are our friends, the Saudis up to these days?

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — A court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes for “mocking religion” after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper reported yesterday.
Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.
He was charged with promoting a “dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer,” the newspaper said.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.
A U.S. State Department report criticized Saudi Arabia last week, saying religious freedoms “are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam.”
The newspaper said Mr. al-Harbi will appeal the verdict.
A similar case was cited in the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2004.
“During the period covered by this report, a schoolteacher was tried for apostasy, and eventually convicted in March of blasphemy; the person was given a prison sentence of 3 years and 300 lashes. The trial received substantial press coverage,” the report said.
A 2003 report by the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, the world’s only government-sanctioned entity to investigate and report religious-freedom violations, named Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest violator of religious liberties.

Oh, okay, SSDD.

And this is a nation that exports its “religious” beliefs via mosques and schools to countries all over the world, where despite their claim that they are friends of ours, they preach hatred and scorn for all but Islam to their young, naming the United States and its citizens as one of their two worst enemies, the other being Israel.

Islam, the Religion of Peace.

Tell it to the French.

In scattered attacks overnight into Monday, vandals rammed a car into a primary school in the southern city of Toulouse before setting the building on fire. In northern France, arsonists set fire to a sports center in the suburb of Faches-Thumesnil and a school in the town of Halluin.

A gas canister exploded inside a burning garbage can in the Alpine city of Grenoble, injuring two police officers, the national police said. Three officers were injured elsewhere.

The rioting, sparked by the accidental electrocution deaths of two teens who thought police were chasing them, began in Paris’ poor suburbs, where immigrants from North and West Africa live with their French-born children in housing projects.

Sunday was the 18th straight night of unrest, but the storm of arson attacks and other violence has lost steam since the government declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.

The number of cars burned nightly has steadily decreased — from 502 overnight into Saturday, to 374 overnight into Sunday, to 271 as Monday began. A week earlier, 1,400 cars were incinerated in a single night.

What really irritates me about the way the liberal media has been handling the above events, collectively, is that they all but justify the property destruction, school and car burnings and other violence, including cop killing by focusing on the failure of the French to assimilate these Muslims into their society, citing the high rate of unemployment and poor living conditions in Islamic neighborhoods in France.

The Mainstream Media has actually excused these rioters and reduced, in tacit manner, what they’ve been doing to the status of peaceful protesters demonstrating against a government that has made them feel oppressed.

Right, so there’s no harm in burning a few thousand cars belonging to individuals who more than likely have had no influence in anything having anything at all to do with the Muslims’ situation, burning some schools, go figure — throwing gasoline all over a woman on crutches that burned the skin over a large part of her body — beating up senior citizens and attacking police.

We need to try and understand the poor dears, examine the reasons, the very motivations that created this atmosphere of violence, etc, etc…

Let’s hear it! “Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya…”

So as is always the case, the portside media manages to turn the victims into elements of an evil society{well, it is France} that is unfair to its Muslim citizens, who are merely responding to the unfairness, and voila! the rioters are now the victims.

Leave it to the left to define a situation thusly. If the ACLU had a Paris branch, they would probably be suing the French government for setting curfews and arresting rioters, thereby obstructing their rights to express their hate and anger.

Still, it must be a tough call for the left, since their appointed villains belong largely to the socialist government liberals so look up to.

What the truth boils down to is that gangs of young Muslims have been running amok, commiting violent, destructive felonies and there is nothing they can use as an excuse that will justify their acts. They are, indeed, scum.

If the French courts don’t deal harshly with those arrested in the course of their terrorism — yes, that’s exactly what this is — it will only make them appear weak and vulnerable to these animals, who view leniency as spinelessness and therefore contemptible. This lesson has been learned the hard way by many, not least of whom are the Israelis, but the left still hasn’t picked up on that. They won’t, in fact, until they are living under Sharia law and no longer have the right to criticize the powers that be, and their women are eighth class citizens, chattel who can be beaten bloody by hubby for the slightest infraction.

Dealing leniently with these “people” will only let them know that the threat of future rioting will be accepted as a bargaining chip by the French government. And there will be future rioting as a result.

What western supporters of and apologists for the actions of militant Islamics refuse to accept is that we are dealing with a mindset that is 100% intolerant of any religious beliefs that differ from theirs, believing that they are false and that it is the God given right of Muslims to go to any country they please and attack its customs, religious symbols and heritage in order to force it to comply with their own culture. It is acceptable to lie to infidels(non-believers), even to the point of signing treaties with full intentions of violating them when it is strategically advantageous to do so.

The centerpiece/ mastermind of today’s global Islamic terrorist front is, of course, al Qaeda, and those extremists have become so excessive as to alienate a few Muslim countries and communities through the none-too-bright practice of murdering their own. Witness the beach resort bombings in Egypt not long ago and, the other day, their hotel bombings in Jordan, the latter leading to a declaration of war on them by the king of Jordan himself.

JORDAN’S King Abdullah II vowed to “take the fight” to Iraq-based Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group Jordanian officials say carried out suicide attacks in Amman this week that killed 57 people.

“We are going to crack down and take the fight to Zarqawi,” the king said in an interview with CNN television.

“We have been very successful in taking down his operations in the past … (when) he used Jordanians. Now he has changed tactics, he is using foreigners. That means that our security services have to change tactics too.”

Authorities have arrested 12 people suspected of having had a hand in Wednesday’s bombings and have questioned scores more.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi was released from jail in 1999 as part of general amnesty granted by King Abdullah but was last year sentenced to death by a Jordanian court for the 2002 murder of a US diplomat.

Good, let the SOBs get their own people after them, at least those fellow Muslims of theirs are folks who understand what they’re up against, unlike western governments like our own who simply refuse to realize that we are addressing an enemy whose thought patterns are totally alien to our own, especially in regard to such items as the sanctity of human life or the value of their word when given to any person or political body that exists outside their own faith.

And our political leaders really don’t seem to have a clue. One piece of supporting evidence for that statement comes from the pressure we are putting on Israel to expedite their capitulation to the Palestinians.

A sharp dispute arose on Monday between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the issue of Hamas participation in Palestinian elections slated for January.

In a Monday morning meeting in Jerusalem, Sharon said that allowing Hamas to take part in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council would be a grave error, and would only weaken Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, rather than strengthening him, as Palestinians have argued.

“We will not interfere with the elections,” Sharon declared, “but neither will we coordinate the elections with [the Palestinians], and will not allow Hamas people to operate and move around differently from what is happening now.”

We are pushing Israel to interact with the Palestinians in the same manner the United States would exercise diplomacy with, say, Norway, Germany or Greece, but the reality they face is alien to that of diplomacy with the average civilized country.

Very real security concerns prevent the Israelis from going with a program that could get innocent civilians killed. As many of us expected when Ariel Sharon ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and evacuated all the Jewish residents, Gaza has been morphing itself into an armed camp from which terrorists of such esteemed murder organizations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad can launch attacks against Israel without even having to travel. They can telecommute by mortar.

Condi, I love you and will vote for you for President in 2008 if you’re our candidate, but please, don’t treat the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians like the relationship between the U.S. and Canada, for Chrissake!

While we argue with the political panjandrums in Ottawa over things like steel manufacture or Mad Cow, the Israelis exist in a completely different reality.

Late Sunday night, tanks lined up outside the northern Gaza border targeted the sources of the attacks.

According to IDF officials, the reprisals would continue into the early hours Monday morning, “because the Palestinians must understand that we will not ignore mortar fire.”

The army began firing at the terror cells after a mortar shell landed near the security fence north of the Karni crossing Sunday night. No one was wounded and no damage was caused in the attack.

“Our response will be exaggerated and disproportional to the [mortar] fire,” a senior IDF official said, according to Army Radio. If the Palestinian cells continue firing mortars, he added, Israel’s response will even intensify.

Israel has gradually escalated its response to the attacks from Gaza since its withdrawal from the strip. During the first half of September, during Operation First Rain, Israel stationed a row of tanks bordering the Gaza Strip to discourage attacks. When Palestinian attacks continued, however, the army was given the go-ahead to respond to fire with fire.

IDF officials explained that the object of the current operation was to drive the terror cells away from the security fence, and thus render the mortar fire ineffective due to the limited range of the shells.

The major worry here is that Hamas, a terrorist organization by any definition, has become an important political party among the Palestinians and if they win any major posts in upcoming elections they will be a terrorist organization with political authority that will undoubtedly be acknowledged by the U.N. and member nations that encompass, among others, western countries, including the United States.

To add to all else, we have ongoing problems with Syria and Iran.

We are at war with radical Islam. We initiated our two main fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and despite the mewlings from the left as to how “Bush lied and people died,” and the down-playing and downright ignoring of our highly positive results in Iraq by the Mainstream Media does more to hurt our country than to help it — they would rather spin, omit and lie than tell the truth, all for a political agenda that’s more important to them than the security of our form of government and the well-being of Americans in America.

Sad.

Since the beginning of Islam, the “faithful” have attempted unsuccessfully to force their beliefs and lifestyles, para-militarily and militarily, on the Judeo-Christian world. They have failed miserably. Today, however, they are taking advantage of advances in technology and travel to pursue their ages-old agenda via terrorism.

We are fighting a global war whose stakes comprise our freedom and the continuity of our very way of life, and it would greatly benefit us all if those Americans on the left side of the aisle went beyond the limitations of partisan politics and stood up for their country and for the freedom these fanatics are fighting tooth-and-nail to take away from us.

Iran has now put a satellite in space as part of a joint venture with their good friend, Russia.

Iran launched its first satellite into space from Plesetsk in northern Russia on Thursday, joining a select club of countries.
A joint project between Iran and Russia, the Sina-1 satellite will be used to take pictures of Iran and to monitor natural disasters.

Director General of Iran Electronic Industries Ebrahim Mahmoudzadeh said Sina-1 was the result of years of research and 32 months of construction.

I find the very concept just a little scary — they are the 43rd out of the planet’s 191 countries to have a satellite in space — and they are a country governed by extreme ideals several centuries in arrears, a nation that sponsors terrorism, whose president just decried a need for the destruction of Israel, who are the subject of a frantic attempt by the western world to discourage their development of the means to manufacture and deliver nuclear weapons.

Mr Mahmoudzadeh said the $15m research satellite would contain a telecommunications system and cameras that would be used for monitoring Iran’s agriculture and natural resources.

“Considering that the satellite weights 170kg and is carrying a camera, it is an initial model as far as technical know-how and experience are concerned.”

Great, so perhaps next they’ll have a Russian version of the KH-12{surveillance} satellite to send up, to keep an eye on Israel and on the Great Satan{the U.S.} and other western countries.

It would be nice to think that we have some folks on tap who can intercept their satellite feed and disseminate it for useful intelligence.

Hat Tip The Raw Story.

Michael Yon’s brand new post from Iraq is called Purple Fingers.

Tony Blankley has written a detailed and must-read piece on the premises behind his book The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win The Clash Of Civilizations?, in which he discusses the serious threat posed to western civilization by radical Islam, citing among other causes for alarm the rapid ongoing ingestion of Europe by Muslims.

It is beginning to dawn on Europeans that the combination of a shrinking ethnic-European population and an expanding, culturally assertive Muslim population might lead to the fall of Western civilization in Europe within a century.
This phenomenon, called Eurabia, is viewed with growing fatalism both in Europe and in America. Such fatalism, however, is premature.
Last November, an Islamist terrorist’s butchering of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie revealing abuse of Muslim women, aroused deep fears in Holland and across the Continent.
The public anger, which included the burning of mosques in traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct for survival has not been fully extinguished.
But that survival instinct is threatened by the multiculturalism and political correctness advocated in media and academe — and institutionalized in national and European Union laws and regulations for half a century.
Europe’s effort at cultural tolerance since World War II slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.
If Europe doesn’t rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass. Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.

Another excerpt from the article that should be kept in mind,

Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.
Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.
Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.
The Islamo-fascist mullahs encourage young Muslims not to turn to their parents for guidance on choosing a wife (or wives). Nor are young Muslims to be guided by parental or community disapproval of making an individual commitment to jihad. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave their beards and commit what otherwise would be judged immorality in a Muslim — in order to advance jihad.

Read the entire series, three parts, the second two linked at the ends of their “predecessors.”

We are fighting a war against a religious entity that has actually been at war with the rest of the world, in one way or another, for about a dozen centuries, because they believe that only Muslims are entitled to live, the rest of us must be killed.

The technology of today has enabled them, for the first time in their entire bloody history, to mount the war they’ve always wanted on a global scale.

And we are fighting them tooth and nail, despite obstruction from our own lemminglike left and politically partisan propaganda, spins, omissions and outright lies by the mainstream{liberal} media, all of whom either take the side of or play into the hands of our terrorist enemy.

The superbly well prepared, well fact-checked outing of a left wing media stooge who is a very good friend, indeed, of the terrorists in Iraq can be found at GM’s Corner, and a definitive rebuttal to the left’s decomposing dead horse, “Bush lied! We only invaded Iraq because he said they had WMD!” awaits at Kender’s Musings.

I’ve long since become accustomed to the fact that the Mainstream Media grinds its liberal political axe without a shred of reportorial ethics, conscience nor any ambition to provide the public with any kind of factual, unbiased reporting. Anything, no matter how trivial, that may cast any kind of positive light on anything Bush, for example, seems to be a non-event, never happened, while anything, again no matter how trivial, that may cast any kind of negative light on anything Bush becomes an epic parade of headlines and feature stories, half the time delivered with such rabid enthusiasm that the so-called journalists and the columnists who feed off them don’t even bother taking the time to confirm their information.

We’ve all seen that, and seen some of the leftist reporters responsible who’ve been caught out lose their positions, thrown to the wolves by the same editors and upper management people that encouraged their irresponsible “reporting” to begin with, in order to save their own skins. We’ve seen the media respond to a still unfounded charge that American soldiers flushed a Koran down a commode at Camp Delta with a major onslaught that brought references to the Soviet gulags, to Nazi concentration camps and even the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime, and the media jumped on all of it with relish, like a bunch of slobbering, undisciplined pre-adolescents..

Leftist twits like the NYT’s Maureen Dowd bent over backwards to make the American public believe that the Bush Administration and our soldiers were no better than Saddam, who tortured, terrorized, oppressed and murdered his own citizens as a matter of policy.

Despite all the evidence that glares blatantly from MSM newspapers and evening reports, editorials and Op Ed columns, liberals will actually look you in the eye and claim there is no media bias or actually go so far as to say, still looking you in the eye, by gum, that the MSM is right wing biased.

So-called “news” from the N.Y. Times, S.F. Chronicle, Washington Post, L.A. Times, etc, CBS,NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and other liberal sources would have us believe we are being trounced in Iraq, for example, that everything happening over there is negative, that the Iraqi people feel we’ve occupied their country for colonial purposes, we’re there for the oil and so on, and so on. Whenever an American soldier dies in combat or from a terrorist car bomb, RPG-7 grenade or IED, he or she is added to a death count intended to show America that we are in some kind of quagmire, “another Vietnam.”

In truth, we are beating the hell out of the insurgents over there, driving down their numbers faster than they can replace those that Coalition and Iraqi forces capture or kill. We have helped open schools so that now thousands of Iraqi children are being educated where many could not enjoy educations before. There is a successful Iraqi stock exchange in Baghdad, newspapers are flourishing as the Iraqi people embrace their newfound right to freedom of speech. We have been training Iraqi police and military forces with a great degree of success, and these forces are working as counterparts with our own. As they become seasoned, adequately staffed and prepared to do their jobs independently, we will begin withdrawing our own forces and allowing them to take over.

In today’s Opinion Journal’s Review & Outlook, some good observations are made regarding a letter sent from bin Laden’s XO, Ayman al-Zawahiri to al-Qaeda’s Iraq commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that was obtained this past Summer and whose contents were just released.

The letter in its entirety is here.

This link is included within this column, titled Zawahiri’s Lament.

Those who want a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will now have to explain why that won’t play into the hands–and plans–of the enemy. Zawahiri makes it quite clear that al Qaeda’s ambitions extend well beyond the borders of any one country. The goal is a fundamentalist Islamic regime that begins in Iraq, extends into the neighboring secular nations of the region, assaults Israel and moves on from there. And yes, he uses the word “caliphate.”

The tone of the letter makes it quite obvious that Zawahiri is not a happy camper, that he’s watching the extremist tactics employed by his people in Iraq work against them, both in the media battle that seems to have become as big a part of both sides’ campaigns as the fighting itself, and in the more localized effects of the wanton bombings, the beheadings and other terrorist strategies being employed by the Islamofascist butchers in Iraq.

As for the Sunnis, he urges Zarqawi to cast a wider net–an implicit admission that he’s worried about Sunnis who have been showing signs of interest in the democratic political process unfolding there. Afghanistan–and the Islamic democracy emerging in that nation–is his worst nightmare. “We don’t want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Kandahar alone,” he says. “The result was that the Afghan people disengaged themselves from them. Even devout ones took the stance of the spectator and when the invasion came, the emirate collapsed in days, because the people were either passive or hostile.”

Later in the editorial,,

Amid these lamentations, however, one area emerges about which the terror commander exudes great confidence: the media. The lesson he learned from Vietnam is that “more than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media.” He clearly wants to use the media, in the U.S. and in the Arab world, to induce the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and default a position of strength to al Qaeda.
He actually worries about the possibility that Zarqawi will blow victory on the media battlefield: Toward this end, he gently urges Zarqawi to discontinue his habit of beheading hostages, suggesting that perhaps instead he could just shoot them. “We are in a media race for . . . hearts and minds,” he writes.

It would seem the lesson of Vietnam is featured prominently in the terrorist handbooks: The Americans’ greatest weakness is their liberal media. Beat them in the MSM, you beat them at war, no matter what the physical realities are.

The long Zawahiri letter is a rough roadmap of the strategic vision for al Qaeda’s intentions in Iraq and the global jihad. If it has a familiar ring, that’s because George Bush has been warning the world about it for several years.

Some excellent commentary on the letter can be found at Sister Toldjah!, and Howie at The Jawa Report offers another perspective — be sure to follow the link in his post.

But to cut to the chase, we are winning in Iraq and in the Global War on Terror in general, not only in terms of killing the enemy but also in terms of winning the hearts and minds of the people in the regions in which we operate. It’s just too bad that the MSM, for partisan political reasons, continues to lie to the public in their shameful crusade to discredit President Bush.

The remarkable Michael Yon, a civilian journalist who had been blogging from within the ranks of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment{the Deuce Four} in Iraq via his newsmagazine until its tour recently ended, is now heading into a new embed. Read his latest post here.
A single column by Michael Yon is more informative where the war in Iraq is concerned than six months’ worth of the New York Times and CNN combined.

Since I’m leaving Washington, DC and heading up to New York this weekend, I headed down to the Tower Bar, here at the Wyndham, for a last tequila with a great bartender named Reggie and afterwards(about now), I’ve returned to my suite. Pictures At An Exhibition is playing on the living room radio/CD player, cool. A little bit of Mussorgsky to accompany this post, open the fridge and break out a Sam Adams to go with another tequila.
Fitting, a drink in honor of those Americans fighting for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan as tomorrow{oops, sorry, today as it’s after midnight} I’ll be headed over to attend a rally in honor of our troops who are now in harm’s way on behalf of our great nation.

Ditch Bitch Cindy Sheehan is here. You know, the traitoress who has chosen to demean the mortal sacrifice made by her son during his second enlistment, fighting for the country he believed in, the one his mother does not.

If you’re within driving distance of our nation’s capitol or it’s convenient to hop on a plane and you’re of a mind to, or you’ve got a few bucks you can donate to help, well:

ALERT: What did you do yesterday?

William Greene, President
RightMarch.com

I’ve met Bill Greene, he’s a really sincere guy and a patriotic American who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the bureaucrat the phrasing of the email copied above might suggest. He is a powerful looking{the kind you’d like to have as back-up if you were under attack}, well spoken, charactar-filled, ordinary American who loves his country and sacrifices one whole hell of a lot of his own time for the cause of RightMarch, the organization he leads, because he believes in our nation.

RightMarch is an organization dedicated to preserving the freedoms we, as Americans, enjoy as the liberals in this country fight to turn us into a socialist quagmire, attempting to transform the Constitution into The Communist Manifesto with the ACLU as guideon. A commenter at Kira Zalan’s blog called Civilwarrior pointed out that

…As for the vaunted, saintly, ACLU, may I remind you that it’s founder, Roger Baldwin, stated: “We are for SOCIALISM, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself… We seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the SOLE CONTROL of those who produce wealth. COMMUNISM is the goal.”