Ron Silver has some suggestions of things we can do to make the world like us more.

Man of God?

I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.

Michael Yon:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus

…same as the old Nazis. We might have defeated them (at least temporarily) in Europe, but the same mentality is thriving in the Middle East, and has been for decades. And it makes the notion that Israelis are the new Nazis all the more stupid.

[Update late morning]

Speaking of stuck on stupid, here’s Exhibit A: Ward Churchill gives a speech. Theme: Zionists are Nazis.

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