Nelson Ascher makes a very compelling case. If I were in his situation, I’d do the same.

Nelson Ascher makes a very compelling case. If I were in his situation, I’d do the same.

Claudia Rossett (who deserves a Pulitzer for her reporting on the Oil for Palaces and Weapons scandal) has some appropriately ungenerous words for Kofi Annan.

Alas, such dignity may come as cold comfort to the French, given that Mr. Annan did not actually deny that the Chinese, Russians and French had taken big payoffs from Saddam. Mr. Annan merely disputed that the Chinese, Russians and French would have delivered anything in return for the bribes. In other words, they may be corrupt, but at least they weren’t honest about it.

Sure, John-John, let’s give them nuclear fuel and “see what they do with it.”

The foreign fighters are wearing out their welcome.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

“If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force,” said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah’s Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents…

…U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

“He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near,” Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

Here’s the president’s speech this morning in Pennsylvania, in which he said many things that he should have said in last Thursday’s “debate”:

There will be good days and there will be bad days in the war on terror, but every day we will show our resolve and we will do our duty. This nation is determined: we will stay in the fight until the fight is won. (Applause.)

My opponent agrees with all this

No, the headline isn’t about a repeat performance by Castro, but about releasing most of the prisoners from Guantanamo. But the story has me scratching my head:

Most of the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban inmates at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are likely to be freed or sent to their home countries for further investigation because many pose little threat and are not providing much valuable intelligence, the facility’s deputy commander has said.

OK, seems reasonable to me. But I emphasized those three words to put them in contrast with this:

“We don’t have a level of evidence to feel that we can be confident to prosecute them” all, he added, according to the newspaper. “We have guys here who have never told us anything, except to say that they want to cut off the heads of the infidels if they get a chance.”

Can someone help me reconcile this? Does someone who “wants to cut off the heads of infidels if they get a chance” really “pose little threat”? I mean, it’s not like these are exactly idle desires, as we’ve seen from the videos recently at various Islamic web sites. They really do it. And last time I checked, I was an infidel, by almost anyone’s definition, but certainly by these guys’. So is it unreasonable for me to feel safer if they remain caged up in Guantanamo?

Now I understand that we may not have any legal grounds for holding them within our criminal justice system (though even that’s kind of surprising–is it standard practice to parole someone who cheerfully admits that he’ll decapitate innocent folks given half a chance?), but we are at war. Frankly, if it were feasible, I’d be happy to cage up everyone who wants to lop off infidels’ heads, no matter how many million of them there are. We obviously can’t go out and find them all, or read their minds, but if we already have some in custody, and they admit that they’re going to try to murder us upon release, does it really make sense to release them?

Of course, it may not make sense to feed and clothe and guard them the rest of their days either. So I’ve got a modest proposal. How about we shorten a few of them by a few inches? With a pork-fat laden blade? Not all of them, just the ones who profess to think that a fitting fate for us infidels? It might serve as a salutory example, and at least they might quit being stupid and brazen enough to brag about their evil intentions toward us.

Obviously, we’re not going to do this, but sometimes I despair of any way of winning this war without resorting to such measures. How do we share a planet with people (and right now there are thousands, perhaps millions) who want nothing except, as the alien said in Independence Day, for us to die? If their minds cannot be changed, and changed in a way that we can feel confident that they’ve been changed, what can we do short of imprisoning or killing them?

Other than converting, or dying, I mean.

[Via Orin Kerr]

David Warren writes that we need more quagmires:

…by mucking in, the U.S. and allies have succeeded in creating a theatre of conflict far from Europe and the U.S., that draws Jihadis away from where they could be operating. Quite often, British and European I.D. is found on the corpses of the insurgents, who were recruited in Western mosques.

So much for Kerry’s charge that we’re “creating more Al Qaeda recruits.” We’re destroying them on a battleground of our choosing, not theirs.

If this is not atypical, and the word gets out, Tunisia could expect a huge inflow of Yankee tourist dollars. It gives one hope for ultimate victory in the war.

Despite the church bombings this weekend.

Ayatollah al-Sistani has condemned them:

Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric condemned as “hideous crimes” the coordinated bomb attacks on five churches in Baghdad and Mosul that killed at least seven people and marked the insurgency’s first major attacks on Iraq’s minority Christians.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that Sunday’s assaults on churches “targeted Iraq’s unity, stability and independence…”

“…We assert the importance of respecting the rights of Christian civilians and other religious minorities and reaffirm their right to live in their home country Iraq in security and peace.”

It looks like he understands the problem. Amazingly, even Mooky al-Sadr’s guy got into the act:

“This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis,” Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.

Unfortunately, I’ll bet we won’t be hearing this from the imams across the border in Iran, or from the loony bins that are many of the mosques in Saudi Arabia. This is why Iraq is so fundamental in the war on the fundamentalists.