Many may want to pretend that Al Qaeda and Iran aren’t at war with us, but they know better.

Dutch Muslim youths rioted and burned cars, apparently in protest over the killing of someone who attacked police officers with a knife, and perceptions that they’re seen as violent. As the British foreign service used to say about many cultures, their primary problem was that they lacked a sense of irony.

Michael Yon reports that not only has Al Qaeda lost its war in Iraq, but that its attempts to foment a civil war have backfired on them. It may be that the incipient civil war there (which Yon was the first to note) is over before it really got started, and once again, the war opponents (who remain in denial about the enemy, and fantasize that this never was, and never would be, more than a civil war) are behind the curve. This possibility is buttressed by events like the Shia awakening.

Yon also has a much longer recent dispatch from Iraq.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

More good news from Iraq (and bad news for Al Qaeda, and those who continue to hope that the US loses):

…in order for the advances to be permanent, something else must take the place of U.S. kinetic operations. Solution? Concerned citizens. One reason for al Qaeda

I don’t know if I agree with this post (and haven’t given it much thought), but it’s worth discussing. I remember shopping for them with my dad in the late fifties, though we never ended up getting one.

That was then, this is now. Do they make sense in the current environment?

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts on the subject from Dr. Kurtz.

Michael Yon writes about the state of medical support in the war, which is surely the best in any war, any time in history. But he also writes about some things that never change:

The soldier who had been ambushed by the IED in Iraq was expected to die very soon. I was a few feet away when a call came in from a close family member. The family member did not inquire about his condition or what happened. This family member only wanted to know when the soldier would die, and who would receive his death benefit. In less civilized times, people like that roamed the battlefield with tools to pry gold teeth from the jaws of fallen soldiers, but it was distressing to imagine that a family member would do the same.

Yes, distressing, but sadly, not surprising, for anyone who watches the freak shows on daytime television.

Let’s hope so.

The Democrats, meanwhile, held a convention in late August, nominating without serious controversy George B. McClellan, the general whom Lincoln had dismissed as head of the Union forces in Virginia because he would not fight. The Democratic platform denounced “four years of failure” in the war effort and the destruction of “public liberty and private right.” It called for the restoration of the rights of the states unimpaired, and a settlement of the issues central to the war

What happened to Al Qaeda’s Ramadan offensive?

Most people (and all Democrats) fail to appreciate the fact that al Qaeda was directly responsible for the enormous rise in civilian casualties that occurred in 2006 and that continued until recently. As such, they do not really have a way to conceptualize the enormous drop in casualties that occurred last month and that has been maintained through the first week of this month. Once you understand the role played by al Qaeda, then, if al Qaeda really has been quashed (big “if”), I do not see how civilian casualties will ever again climb to their previous levels. The two main sources of civilian casualties in Iraq — deaths from al Qaeda’s suicide bombers and retaliatory execution-style killings by Shiite militias in Baghdad — are both under control. If al Qaeda can no longer deliberately enrage the Shiite militias by slaughtering hundreds of innocent Shiite civilians at a time, then where are the extra 1000 deaths going to come from this month?

An interesting question. But it does look like Al Qaeda’s attempt at a Tet of their own failed, despite the Dems’ fervent desire for a repeat.

[Update in the evening]

More thoughts from Omar Fadhil, in Iraq.

An interesting analysis, and speculation. Whatever it was, the silence from all quarters does indeed indicate that it was very big:

Apart from averting the threat that was developing at Dayr as Zawr, Israel

Christopher Hitchens writes about a remarkable young man:

I became a trifle choked up after that, but everybody else also managed to speak, often reading poems of their own composition, and as the day ebbed in a blaze of glory over the ocean, I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best. I hope no fanatical fool could ever mistake this for weakness. It is, instead, a very particular kind of strength. If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one. To borrow some words of George Orwell’s when he first saw revolutionary Barcelona, “I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

Remember when Al Gore was castigating George Bush for ignoring Saddam’s ties to terrorism? Gee, I wonder what changed?

Calculating and cynical? Democrats? How can you think such a thing?

[Update late morning]

When is Al Gore going to apologize to George Bush and the nation for lying about Saddam’s ties to terrorism?