The Great Hallucinator will not leave Iraq, nor Afghanistan, for he is convinced that he is right and, we are now told, he is telling others "I will stay in Iraq even if only Laura and Barney [his dog] support me." We are supposed to be impressed. Are you? Does this soothe you? Do you think he has some conception of this as more than merely a "war on terror" as he so idiotically has named it? Do you think his energy policy demonstrates the recognition of the need to diminish the wealth weapon of the Arabs and Muslims? Do you think he is secretly worrying about the islamization of Europe, secretly communicating to others that plans must be drawn up to prevent this from happening, and to protect the armories of fellow NATO members? Does he give the impression of being mentally well-prepared, highly intelligent, ruthless, good at articulating the problem through language that may at times be aesopian, or calculated to prevent Muslims from being able to openly object, determined to reunite the Western alliance as an alliance of threatened Infidels, but not by succumbing to the temptation that they present, of greater appeasement. Do you think Bush has any notion of working to create the conditions which will force Muslims, and allow all Infidels, to make the connection between Islam's political, economic, social, moral and intellectual failures, and Islam itself? What do you think?

Instead we get a misunderstanding of democracy, including the nature of American democracy and of the Framers (the idiotic comparisons made between the primitive "Iraqis" and the men who attended the Constitutional Convention, for example), and a mad and messianic polypragmonic belief that "democracy" can be transplanted --"democracy" interpreted merely as head-counting -- into the stony and unyielding -- because Muslim -- soil of Iraq. No understanding of how political legitimacy in Islam is located in the will of Allah, not in the expressed will of mere mortals, and no understanding, either, that the habit of compromise with one's rivals, so essential to the functioning of Western democracy, is discouraged by all the attitudes of victor and vanquished that fill the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the "exemplary" life of Muhammad.

Meanwhile, The Great Hallucinator ignores what "democracy" should mean in this country. What does it mean when he proudly insists that even if everyone in the country except his wife and dog are with him, he will "stay in Iraq" (well, not he, he's not there, but all those hapless American soldiers being kept on a fool's errand to bring all kinds of wonderful and often impossible things to people who, by and large, support attacks on those same Americans: 91% of the Sunni Arabs, 74% of the Shi'a Arabs. Would you wish your husband, father, brother, son or daughter, to risk his, or her life, in order to help such people? Why? Because otherwise you would be cutting-and-running, and we just can't do that? Because in the chaos and civil war of Iraq, which would alarm Muslims outside Iraq and cause all kinds of dangerous problems for them (for them, but not for us, the Infidels), none of our political leaders has the wit to see how this is not an outcome to be deplored (and in any case, can only be delayed, cannot be prevented) but to be welcomed and exploited.

Two-thirds of the people in this country want the United States out of Iraq. Given that, it is not democratic, or "democratic," for any hallucinator to overlook the desires, the will, of the people, and above all he has no right to keep overlooking all those who want the soldiers out of Iraq not because they are appeasers, but precisely because they are not. Dismissed by Bush as "cut-and-runners," they include those who wish to weaken the Camp of Islam intelligently, wish to direct attention to matters much more important than whether or not Sunnis finally acquiesce in the transferal of power to Shi'a, above all to the problem of islamization, through demographic changes and Da'wa, in Western Europe. Not a peep about this, not a peep about what could happen to the armaments in Germany, for example, were there to be not 3.2 million Muslims, but 10 or 20 million. Not a peep about the already observable constraints on the foreign policies of many Western countries. Nothing -- nothing but the goddam "war on terror."

How dare he continue to damage the American military? How dare he continue to think he can endlessly prate about bringing "victory" (an irrelevant and stupid word, in the context of the without-end war of self-defense against the Jihad -- there is no "victory" but only the possible attainment of reducing the scope of the threat)? How dare he call those who want a much more ruthless policy enforced, those who wish to "cut and run"? And his claque, those who at certain web-sites are automatically cheered for the supposed "brilliance" of their analyses, analyses that consist entirely of sticking by their man, The Great Hallucinator, no matter what folly he persists in, deserve not continued praise but blame, for encouraging Bush in his own obstinacy, stupidity, timidity, and willful waste of lives, money, matériel, and morale.

There is apparently no hope that Bush will change. He is proud of his refusal to change, proud of his inflexibility. Those who keep cheering him on or defending this, often not because they have thought about the waste his policy engenders, but because they are infused with hatred for those who attack Bush most violently, and for all sorts of things where he does not deserve attack (as in his arguments for surveillance), might begin to consider that if American soldiers are still in Iraq in a year, there will almost certainly be a strengthening of those who are urging withdrawal for all the wrong reasons, as part of what one might call a comprehensive policy of appeasement. Bush has no sense of this, no sense about how to ensure, once he is out of office, that appeasement does not take place -- but the unhappy experience with tarbaby Iraq, if not quickly ended, will make that appeasement more likely, perhaps even certain.

His incessant and essentially stupid talk about that "war on terror" diverts attention from, never quite gets to, all the other instruments of Jihad -- Da'wa and demographic conquest and the money weapon, which are the main problems that need somehow to be addressed by the nations of the Infidel West, and that cannot be addressed if war is regarded, as it now seems to be regarded in Washington, as a matter of soldiers conducting raids to round up those whose ranks are endlessly replenishable, and Humvees avoiding explosives - in other words, "war" understood merely as a military matter when it is, or should be, much more.

He has been hallucinating for a long time. Too many have been too willing to overlook the timidity and stupidity reflected in the dreamy, colossally expensive $500 Billion Misunderstanding that constitutes what has so far been undertaken in Iraq, and have overlooked the opportunity costs of that mad focus on that hopeless three-vilayet concoction. For some, their inability to reconsider has to do with wounded amour-propre; they don't quite know how to gracefully distance themselves from their own previous enthusiasm, their own participation in a claque's campaign that may have temporarily confirmed Bush in the rightness of his own certitude, kept the ship of state on its sickeningly naufragous path, but did nothing to help force him to study Islam, or to have others study it and to come up with something other than an example of American messianism at its naive and clumsy worst, and to instead fashion quite a different policy, one that ceased to focus on a "war on terror" and on "Iraq as the center of the 'war on terror'" and instead, would focus on attempts to educate and arouse rulers and ruled among the threatened Infidels of the world. This would require someone capable of seeing everything at once, able to construct a coherent, articulate, resolute, and cunning policy, which would be determined to exploit every pre-existing division, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within the Camp of Islam, and to create, in Iraq and elsewhere, not Lights Unto the Muslim Nation, but rather spectacles of disorder and instability that would tell the Infidels much about the natural tendencies of Muslim peoples when despots are removed, would cause Muslim states, instead of the United States, to expend money, war matériel, and lives, as co-religionists of both Sunnis and Shi'a made Iraq a proxy war, and the struggle for power between them in Iraq, in turn, caused internecine difficulties wherever Sunnis and Shi'a elsewhere might conceivably clash -- in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Pakistan.

Bush is "tough-minded"? Really? If so, he is merely a tough-minded sentimentalist. He has misstated, and misrepresented to himself and to those whom he has a duty to protect and instruct, the nature of the conflict. He must be endured for another two years. His policies need not be.