Who could not be for a "realistic assessment" on the ground? And the "ground" for which such a "realistic assessment" is required is the entire earth, the entire giddy globe, where everywhere Muslims are on the march, and they can be on the march simply by sitting at home, in Bradford or Marseille, in London or Paris, and procreate, and live off the Infidel dole, and make demands for this and for that change to social arrangements, to legal and political institutions, to everything that makes the local Infidels what they are-- and it hardly matters if those demands are crazed, hardly matters if, for now, those demands are turned down -- because simply by increasing their numbers, through overbreeding and campaigns of Da'wa directed at the psychically and economically marginal, the islamization of Western Europe proceeds, inexorably.
It is that "ground" too -- the "ground" of Western Europe -- that requires a "realistic assessment" by the likes of Senator McCain and Senator Obama, each lacking the understanding necessary.
In McCain's case, as a not-very-imaginative military man, he has accepted the idea that the war on what he, what even Bush, have described as an "ideology" must proceed through boots-on-the-ground warfare, though they fail to see that the side they are helping, or sides, for there are seven or eight or ten such discrete sides in Iraq, and counting, are all Muslim and that if Iraq is helped to stay together, stable and prosperous, this does nothing to weaken the Camp of Islam. McCain shows no signs of understanding what Jihad is, rightly defined, (as the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then dominance, of Islam), nor of understanding, or even recognizing, the instruments of Jihad other than "terror" (in this respect he is a Bush-Administration loyalist). He certainly is far from grasping a strategy that husbands rather than squanders resources, that recognizes and then exploits the pre-existing fissures -- sectarian, ethnic, economic -- within the Camp of Islam, and that wishes the Muslim world not well but ill, or rather, wishes it truly well, in that if Infidels, and then Muslims, come to see the connection between the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failings of Muslim polities and peoples, and Islam itself, then there may be an Ataturk-like movement, for some, to constrain Islam, and for others, especially among non-Arab Muslims who have not been allowed to share in the Arab oil wealth, and who may come to recognize that Islam is, and what's more always has been, a vehicle for Arab supremacism.
This is beyond McCain.
Oh, it's beyond Obama too -- his Islam, or his knowledge of Islam, is colored by his oneiric fantasies of his father, the Father He Never Knew, but who was nominally a Muslim, and his childhood memories -- don't discount the enormous power of childhood memories -- of a completely anomalous brand of Islam, the kind exhibited in comparatively tolerant Indonesia, at a time before the Return to Islam, and in a setting -- a school where Muslim parents agreed to send their children along with Christian children -- that was as atypical as, say, the American school in Kuwait City, or the high school run by Boston College Jesuits in the old days, Baghdad College.
Both candidates so far have shown themselves to be completely inadequate to the task at hand. But McCain may be salvageable-- just.
