Will anyone remind the viewers that there were no basketball courts in Iraq before the American troops entered Iraq, but lots of soccer stadia where women were mercilessly stoned or shot to death for no reason?

(crickets chirping)

But who needs history or reality? Obama is SOOOOOO cool!

A caller on Bennett’s show this morning wondered if this conversation would take place. For him to go to Iraq and not ask forgiveness for opposing the war -the cause of Iraq’s liberation- is rank hypocrisy.

That, by itself, should cause pause for those who view Muslims as (metaphorically and broadly speaking) some sort of robots who programmatically march together against non-believers.

Yes it is. Well it is a throwback to the SDKs of the 40s,50s, and 60s. Once I get back from the desert I will trade my DCUs in for those. Thats if i go to the beltway.

Anyone who is for government spending is a socialist…especially those of you who are for military spending.

I’m still a conservative…I just don’t believe in god or empire…which makes me a paleocon, I guess.

alphie on July 20, 2008 at 8:01 PM

Government spending on the military is one of very few things that the government spends money on on that is constitutional.

This is victory. Enjoy it. Savor it.

We were right and Iraq is becoming a liberal democracy in the heart of the old caliphate. AQ has discredited itself and suffered massive attrition.

I think they will sit up a security arrangement before Bush leaves office. After all, if it all goes to hell, Maliki’s head might end up on a pike.

Terrye on July 20, 2008 at 8:56 PM

Sooner or later, if not already, the Iraqi military will itself emerge as a critical party to any division of spoils and power. Much has been said about Iraqi military successes improving confidence in Maliki, but the credit and the credibility belong at least equally to the military. It would be very unusual in a country like Iraq if the various generals and others influential in and with the army didn’t have a major say. The Iraqi military will know at least as well as any Iraqi politicians how realistic any particular withdrawal schedules are, and presumably will have its own opinions about what’s doable and desirable.

The real withdrawal, as opposed to the fantasy withdrawal, will be a complex process involving numerous participants, including diverse enemies, allies, and fence-sitters, as well as the Iraqi populace in all its diversity.

always always always

In medieval times, people created fairy tales and magical creatures to make sense of their world. One of the most endearing is the unicorn, a horse with a single horn that symbolized purity and wholesomeness. In our modern times, people in Europe and the United States consider themselves more sophisticated and rational than people from the Middle Ages, but we still create myths, albeit more subtle ones.

Daily we hear reports of violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists on every inhabited continent. We try to wish it away with the myth of the ‘Moderate Muslim’, telling ourselves the Islamic agenda has been’ hijacked’ by a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and that soon the huge, silent, moderate majority of Muslims will take charge and change things. However, post 9/11 very few Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of unicorn searching.

Moderate Muslims will not be able to wrest control of the agenda for several reasons. First of all, Mohammad, the Messenger of Allah’s eternal word, was not moderate. No moderate can legitimately tell another Muslim to stop doing the extremist things Mohammad himself did. Also, the Koran condones violence and coercion to further the Islamic agenda. People whom we call moderates are labeled hypocrites by Allah Himself in the Koran. Moderates will always lose the argument because, as ex-Muslim author Ibn Warraq says, “There may be moderates in Islam but Islam itself is not moderate.”

Islamic expert Daniel Pipes and others estimate ten percent of the Islamic world to be militant. In 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany it had 2 million members, comprising only three percent of Germany’s sixty-six million citizens. A tiny minority of extremists can control a vast number of moderates, making them irrelevant.

Placing hope in ‘The Moderate Muslim’ is like searching for unicorns in the forest.
- A_Plague_on_Both_Houses (JihadWatch)

Have you bothered to read R. Spencer’s weekly installments of the Koran?

Yes, some of it. I’ve also read Bernard Lewis’s wonderful writings on Islam. Islam, like most religions (well, the ones I’m somewhat familiar with), is not some static institution that hasn’t changed over the centuries. Doctrine and practice are not always the same.

One not so brief (sorry, stay with it) paragraph from Lewis to illustrate my view:

Islam is one of the world’s great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.

It seems to me that Islam – and its history – is more complex than just reading verbatim chapters of the Koran or Hadith.

More here: Link

Anyone who views Islam as some sort of monolithic religion irretrievably hostile to us has, in my view, a overly simplistic view of both that religion and human beings.

Have you bothered to read R. Spencer’s weekly installments of the Koran?

There’s good reason why EVERY Islamic country is weak to awful on human rights and women’s rights. It’s hardwired into the very religion.

You might be right, MB4. I’m hoping your prediction doesn’t come true. It would be tragic.

terryannonline on July 20, 2008 at 9:57 PM

I would like to be wrong too.

The American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this,

It seems to me that this was more luck than a planned effort.

Okay, more than seems. It was.

But we’ll take it anyway.

Islamic radicalism itself is incapable of mustering much military power, and the movement largely relies on terrorism to gain attention. Most of the victims are fellow Moslems, which is why the radicals eventually become so unpopular among their own people that they run out of new recruits and fade away. This is what is happening now. The American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this, forcing the Islamic radicals to fight in Iraq, where they killed many Moslems, especially women and children, thus causing the Islamic radicals to lose their popularity among Moslems.

Anyone who views Islam as some sort of monolithic religion irretrievably hostile to us has, in my view, a overly simplistic view of both that religion and human beings.

More on the above here: Link.

MB4 on July 20, 2008 at 9:43 PM

You might be right, MB4. I’m hoping your prediction doesn’t come true. It would be tragic.

We’ve let them enshrine Sharia law, that’s not good for Women, Jews, or Christians or even for many of those “Moderate Muslims”. We make out troops apologize and kiss their filthy Koran.

Once a Muslim government gets a firm hold you’ll see it become more “fundamentalist”, not less.

Eventually Iraq will become just another Muslim country hostile to the US and Israel and we will have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, over 4,000 American lives and tens of thousands of permanently wounded Americans and for that. What a tragedy.

I guess that I will have to weigh in with the delivery person of my local rag in order to make my judgments on world events from here on out. What was I thinking before this critical detail came to my attention?

And with a successful transformation of Iraq, the entire middle east may very well be in a better place.
wise_man on July 20, 2008 at 7:42 PM

And if I had wings I could fly.
The middle east is getting worse.
MB4 on July 20, 2008 at 9:08 PM

Not when you read the news. As far as Iran goes, we and the rest of the world are currently dealing with this. So how, in your esteemed opinion that is based on no factual evidence whatsoever, is the entire middle east getting ‘worse?’

And if I had wings I could fly.

Implying you are a pig, MB?

I can get behind that.

Lots of Iraqis dead – but who cares? They’re Muslims. And all Muslims are the same. They hate us infidels.

Even, apparently, those fighting with us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, it would have been a disaster for the US as well. Our standing in the Middle East – indeed the world – would have plummeted. No one could trust us. The region would have been thrown into chaos. Humanitarian diaster.

Our allies around the world would have second and third and fourth thoughts about trusting us.

Just swell.

But hey, lots of Muslims are dead.