While this seeming end-in-sight comes as a relief, I doubt if anyone who supported the initial Iraqi invasion would have done so if they knew in advance we would be there 8 years, at a cost of 2 to 3 trillion dollars and over four thousand lives. When we finally leave, Iraq will not be that beacon of democratic freedom for the Muslim nations as we had hoped because the people cling to Islam and under Islam, freedom means perfect slavery.

WSJ: BAGHDAD -- U.S. and Iraqi negotiators reached agreement on a security deal that calls for American military forces to leave Iraq's cities by next summer as a prelude to a full withdrawal of combat troops from the country, according to senior American officials.

The draft agreement sets 2011 as the goal date by which U.S. combat troops will leave Iraq, according to Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Haj Humood and other people familiar with the matter. In the meantime, American troops will be leaving cities, towns and other population centers by the summer of 2009, living in bases outside of those areas, according to the draft...

This business of "withdrawing combat troops" and leaving others confuses. Indeed, it hardly makes sense. Are we to understand that the other troops, those  "non-combat troops," the American soldiers who will continue to engage in the tireless and endless little acts of kindness and of love -- Reconstruction, teaching Peace and Justice, taming various lions (Arab and Kurd, Shi'a and Sunni ) to lie down peacefully with other lions -- will remain, without those "combat troops" to defend them? And what of the American civilians seconded to various ministries, or the American and other Western contractors? How long do you think they will remain safe and sound, when this or that group of Muslims may find it in in their interest, at the moment, to discourage American involvement (of the type: if we can't get the role in the government we think we deserve, we will push out the Americans and their aid to that government), or, alternatively, calculate that by attacking those Americans who remain insufficiently defended, such acts may force the American troops to return in force, and that too, may fit in with some sectarian or ethnic group's calculation.

"Avoid entangling alliances" warned Washington. Not all alliances are "entangling" ones. Some are useful. But this business in Iraq, or any business in any Muslim land, where the best efforts of American soldiers and civilians are akin to that of Colonel Bogey building that bridge so dutifuly and beautifully over the River Kwai, losing sight that the bridge, when completed, would aid their enemies, the Japanese, is as entangling as all get out.

And that is why, you see, we should long ago have listened to those who for the right reasons --the better to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam by exploiting those pre-existing sectarian and ethnic divisions -- wanted us to...get out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06D2lZcxqfA&feature=related

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/08/20/2008-08-20_barack_obamas_povertystricken_halfbrothe.html

Michelle Obama, poor-mouthing  about still paying off student loans (the Obamas made more than $4 million in 2007, and $900,000 in 2006, so those loans must have been very large), was reported by The New Yorker in a story put up here, as complaining:

"You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

Perhaps, before asking her husband's very very distant relative Dick Cheny to "give us something here," Michelle Obama might suggest that in an act of charity -- Save-the-Children-Federation, that kind of thing -- her husband, Barack Obama, to the greater glory (ad majorem gloriam) of whom hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised, might do the handsome thing and perhaps spare a thousand dollars or so for a much closer relative than he is to Dick Cheney -- to wit, his half-brother in Kenya.

After all, if thinking in those family-tie terms comes so easily to Michelle Obama, surely she will urge her husband to do unto others as she would apparently have at least some of them do unto her.

It would mean so little to the Obama finances.

And it would mean so much, there can be no doubt, to Obama's half-brother. 

Or is African poverty going to be solved, in an Obama administration, another way -- by handing over (so Obama has suggested) another fifty billion dollars in taxpayers' money to add to the coffers of the Big Men who everywhere rule, and to their retinue of waBenzi profiteers? 

Some electronic jihadi hacked the FEMA voice mail system to make thousands of calls - probably to al Qaeda affiliates in the Middle East and South Asia - on our nickle. This is a scandal of earth-shaking proportions. The head of FEMA and SECDHS ought to be roasted, but good, over this breach of COMSEC because of some alleged contractor software glitch. The DHSCOMSEC team didn't obviously vet the system contractor nor test it to determine if it was bullet proof. If this could happen at FEMA/DHS then it tells me our federal government COMSEC is capable of being breached, and unless encrypted, calls and traffic monitored. I guess only the Israelis and SKYPE know how to  provide COMSEC. Embarrassing doesn't even come close to describe how this could occur and what the ramifications are. Is this a prelude to a 9/11 anniversary event?
 

The Muslim Brotherhood is attempting to remake its image as fine upstanding representatives of the "Religion of Peace." From Ikwan.com (hat tip: GMBDR):

In a confusing account of Al Qaeda mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohamed’s “terrorist history”, the Financial Times has most strangely stated that Mohamed “claims” to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood at an early age and then was “radicalized at youth camps.”

BBC: Nigeria's Islamic authority has told the man who has 86 wives to choose only four and repent within three days or else he will be sentenced to death.

The Jamatu Nasril Islam (JNI) passed their verdict on Mohammed Bello Abubakar, 84, according to Sharia law.

This comes two weeks after the Nigerian press and the BBC reported on the case.

Talking to the media then, Mr Abubakar challenged Muslim scholars, saying there is no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives.

However, Mr Abubakar advised other men not to follow his example and marry 86 women.

The former teacher and Muslim preacher lives in Niger State with his wives and at least 170 children, and says he is able to cope only with the help of God.

"A man with 10 wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them," he told the BBC....

(IsraelNN.com) Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler, a Liberal party representative, has stated that the Palestinian Authority, including its Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, is guilty of purveying hatred of Jews. He also lamented that the official PA incitement is being ignored by Western governments and media outlets.

MP Cotler said that Hamas, with their charter's "genocidal objective, anti-Semitic ideology and terrorist instrumentality," is not alone in its incitement in the PA public sphere. "I'm talking about the Palestinian Authority," said the Mount-Royal MP at a press conference this week. He added that the "culture of incitement" harms not only Israel, the PA Arabs themselves.

Cotler recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Israel, where he also met with PA officials and told them that "hate breeds hate. If you have a culture of incitement and hate, you're going to create a culture of hate that is pervasive in the Palestinian society itself."

Cotler cited several examples of anti-Jewish incitement in the PA. Among the most egregious offenses, he noted, were those promoted by official PA government outlets and officials, as well as by Arab academics.

"People don't realize that Abbas signed a law, on the very day there was a suicide terrorist attack in December 2005 against Israel, providing monthly stipends for the families of suicide bombers. In January 2007, Abbas addressed a large crowd that was estimated as being over 100,000, in which he said 'the sons of Israel are mentioned in the Koran as those who are corrupting humanity on Earth.'" 

According to the Canadian MP, "Abbas has never recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state." The official PA media, meanwhile promotes anti-Israeli libels and "breeds hatred and contempt for Jews."

The PA leader's anti-Israel statements and the hatred promoted by his official outlets, Cotler charged, has been judiciously ignored by the West and those involved in promoting Middle East peace. Yet, that incitement, Cotler concluded, is "the greatest threat to a just and lasting peace."...

ROMA - Un algerino di 31 anni ha tentato di sequestrare una bambina di tre anni ad Ostia, sul litorale romano. Si e' avvicinato alla piccola e ha cercato di portarla via. Le sue grida di aiuto e quelle della madre hanno attirato l'attenzione degli altri bagnanti che hanno bloccato e picchiato l'uomo. Solo l'intervento della polizia gli ha evitato il linciaggio. Il nordafricano e' finito in manette. (Agr)

The word "linciaggio" in Italian does not mean "lynching" in the American sense. Hanging is not required, and in Italy hardly the modus operandi. It is a word used to describe the fury, and beating inflicted by, a suddenly-formed crowd, in response to a crime that has just been committed or has been attempted.

Italian citizens are fed up with various kinds of illegal immigrants. Despite all kinds of sympathetic treatment, the Gypsies are not winning friends, especially when they have been caught attempting to steal very young non-Gypsy children (yes, it sounds fantastic, sounds like a medieval charge -- but it happens to be true) in order to train them up to be part of an alms-for-the-poor routine -- one would-be kidnapper was caught in the act in Naples a month ago, by the mother who ran hysterically after him, and others joined in, and as in the case at hand, only the intervention of the police prevented a life-threatening beating.

And then there are the Arabs, from North Africa in the main, so few of whom live by honest work, (there are one or two cases of successes, much ballyhooed, of Arab chefs and pizzaioli) so many of whom are involved as spacciatori, drug-dealers, and in all kinds of other criminal activities, including the street muggings that are now taken for granted.

Whatever the bomfoggery of some (not all) of the Catholic clergy, many Italians are at the end of their tether. They are tired of this, they are tired of the Rumanian killers, and the Albanians, and they do not mince words, in the American and English manner, in the Italian press about the identities of these offenders. They are tired of the vu cumpra, selling their shoddy fakes to tourists whom they accost at every streetcorner. They are tired of the Muslims squatting in their churches and urinating on the Gates of Paradise of Ghiberti (see Orianna Fallaci) or on similar works of art. They are tired of the boatloads of illegal immigrants,  that leave from Libyan shores -- the very phrase contains shades of the Cumaean Sibyl -- and that must be interdicted, and then taken to the island of Lampedusa, half-way between Africa and Italy, where the human cargo -- so unfit for life in an advanced Western society, and spelling all kinds of potential trouble and danger and expense for the Italians -- is placed in camps, with only a few  immediately sent right back, and so many of those who do manage to get to Lampedusa, no matter what the authorities try to do, end up by hook or by crook on the Italian mainland, with the inexorable results -- the certain degradation in the quality of Italian life -- that is becoming obvious to all.

And that is why even the sweetest kindest mildest people in Italy are becoming fed up, all of them. Or rather, all but  those of the comical and heedless type embodied by that correspondent for Il Manifesto who was captured in Iraq, and for whom Italy is not a place with a history and a civilization to protect, but rather, merely a boot-shaped peninsula that (since All Men Are Created And Are Forever Equal In Everything That Counts)  should be permanently open to anyone who manages to reach its shores.

The word "linciaggio" is appearing more and more in the Italian press. People are at the end of their tethers, more and more and more enraged, and capable of anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNW2NXOUWjI

Over at the online edition of the International Herald Tribune I came across this article about a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

On this date, August 21^st, in 1982, over 6,000 PLO troops were allowed to sail out of Lebanon as part of a cease-fire brokered by the U.S.

After the PLO tried to overthrow the government in Jordan in 1971, the Jordanians expelled several thousand “Palestinians” to Lebanon. There, the PLO formed an autonomous region in southern Lebanon, and played a large part in the Lebanese “civil war” (actually, yet another jihad), including the Damour massacre in January 1976 in which 600 Christian civilians (mostly women and children) were murdered by the PLO. 

Another event leading up to the earlier Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon was the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978, in which a “Palestinian” woman led a team of 11 terrorists. They landed in a raft on a beach in Israel, shot and killed a woman tourist taking nature photos, enjoyed her wine and picnic on the beach, then hijacked two buses, and forced the victims onto a single bus. They eventually detonated grenades on the bus to set it afire, and shot and killed 38 civilians (including 13 children). The “martyred” female leader of the group, Dalal Mughrabi, was honored by the “Palestinians,” with a girl’s school and summer camps named after her.

The PLO also assassinated an Israeli diplomat (Yacov Bar-Simantov) and attempted to assassinate another (Shlomo Argov) in the summer of 1982.

In early June, 1982, Israel attacked PLO camps in Lebanon. The PLO continued their artillery barrages into towns in northern Israel. As usual, militarily Israel devastated Muslim troops. They shot down almost 100 Syrian planes and destroyed Syrian tanks and other weaponry, with very little loss by the Israelis. But, also as usual, the U.N. and U.S. got involved and brokered a cease-fire, and allowed the PLO safe passage out of Lebanon. They promptly moved their headquarters to Tunisia.

The remaining jihadis (Hizb’Allah) showed their appreciation by blowing up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. After the withdrawal from Lebanon by the Israelis, the Christians in Lebanon were left at the mercy of the jihadis, who showed absolutely none. Lebanon went from being a multi-cultural society to a Muslim-dominated satellite of Syria.

And the PLO in Tunis merely and merrily continued their mission from their new headquarters, murdering three Israelis in Cyprus in September 1985 and hijacking the Achille Lauro in October 1985.

The lessons of the 1982 Lebanon War were (or should have been) that:

• Military defeat does not lead to political victory. By playing the victim when Israel finally responded, the “Palestinians” successfully garnered sympathy from the U.N. and other anti-Semitic and naive organizations and governments.
• Permanent military victory is not feasible when your opponent is a religion that mandates eternal warfare against non-believers. There is no-one on the other side who has the authority to sign a permanent peace agreement.
• Focusing on a particular jihadi group is not effective. One jihadi group (PLO) was expelled, but another jihadi group (Hizb’Allah) immediately took their place.
• By locating their operations among civilians (against the Geneva Conventions), the jihadis could point to civilian casualties (real or fictitious) when the Israelis responded.
• Allowing the U.S. and U.N. to lead negotiations only allowed the terrorists to escape and continue their attacks from somewhere else. It only prolonged the jihad.

Previous Days in the "Religion of Peace™":

Aug 20: Barbarossa Attacks Tunis
Aug 19: Stoning Sentence in Nigeria
Aug 18: Iranian Jihad Against Kurds
Aug 17: Mass Murder in Lahore
Aug 16: Taliban Bans Bakeries