Krauthammer, on the nutty notion that the “real” war is in Afghanistan, and not in Iraq:

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer — a Martian — and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources, no industrial and no technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure which, though suffering decay in the later Saddam years, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e. wrong) hands.

Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.

Nancy seems to have no problem with misogynists, as long as they’re not western misogynists.

Ralph Peters (and John Derbyshire) wonders what has happened to the Royal Marines.

[Update in the evening]

Mark Steyn has further thoughts.

Michael Yon sees hope in Iraq:

One key aspect of General Petraeus

On the left.

Even if the left in the West remains clueless, letting deranged Bush hatred substitute for thought, the left in the Middle East can’t afford that luxury:

An Iranian blogger, on why it’s a mistake to attempt to appease the mullahs.

The Berlin bureau Chief of Der Spiegel, on the ability of Germans to hold all sorts of strange beliefs, including anti-Americanism:

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course — from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the F

Dean Esmay has some thoughts:

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a “liberal” or a “humanist”–Muslim or not–is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist “insurgency” that routinely cuts people’s heads off and shoots children in the face is the “legitimate voice of the Iraqi people,” or you recognize that there is in Iraq a government elected by the Iraqi people working under a Constitution written entirely by Iraqis that recognizes human rights better than any in the Arab world.

No matter how many reservations you have about how it was done or how imperfectly that elected government implements the ideals expressed in that ratified Constitution.

If you take the former position you have no business calling yourself a liberal or a progressive or a humanist. If you take the latter position, then maybe you have to swallow the bitter pill that someone named George Bush, whom you don’t like and maybe think is incompetent, was the instigator of something that damn well needs to be supported.

But you can’t have it both ways. Indeed, by declaring the whole thing illegitimate, all you’re doing is siding with the Islamophobes of the world who claim the Muslims and the Arabs are far too savage, backward, and primitive to respect things like democracy and human rights. Indeed, you’re implicitly siding with the Jihadwatch crowd.

They’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.

Oh, and I’m sure that the usual suspects in the “human rights community” will be speaking up about this violation of the Geneva Conventions any minute now.

Any minute now.

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Any minute.

So argues Mark Steyn:

How many times does the Islamic Republic have to (a) seize sovereign territory (the US embassy in Teheran); (b) order mob hits on foreign nationals (Salman Rushdie and his publishers); (c) perpetrate acts of state terrorism against citizens of countries with which it has no grievance whatsoever (the Buenos Aires community center bombing)? Its behavior has been consistent for three decades, yet, this time round as last time round, the British government calls in the Iranian ambassador and gives him a stern talking to, as if he were the emissary of Poland or India or any other civilized state.