The open islamization of Iraq's Arab areas, Sunni and Shi'a, was predictable, was even inevitable. The Americans cannot be blamed for this; it was not Rumsfeld's fault, for "not sending enough troops." It was not Bremer's fault, for "disbanding the Iraqi army." It was inevitable because Islam's hold on Muslims is tenacious -- look at Turkey after 80 years of systematic constraints imposed by Kemalism -- and until Muslims are forced to comprehend the ways in which the contents of Islam itself, and its habit of mental submission, explain the failures of Islam, nothing will change -- and even then, perhaps too little will change to make a difference for Muslims. But Infidels need not wait for that change; they can cordon off, or at least keep to a minimum, their entanglements, including entangling phony alliances, they can stop paying the Jizyah of foreign aid, they can stop worrying about how to create viable nation-states out of impossible material (impossible either because, in Iraq, the sectarian and ethnic divisions are too deep and too deep-seated to be uprooted) or as in the territories now ruled by those lords of misrule, the "Palestinians" of either the PLO Abbas wing (the Slow Jihadists) or the Hamas wing (the Fast Jihadists), an attempt to make a viable state out of people who have no skills, no industry, no entrepreneurial sense, and who have been raised up in a society suffused with hatred and the encouragement of violence. There is nothing Infidels can or should do for these people after so much money and so many years of trying. We need to save ourselves.

And that requires the recognition that most people, in most places, are primitive in thought, word, and deed. Only in some, over centuries of development, do they begin to behave otherwise. Islam primitivizes people, and actively discourages thought. Thought is not good; Allah knows best. Some escape mentally, but cannot admit to this publicly, for fear of violent retribution. Saddam Hussein, a Muslim in the same way that Stalin was a Communist -- not a real True Believer but rather someone interested in his own o'erweening power and sense of self, but not an Unbeliever either -- and when he was deposed, first the Shi'a expressed their new sense of Islamic freedom, freedom that is for the more primitive and more devout and more fanatical to force changes in the less primitive, the less devout, the less fanatical, changes in outward behavior, examples of which are noted in Khalilzad's telegram.

Inevitable. Not our mistake or mistakes. But our mistake is in failing to recognize the inevitability of these developments, which comes from a failure to fully understand the hold of Islam on the minds of men, and the ways it keeps coming back, and cannot be shaken. And then there is the other, complementary failure, which follows upon the failure to see Islam as the menace. And that is the failure to define "victory" in Iraq as "ending with a situation in which the camp of Islam will be weakened by what happens in Iraq, will be divided and demoralized." And that result can only come not from remaining in Iraq in an attempt, through further squandering of resources, to make Arab and Kurd, Sunni and Shi'a, lie down like so many lions with so many lambs (depending on which part of Iraq one is thinking of), to create a harmonious, prosperous nation-state that, in some carefully undefined way, is supposed to serve as a Light Unto the Muslim Nations.

This is nonsense, and those in charge of this runaway regime had better come to their collective senses soon.