The former secretary of Northern Ireland thinks that we should negotiate with bin Laden.

In a television interview which will be broadcast on Easter Sunday, she described the current hardline approach to the war on terror as “completely counter-productive”.

Ms Mowlam told Tyne Tees TV’s Sunday Interview that Britain and America must open a dialogue with their enemies.

Interviewer Tony Cartledge asked if she could imagine “al Qaida and Osama bin Laden arriving at the negotiating table”.

She replied: “You have to do that. If you do not you condemn large parts of the world to war forever.

“Some people couldn’t conceive of Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness getting to the table but they did.”

She added: “If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists.”

I was amused by this aside at the end of the column:

She also confirmed on the programme that she has completely recovered from a brain tumour.

I’d say that we have some evidence to the contrary here.

If Iraq is our Vietnam (an analogy that’s flawed on many levels), then Iran is China, without the (yet) nukes and massive army.

I know the press is paying no attention to this, but I hope that the administration is doing something about it. Next country in the Axis, on deck…

We may be at a very crucial point in Iraq. Laughing Wolf has some thoughts.

We may be at a very crucial point in Iraq. Laughing Wolf has some thoughts.

We may be at a very crucial point in Iraq. Laughing Wolf has some thoughts.

Victor Davis Hanson asks that question, a disquieting one.

…at some point the world is asking:

George Soros has a cliche-ridden wrong-headed polemic against the Bush administration in today’s Puppy Trainer. This is hardly surprising, because he’s openly declared war on this administration, vowing to spend as many of his millions as necessary to end it this fall. But it demonstrates that, just as being smart doesn’t necessarily make one rich, the corollary is apparently true as well–Mr. Soros doesn’t seem to be very smart, at least not about anything other than making money.

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

Hmmmm…a “habit”? Can he cite the innumerable examples of this to justify this statement? In fact, I can’t think of a single instance of “waging personal vendettas.” The only ones that I can think of that Mr. Soros and his ilk might come up with are Valerie Plame and Richard Clarke, but in neither case do these meet the “personal vendetta” threshold.

In the case of the former, while the matter remains under investigation, the simplest explanation to me is that, rather than having the intent of harming Mr. Wilson’s wife, the intent was simply to explain to Mr. Safire why the administration made the dumb decision to send the ambassador to Niger to sip sweet mint tea, instead of making a serious effort to investigate the possibility of yellowcake sales.

As for Mr. Clarke, I hardly think that pointing out inconsistencies in public statements, and conflicts of interest, when under attack, constitute a “personal vendetta.” Yes, they helped damage his credibility, but they were only helping him damage his own–in his apparent mission to attempt to rewrite history, he was much more active in that goal than anyone else.

And as to “one of the worst blunders in American history,” like “the worst economy in fifty years,” such hyperbole might be rhetorically effective with people unfamiliar with American history (which Mr. Soros, not being native born, may very well be), but to those more informed, it sounds more like shrill volume is being used to compensate for a lack of solid argument.

And that’s just the first graf.

…to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering

George Soros has a cliche-ridden wrong-headed polemic against the Bush administration in today’s Puppy Trainer. This is hardly surprising, because he’s openly declared war on this administration, vowing to spend as many of his millions as necessary to end it this fall. But it demonstrates that, just as being smart doesn’t necessarily make one rich, the corollary is apparently true as well–Mr. Soros doesn’t seem to be very smart, at least not about anything other than making money.

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

Hmmmm…a “habit”? Can he cite the innumerable examples of this to justify this statement? In fact, I can’t think of a single instance of “waging personal vendettas.” The only ones that I can think of that Mr. Soros and his ilk might come up with are Valerie Plame and Richard Clarke, but in neither case do these meet the “personal vendetta” threshold.

In the case of the former, while the matter remains under investigation, the simplest explanation to me is that, rather than having the intent of harming Mr. Wilson’s wife, the intent was simply to explain to Mr. Safire why the administration made the dumb decision to send the ambassador to Niger to sip sweet mint tea, instead of making a serious effort to investigate the possibility of yellowcake sales.

As for Mr. Clarke, I hardly think that pointing out inconsistencies in public statements, and conflicts of interest, when under attack, constitute a “personal vendetta.” Yes, they helped damage his credibility, but they were only helping him damage his own–in his apparent mission to attempt to rewrite history, he was much more active in that goal than anyone else.

And as to “one of the worst blunders in American history,” like “the worst economy in fifty years,” such hyperbole might be rhetorically effective with people unfamiliar with American history (which Mr. Soros, not being native born, may very well be), but to those more informed, it sounds more like shrill volume is being used to compensate for a lack of solid argument.

And that’s just the first graf.

…to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering

George Soros has a cliche-ridden wrong-headed polemic against the Bush administration in today’s Puppy Trainer. This is hardly surprising, because he’s openly declared war on this administration, vowing to spend as many of his millions as necessary to end it this fall. But it demonstrates that, just as being smart doesn’t necessarily make one rich, the corollary is apparently true as well–Mr. Soros doesn’t seem to be very smart, at least not about anything other than making money.

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

Hmmmm…a “habit”? Can he cite the innumerable examples of this to justify this statement? In fact, I can’t think of a single instance of “waging personal vendettas.” The only ones that I can think of that Mr. Soros and his ilk might come up with are Valerie Plame and Richard Clarke, but in neither case do these meet the “personal vendetta” threshold.

In the case of the former, while the matter remains under investigation, the simplest explanation to me is that, rather than having the intent of harming Mr. Wilson’s wife, the intent was simply to explain to Mr. Safire why the administration made the dumb decision to send the ambassador to Niger to sip sweet mint tea, instead of making a serious effort to investigate the possibility of yellowcake sales.

As for Mr. Clarke, I hardly think that pointing out inconsistencies in public statements, and conflicts of interest, when under attack, constitute a “personal vendetta.” Yes, they helped damage his credibility, but they were only helping him damage his own–in his apparent mission to attempt to rewrite history, he was much more active in that goal than anyone else.

And as to “one of the worst blunders in American history,” like “the worst economy in fifty years,” such hyperbole might be rhetorically effective with people unfamiliar with American history (which Mr. Soros, not being native born, may very well be), but to those more informed, it sounds more like shrill volume is being used to compensate for a lack of solid argument.

And that’s just the first graf.

…to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering

David Warren has a depressing column on Fallujah, and how our own media undermines our efforts.

…we come to the next stage of an unpleasant proposition. In its selective use of explosive imagery, the media have a power equivalent to that which the terrorists have in the selective use of explosive devices. There is an overlapping agenda, too: for the great majority of both terrorists and journalists consider the Bush administration to be their principal adversary. (On the other hand, they differ on the need for the imposition of Sharia law.)

But the bottom line remains:

In its recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. is finding what the Israelis have long since not wanted to know. Michael Oren is an Israeli veteran, and the brilliant author of the definitive history of the Six Day War. When I had coffee with him, recently, he said: “If you strike back, you will encourage terrorism. And if you don’t strike back, you will encourage terrorism.”

You let them walk over you, or you fight. It’s true that fighting makes them even angrier, but it helps to wipe them out.

In the face of such graphic images, it’s easy to forget that much of Iraq is now at peace, with prospects for future prosperity and freedom increasing daily.

Fallujah is the last stand of the Ba’athist regime, with a significant population of those who benefited from it at the expense of most, and who remain unwilling to yield their power. It is, in fact, a microcosm of what all of Iraq was a year ago, before the liberation. It is a gang of brutal thugs, holding hostage a majority of the populace within it, living in an unreality like Saddam’s–the notion that bluster, brutality, deceit and murder will somehow fend off the Americans. As they will find out shortly, it is they, not we, who are fighting the last war, having learned too well the false lesson of Mogadishu.

We are paying the price now for not conquering it when we went in last March.

As many (including me, and more eloquently, David Warren) pointed out at the time, last year’s military activities were less a war than the ending and resolution of a massive hostage situation, the removal of a gang of criminals that had gained sway over the territory of Iraq, maintaining their power by terrorizing its inhabitants.

Their territory, the so-called Sunni Triangle, has now been reduced to a very small portion of that original area, and what we did to the tyranny of Iraq at large then we must do to the thankfully much smaller one in Fallujah now. Like then, it will have to be done as precisely as possible, with as little damage to innocents and infrastructure as possible, but it must be done, and I think it will.

[Update]

They think they’ve identified at least some of the perps. And note this:

…they included former members of Iraq’s paramilitary forces and “non-Iraqi Arabs.”

Flypaper’s still working. More that we can kill there instead of having to defend against them here.