When even the Grauniad can’t avoid reporting it, you know things have to be getting pretty good:

Not so long ago Sunni and Shia gunmen were fighting for control of the suburb, near the road to Baghdad’s airport. As a result, the once religiously mixed housing projects that lie either side of al-Amil’s main street soon separated into Shia or Sunni enclaves.

But Muhammad, a Sunni Arab, and his Shia colleagues in the neighbourhood watch group are determined to reverse the ethnic cleansing. Last month, the group agreed to protect a Sunni mosque in his street from local Shia militias. They have also been mediating between the divided communities either side of the highway.

The result was an understanding: Sunni families would return to their former homes in the heavily Shia areas, while Shia families crossed back into the mainly Sunni streets. The two communities agreed to guarantee the safety of the returnees. Such was the popular backing for the deal that even the local Mahdi army commander had to acquiesce.

“We’ve been neighbours for 25 years and we feel like brothers,” said Muhammad. “We will help them to guard and respect their mosques, and they won’t harm me or my family.”

Nobody tell Harry Reid. Or if you do, make sure that he doesn’t have any sharp objects around, in his despondency.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

I’m not a big Giuliani fan, and a lot of people have been talking up McCain as tough on the war, but I found this an interesting contrast. I’d have trouble pulling the lever for McCain. He’s not Jimmy Carter, or Huckabee, but I don’t think that he’d have any problem with the current State Department, which is one of the many federal agencies that needs to be azed and rebuilt.

[Update]

A good (and related) point about Giuliani:

Frum argues, in response to a post of mine, that Giuliani is the anti-terrorists’ candidate because he has a proven track record of riding herd on the bureaucracies beneath him to accomplish his objectives. This line of argument would be a lot more persuasive if, in the years preceding Sept. 11, Giuliani had managed to get his fire and police departments to be able to communicate with each other in emergencies.

Because we put birds inside other birds.

Just an extreme example of the lunacy and denial on the part of the left about the Islamists.

And here are some related thoughts on denial in Canada about the Religion of Peace™:

It’s cultural, it’s because of colonialism, it’s because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islam.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

Here’s another example of the insanity of the War on (Some) Drugs, and its incompatibility with waging a real war:

It’s a bad idea to keep so many people in prison, and it’s a worse idea to do so and then have them exposed to radical “clerics.”

Yes. A really bad idea.

Not from me, but from Victor Davis Hanson. Here are a couple:

Why would a country that produces 4 million barrels of oil per day at $90 per barrel not use its windfall profits to expand and refurbish an ailing oil industry to get in further on the obscene profit-making, rather than divert resources in the billions for the acquisition of a reactor that is not needed for power production (natural gas is still burned off at the wellhead)?

We suffer collective amnesia in suggesting that the chill in Iranian relations was a phenomenon of the last few years alone. Not restoring formal diplomatic relations was a bipartisan policy, presumably based on the notion that neither the Carter nor the Clinton administration ever got genuine positive feedback from their efforts to expand diplomatic channels with the Iranians. After all, what President wanted to be responsible for opening-and losing-another embassy in Teheran? In this regard, the recent hostage-taking of British soldiers abroad reaffirms that Iranian ways have not changed much since 1979.

They are food for thought.

[Thursday morning update]

Some more thoughts, from John Bolton:

…the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”

It is amazing how many people who have been quick to criticize the NIE in the past have been so eager to embrace it now.

Ron Rosenbaum is worried about Pakistan. With good reason, I think.

From Michael Totten.