…in Gaza? As Glenn notes, the comparison is an insult to mafiosi, but the parallels exist.

Mark Steyn, on the mythical “Palestinians”:

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.

Mark Steyn, on the mythical “Palestinians”:

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.

Mark Steyn, on the mythical “Palestinians”:

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.

Here’s a rant about Islam in the UK. He’ll no doubt be arrested for “hate speech” (in this case, otherwise known as speaking Truth to Insanity).

…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.

The biggest risk, at least in the short term, is the extortion of the Iranian government against the region

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:

…in Iraq. Well, at least we’re going after them there.

An interesting op-ed in the New York Times today:

…despite the defeat in 1975, America

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?

OK, well, the press should take some responsibility, but it will also be the bureaucracy:

Iraq has shown that the DoD bureaucracy is too big, too slow and out of touch with the realities of the modern battlefield.

Up until just recently the military was built for a set-piece battle against like forces. But our enemy does not want to cooperate with the geniuses in the Pentagon who came up with the plans and procured the equipment to execute those plans and developed training platforms to prepare soldiers for those plans.

The bureaucracy–even in combat–is staggering. To get some things done the request has to go through 15! steps of approval.

One Company Commander summed it up like this:

“They trust me with the lives of 100 men, humvees, weapons, ammo, civil affairs negotiations, classified intelligence, radios, everything. But I cannot be trusted with $20k worth of Dinar to hire a crew to build up an IP station?”