John Fund writes about the Democrats’ dilemma in their continuing attempts to rewrite history.

Most people, including me, are willing to discuss and debate the wisdom of both past and current policy in Iraq. But it’s not possible to debate seriously people who continue to insist that Bush lied, and that it was about oil, or avenging his daddy, or because he’s a bloodthirsty warmonger. And people who continue to spout such nonsense are (thankfully) going to continue to lose at the polls, regardless of how unhappy the American people are with the Iraq situation. Which is better news for the Republicans than they deserve.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add that I actually agree with the Democrats that the administration has been incompetent in the war. The problem is that in this (as on almost all issues), the Dems would be even worse (in many cases, not even being willing to actually wage it). As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I wish that we’d had better choices in 2004.

Strategy Page says maybe:

The death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was not as important as the capture of his address book and other planning documents in the wake of the June 7th bombing. U.S. troops are trained to quickly search for names and addresses when they stage a raid, pass that data on to a special intelligence cell, which then quickly sorts out which of the addresses should be raided immediately, before the enemy there can be warned that their identity has been compromised. More information is obtained in those raids, and that generates more raids. So far, the June 7th strike has led to over 500 more raids. There have been so many raids, that there are not enough U.S. troops to handle it, and over 30 percent of the raids have been carried by Iraqi troops or police, with no U.S. involvement. Nearly a thousand terrorist suspects have been killed or captured. The amount of information captured has overwhelmed intelligence organizations in Iraq, and more translators and analysts are assisting, via satellite link, from the United States and other locations.

There is this, too:

The damage done by the post- Zarqawi raids has spurred the Sunni Arab amnesty negotiations. These have been stalled for months over the issue of how many Sunni Arabs, with “blood on their hands”, should get amnesty. Letting the killers walk is a very contentious issue. There are thousands of Sunni Arabs involved here. The latest government proposal is to give amnesty to most of the Sunni Arabs who have just killed foreigners (mainly Americans). Of course, this offer was placed on the table without any prior consultations with the Americans. Naturally, such a deal would be impossible to sell back in the United States. But the Iraqis believe they could get away with it if it brought forth a general surrender of the Sunni Arab anti-government forces.

I heard a lot of bloviation from Capitol Hill last night on the news on this subject. Many of our lawmakers are seemingly outraged (or at least feigning outrage) at the notion that soldiers who have been making war on US troops should get amnesty. But isn’t this the way of every war? During a war, soldiers try to kill each other. After the war, they go home. At least that’s been the tradition with the US.

Regardless of their unorthodox (and some say cowardly) means of killing US soldiers (e.g., IEDs), there’s nothing illegitimate about it, per se (though the lack of uniforms and command structure is troubling). We are supposedly in a “War on Terrorism.” It seems to me that we should be encouraging the enemy to at least stop waging war on innocent civilians, which this should do. And there are no doubt many who planted IEDs that were sincere in their belief that the US was an occupying power, and its soldiers a legitimate target. Certainly we’d do the same, if we had to.

If the war is over, then the soldiers on both sides put down their arms, and no harm, no foul. If making that offer results in an end to the war, then why do we complain? We didn’t, after all, punish the ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht after we defeated Germany. It may in the end be difficult to really make the necessary distinctions between attackers of troops and attackers of civilians, but the principle seems sound. All of this outrage on the Hill seems more emotional than reasoned, to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

Great (OK, well, some kind of) minds think alike. Jonah Goldberg has a similar rant, which is even tougher on the posturing, “get out now” Democrats (and Republicans, where it applies).

His point is mine. Amnesty is a consolation prize for losing the war. What many in the bug-out brigade seem to want is for them to win.

For the Democrats to have this debate…

“Fjordman” over at The Gates Of Vienna says that we didn’t win the Cold War decisively enough, and it makes it harder to fight the new form of anti-Enlightenment totalitarianism represented by Jihad. We still haven’t put the wooden stake through the heart of Marxism.

[Via Mars Blog]

[Update in the afternoon]

Here are some related thoughts on multi-culturalism and how it will kill us as well, if we let it, from the preface of Ayann Hirsi Ali’s new book.

An interesting find in the Zarkman’s (un)safe house:

As an overall picture, time has been an element in affecting negatively the forces of the occupying countries, due to the losses they sustain economically in human lives, which are increasing with time. However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance for the following reasons:

I particularly like this problem they seem to be having:

By undertaking a media campaign against the resistance resulting in weakening its influence inside the country and presenting its work as harmful to the population rather than being beneficial to the population.

Those evil propagandists! Only they could fool people into thinking that brutally murdering and blowing up innocent men, women and children, and kidnapping and people and making head-chopping snuff films with them, was harmful to the population.

Anyway, they must be talking about Iraqi media. I haven’t seen much of that in the western press. Most of what I read here, based on interviews with Murtha and Kerry, is that we can’t win, and must give up. Wonder what they’ll have to say about this document? Someone should ask them. But they won’t.

And note that the enemy knows who its best friends are, as evidenced by the fact that this is their numero uno strategem:

To improve the image of the resistance in society, increase the number of supporters who are refusing occupation and show the clash of interest between society and the occupation and its collaborators. To use the media for spreading an effective and creative image of the resistance.

Yup. They keep playing the western media like a finely-tuned Strad. And the western media love the tune, because they share a common enemy–George Bush.

[Update in the afternoon]

I just noticed in reading more carefully that a key part of Al Qaeda/Iraq’s strategy seems to be to foment a war between the US and Iran. We’ll have to look out for this. I wonder if the Iranian government is aware of this (and if they’ve been harboring Al Qaeda types to whom they’ll no longer be as friendly).

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s a story that says the Iraqi government believes that it’s broken the back of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The mine of information from Al-Qaeda documents seized during raids spelt “the beginning of the end” for the terror group, said Iraqi national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie

“We believe Al-Qaeda in Iraq was taken by surprise; they did not anticipate how powerful the Iraqi security forces are and how the government is on the attack now,” Rubaie told reporters.

The documents had given Iraq an “edge over Al-Qaeda and will also give us the whereabouts of their network and their leaders and their weapons, and the way they lead the organisation and the whereabouts of their meetings”.

I hope they’re right, but I’ll keep the champagne chilled for now.

[Update at 3:30 PM]

One more interesting point about that letter from the (un)safe house, re: benefits to AQ in Iraq of a US/Iran war:

They couldn’t even wait for the next thousand on the odometer. Remember the big deal the press made about the 2000th death in Iraq? Now the magic (and utterly meaningless) number is 2500:

While there were no details on who it was or where the 2,500th death occurred, it underscored the continuing violence in Iraq just after an upbeat Bush returned from a surprise visit to Baghdad determined that the tide was beginning to turn.

In other words, we’ve now lost, over a period of over three years, almost as many as died in a couple hours on the beaches of Normandy (perhaps even the same number as were lost just in training for that event). Would the media have been so hung up on these kinds of numbers during that war? It seems unlikely, but if they had (or to be more precise, had today’s media been reporting then), the story would have been something like this.

Mark Steyn:

Melanie Phillips makes a point that applies to Britain, Canada and beyond: “With few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people’s heads that drives them to such acts.” These are not Pushtun yak herders straight off the boat blowing up trains and buses. They’re young men, most of whom were born and all of whom were bred in London, Toronto and other Western cities. And offered the nullity of a contemporary multicultural identity they looked elsewhere — and found the jihad. If we try to fight it as isolated outbreaks — a suicide attack here, a beheading there — we will never win. You have to take on the ideology and the networks that sustain it and throttle them. Does [Toronto mayor] David Miller sound like a man who’s up to that challenge? A reader in Quebec, John Gross, emailed me to distill the mayor’s approach as: “Don’t get mad, get even . . . wimpier.”

Despite the delusions of many Canadians, being “nice” will not save Canada.

The intimidation of the Islamists is working:

Bertel Haarder believes that the government of Denmark

It’s been a tough week for terrorists. I particularly liked this part:

…an interesting statement made by the speaker of the parliament after the debate:

Remember all of the outcry because Rumsfeld wasn’t getting better armored Humvees to the troops? Well, it turns out that the new “up armored” Humvees in Iraq are apparently killing more soldiers in rollovers than they’re saving with the new armor:

…serious accidents involving the M1114 have increased as the war has progressed, and the accidents were much more likely to be rollovers than those of other Humvee models, the newspaper reported.

Duhhhhh!

Increasing the vehicle mass, and coincidentally raising the center of mass, is obviously going to decrease its stability in turns. Didn’t anyone consider this when they came up with the design? People forget that this vehicle was a replacement for the jeep, not the tank.

This is a classic engineering safety trade, but soldiers killed in auto accidents don’t get all the press that the ones killed with IEDs do. That doesn’t fit the template that we’re losing the war, because they were killed by media outcry, not terrorists.