The officials I met in Baghdad said that 90% of suicide bombings in Iraq today are the work of non-Iraqi, al Qaeda terrorists. In fact, al Qaeda’s leaders have repeatedly said that Iraq is the central front of their global war against us. That is why it is nonsensical for anyone to claim that the war in Iraq can be separated from the war against al Qaeda–and why a U.S. pullout, under fire, would represent an epic victory for al Qaeda, as significant as their attacks on 9/11.
Some of my colleagues in Washington claim we can fight al Qaeda in Iraq while disengaging from the sectarian violence there. Not so, say our commanders in Baghdad, who point out that the crux of al Qaeda’s strategy is to spark Iraqi civil war.
Al Qaeda is launching spectacular terrorist bombings in Iraq, such as the despicable attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra this week, to try to provoke sectarian violence. Its obvious aim is to use Sunni-Shia bloodshed to collapse the Iraqi government and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, radicalizing the region and providing a base from which to launch terrorist attacks against the West.
I guess that explains why he was drummed out of the Democrat Party. No moral or intellectual clarity allowed.
Seasoned observers have been making droll cracks about a “two-state solution” – Hamas gets Gaza, Fatah gets the West Bank. But even that cynical jest is wishful thinking. The better bet is that the West Bank will eventually fall Hamas’ way, too.
This is the logical consequence of the fraudulence of “Palestinian nationalism”. There has never been any such thing. There is no evidence anywhere in the “Palestinian Authority” that anyone there is interested in building a state and running it. In conventional post-colonial scenarios of the Sixties and Seventies, liberation movements used terrorism as a means to advance nationalism. By contrast, Arafat’s gang used nationalism as a means to advance terrorism. With him out of the way, it was deluded to assume that the “Palestinian people” would stick with a bunch of corrupt secular socialists with little appeal to anyone other than French intellectuals and Swiss bankers.
Want to see what Iraq will look like if we abandon it to the Islamists? Just look at Gaza.
Seasoned observers have been making droll cracks about a “two-state solution” – Hamas gets Gaza, Fatah gets the West Bank. But even that cynical jest is wishful thinking. The better bet is that the West Bank will eventually fall Hamas’ way, too.
This is the logical consequence of the fraudulence of “Palestinian nationalism”. There has never been any such thing. There is no evidence anywhere in the “Palestinian Authority” that anyone there is interested in building a state and running it. In conventional post-colonial scenarios of the Sixties and Seventies, liberation movements used terrorism as a means to advance nationalism. By contrast, Arafat’s gang used nationalism as a means to advance terrorism. With him out of the way, it was deluded to assume that the “Palestinian people” would stick with a bunch of corrupt secular socialists with little appeal to anyone other than French intellectuals and Swiss bankers.
Want to see what Iraq will look like if we abandon it to the Islamists? Just look at Gaza.
Seasoned observers have been making droll cracks about a “two-state solution” – Hamas gets Gaza, Fatah gets the West Bank. But even that cynical jest is wishful thinking. The better bet is that the West Bank will eventually fall Hamas’ way, too.
This is the logical consequence of the fraudulence of “Palestinian nationalism”. There has never been any such thing. There is no evidence anywhere in the “Palestinian Authority” that anyone there is interested in building a state and running it. In conventional post-colonial scenarios of the Sixties and Seventies, liberation movements used terrorism as a means to advance nationalism. By contrast, Arafat’s gang used nationalism as a means to advance terrorism. With him out of the way, it was deluded to assume that the “Palestinian people” would stick with a bunch of corrupt secular socialists with little appeal to anyone other than French intellectuals and Swiss bankers.
Want to see what Iraq will look like if we abandon it to the Islamists? Just look at Gaza.
…and only Joe Lieberman can talk about bombing Iran:
“I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” Lieberman told Bob Schieffer. “And to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”
The Indepedent former Democrat from Connecticut said that he was not calling for an invasion of Iran, but he did say the U.S. should target specific training camps.
Shamkhani told the US journal Defense News that missiles would be launched not only at US military bases but also at strategic targets such as oil refineries and power stations.
Qatar, Bahrain and Oman all host important US bases and British forces are based in all three countries. Any Iranian attack would be bound to draw in the other Gulf Cooperation Council states: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
The attacks on Arab states would be in addition to airstrikes on Israel, which have been threatened repeatedly. An Iranian foreign ministry official said:
We continue to pretend that Iran is not waging war against us, in Iraq, Afghanistan (and against Israel in Syria and Lebanon). How much more of this should we take before punishing the regime?