Daniel in Brookline

Since we are not losing, it is hard to see what the people calling for American withdrawal think they are accomplishing.

Every speech by an American leader calling for immediate or early withdrawal leads quite directly to the deaths of more American soldiers. Because our success depends on proving Osama wrong, discrediting him and the other terrorist leaders, and weakening the loyalty of those on the periphery of the terrorist movement.

But every one of those speeches undoes the work of a thousand soldiers. It encourages borderline participants in the terrorist movement to stay involved, because it seems to prove that Osama is right and that makes it look like God is with him and he will prevail in the end.

That's why the terrorists trumpet every one of these speeches to each other as if they were a victory on the battlefield. Because each one of those speeches by an American leader is a victory for the terrorists on the most important battlefield they fight on -- the hearts and minds of the Muslim people.

Even if this war were being badly run, even if the Bush administration was full of liars and incompetents, even if we were losing the war, it would still be shameful for Americans to openly make statements that directly aid our terrorist enemies.

If during the Revolutionary War, members of Congress had made the kind of defeatist public statements that we're regularly hearing from some today, there is little chance that the war could have continued.

What is so surprising is that Mr. Chirac's government has in the past favored an approach of conciliation or even appeasement toward Iran and the Arab nations. He was, after all, the vociferous foe of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and a hard line against Iran. That approach benefited French companies that were able to obtain lucrative contracts in competition with corporations based in the land of the great Satan. So, what happened? There are two contributing factors. The first is the civil unrest in France several months ago, which involved nightly riots and a myriad of car burnings in many areas of the country. This violence had the same kind of impact upon Mr. Chirac and the French government that September 11 had upon the United States.

In his speech, Mr. Chirac bluntly declared, "In numerous countries, radical ideas are spreading, advocating a confrontation of civilizations." Mr. Chirac now understands the problem. The jihadists are attempting to capture town by town, areas within Western Europe. As one French government official put it, "This is more than a clash of civilizations. It is a cancer within our country that if unchecked will destroy all of France."

With his statements, Mr. Chirac is warning Iran and the Arab countries to desist in supporting and encouraging residents of France who launched last year's attacks and are undoubtedly planning to do far worse. His approach is to cut off terror at the source. This resembles the policy being pursued by the U.S. government, although it is hard to imagine how great the public outcry would be if President Bush threatened to use nuclear weapons.

RAMALLAH - Hours after unofficial results indicated Hamas' clear victory in the Palestinian elections, Hamas supporters poured into the Palestinian parliament amid clashes with Fatah loyalists.

The Hamas supporters then raised the Hamas flag over the building.

The two camps threw stones at each other, breaking windows in the building, as Fatah supporters briefly tried to lower the green Hamas banners. The crowd of about 3,000 Hamas backers cheered and whistled as activists on the roof of the parliament raised the Hamas banner again.

It was the first confrontation between Hamas and Fatah since the Islamic militant group won parliament elections on Wednesday.

Fatah supporter outside
a Gaza City polling station

WELL, THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN! [...] it became clear in early hours Hamas has won a most solid and unexpected victory, aided by turnout substantially higher in Gaza, its most reliable source of support, than in the West Bank.

It's not clear anyone wanted this, least of all Hamas, who in assuming the administration of the Palestinian national authority's creaking and often corrupt bureaucracy single-handed in a moment when its sole lifeline of European and other international support appears threatened, may just have stumbled into the biggest molasses patch the Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah has ever faced. Unlike the Lib Dems of 1985, Hamas did not go to its constituencies to prepare for government. It had prepared for a coalition, or possibly pristine opposition, but not this.

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

The war on terrorism is very much a war of bombs and bullets in which soldiers and civilians die. It's also an economic war, a war waged in dollars and cents on dusty ledgers in banks in New York and London and Geneva. But more than any of those things, it's a war of ideas. It's a war that will, when it reaches its eventual conclusion, finally settle the question of what kind of world we're going to live in.

Are we going to live in a world where airplanes fall burning out of the sky and where discotheques explode without warning and where skyscrapers turn into mass graves? That's the question the participants in this war seek to answer. And if we want the answer to be "no" - and we do - we've got no choice at all but to radically change the rules governing a third of the world.
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Tyranny anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. That's the war we're fighting. And it's bigger than al-Qaida. It's bigger than Iraq and it's bigger than Palestine, and it's sure as hell bigger than Osama bin Laden. It's a war to decide the fate of the entire world. And it's a war we mean to win.

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"Remember George, this is no time to go wobbly." So said Margaret Thatcher to the first President Bush just days after Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait. Bush did not go wobbly. He invaded. A decade later, the second George Bush came into office and immediately began a radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. Now, however, the conventional wisdom is that in the face of criticism from domestic opponents and foreign allies, Bush is backing down. Has W. gone wobbly?
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Has Bush gone wobbly? Not at all. [...] No need for in-your-face arrogance. No need to humiliate. No need to proclaim that you will ignore nattering allies and nervous ex-enemies. Journalists can talk like that because the truth is clarifying. Governments cannot talk like that because the truth is scary. The trick to unilateralism -- doing what you think is right, regardless of what others think -- is to pretend you are not acting unilaterally at all.

Ostensibly I am receiving this portfolio for the transition period of a number of months until the elections, but as mentioned we cannot permit ourselves to view this period as one of transition or to rest until Israel's elections.

First of all, in the Middle East there is never a dull moment. Imagine to yourselves where we were a month or two months ago and where we'll be in another week or ten days.

There was a window of opportunity following the disengagement process that Israel created, and a choice should have been set before the Palestinians. We should have told them that this is the meaning of democracy and you should choose it, not go to the polls with weapons, and not come armed to parliament, and not go armed to the government.

But the Palestinians came with a different claim to the international community and said that they need these elections in order to provide legitimacy in the war against the terrorist organizations.

So our objective now, even though the PA elections were supposed to complete the process of dismantling terrorism [...] our commitment today is to make it clear at home, but particularly to the international community, that this process has not been resolved and the Palestinians have not been released from their commitment to dismantle the terrorist organizations.

Israeli military Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was recently asked how far Israel was willing to go to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Answer: “Two thousand kilometers.”

And so we took action. We took action because the Taliban refused to expel al Qaeda. And we took action because when an American President says something, he better mean it. In order to be able to keep the peace, in order to be able to have credibility in this world, when we speak, we better mean what we say. And I meant what we said. And we sent some brave souls into Afghanistan to liberate that country from the Taliban.

If you live in an arab country, you know you heard those 3 statements before and sometimes from the same person:

1) The Holocaust never happend.
2) Hitler is a great man for killing the Jews.
3) Sharon is as bad as Hitler.

You figure out how someone can have those 3 statements in their heads and feel utterly comfortable with believeing them despite their galring contradictions, and you will figure out how the mind of the average conspiracy-theory-obsessed jew-hating arab works.

As a professional soldier, Sharon saw that Israel had won all its wars with the Arabs in military terms but failed to translate those victories into lasting political gains. At some point he must have wondered why.

For a war to be won it is not enough for one side to claim victory, although that is essential. It is also necessary for one side to admit defeat. The problem in the case of the Arab-Israeli wars, however, was that the side that had won every time was not allowed to claim victory while the side that had lost was prevented from admitting defeat.

This was a novel situation in history, throughout which the victor and the vanquished had always acknowledged their respective positions and moved beyond it in accordance with a peace imposed by the victor.

In the Israeli-Arab case this had not been done because each time the UN had intervened to put the victor and the vanquished on an equal basis and lock them into a problematic situation in the name of a mythical quest for an impossible peace.

There is, however, not a single instance in history in which the winner of a war has given the loser any land in exchange for peace. Nor is there a single instance in which justice and peace have gone together as Siamese twins. In every case the winner wins the land and gives the loser peace. In every case the peace that is imposed is unjust to the loser and just to the winner.

Without going far back into history, it is sufficient to glance at some of the dozens of wars in Europe, Asia and Africa in recent decades to see that they all ended with a peace designed, if not dictated, by the winner. Thus for more than 50 years Israel and the Arabs have been asked to achieve what no other warring parties have ever achieved.

Israel-Palestine became the only conflict to defy a resolution. Successive Israeli governments preferred to wait until there was a Palestinian partner that would accept the kind of peace Israel could offer. This was mirrored by the Palestinians, who were asked by their Arab brothers and others in the UN to wait until Israel offered a peace they would like.

Sharon understood that if such a formula remained in force there would never be peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was necessary for the victor to claim victory, regardless of what anyone else said. It was also necessary for the victor to take unilateral action by imposing the peace it could live with.

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

So you have Swedish clothing designers putting a tag on hot jeans with a skull and an inverted cross, with the express intention of pointing out the “evil” of Christianity. "It is an active statement against Christianity," Bjorn Atldax told The Associated Press. "I'm not a Satanist myself, but I have a great dislike for organized religion."Atldax insists he has a purpose beyond selling denim: to make young people question Christianity, which he called a "force of evil" that had sparked wars throughout history.

It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion’s mouth. Or selling jeans that have the international cross-and-bar NO symbol over the crescent of Islam. They don’t dare do that – partly because they are deeply suffused in the very racism they decry, and regard the inhabitants of their tall dead Corbu-inspired concrete ghettos as brown rabble beneath contempt and therefore irrelevant to relevant discussion, and partly because they have a nagging fear of editorials, hate-speech laws, tut-tuts from the thinking class, and the occasional unhinged fellow with a knife. But Christianity? Didn’t that die in a muddy hole in Ypres?

But that’s not really what tickled me about the letter. It’s a fairly concise summation of a particular mindset that does not, to put it lightly, share the same peril-set I do. [...] And that’s why the letter amused. He said:

Assume that violent Islamic fundamentalism, like Nazism and communism before it, is completely marginalized.

Right. The Iranian sponsors, with their nuclear ambitions and support of international terror, are off the stage; the Saudi paymasters are likewise cowed or replaced with a government that seeks coexistence with Israel; Syria has had a revolution, Iraq makes the Swiss look like South Bronx (or a Paris Suburb), the Chechen rebels have disbanded in shame, the store-front sheiks of London have decided to join in the experiment of 21st century post-national continental identity, the various rag-tag bombers and separatists and fundamentalists from Indonesia to India to Pakistan have likewise stood down, and the most primitive, unreconstructed, antagonistic threat to modernity, liberalism, gender equity, religious tolerance, pluralism, and all the other right bonny boons of the Western Civ have been defeated, thwarted, or persuaded to change their ways.

Assume that, and we can get on to the issues the [Bush] apologists never consider.

Give me a call when it happens. We’ll sit down and have a nice hot cup of worry. Some scones, too. If they’re fresh.

Say a prayer for the prime minister.

Say a prayer for the man who could not be broken.

Say a prayer for our shattered present. Say a prayer for our shuttered common future.

Pray for the man who could not be stilled. Pray for the man who could not be swayed.

Say a prayer for the future only he knew.

Say a prayer for the people he has left behind. The Jewish People, the people he loved, at times despite himself, despite them. The people who could not bring themselves to love him.

Pray for those of us who once embraced him, and came to curse him.

Pray for those of us who once cursed him, and could not bring ourselves to forgive him.

Pray for those who call themselves religious and see in this, the hand of God.

Pray for those who call themselves non-religious and need now to pray.

Pray for the leaders who, unable to replace him, will now succeed him.

Pray for a miracle. Pray for all of us. Pray that we may know to heal each other.

Pray for this land. That it may know the peace that he never will.