Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan ...
The U.S. government is running like hell from this simple and obvious fact.
New Hampshire? Is that one fo the top 5? Shouldn't New York or California come first? Even so, couldn't we just focus on the regimes in Ithica & San Francisco? Even there is regime change really worth the rebuilding and "hearts & minds" battle (which would be much tougher in either place than in Trikrit or Baghdad)?
Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan ...
...everyone — from the body that approves Muslim chaplains for the US armed forces to the diplomat the Pentagon sent to investigate Saddam’s nuclear contacts in Africa, to the companies supplying voting machines for next year’s elections — turns out to be on the Saudi shilling
Is that true?! What a shame!
Steyn: Membership in one group does not preclude simultaneous membership in another.
I've been saying for a while that membership in the groups is to some extent fungible. The difference is, that Mark Steyn was able to put this together in his NH study, and I had to go to Afghanistan to see it in action: it was quite possible for a guy to be a member of the Jamiat-i-Islami (Massoud's guys, Tajiks, the core of the Northern Alliance and basically good guys), the Taliban (Omar's guys, bad guys), and al-Qaeda (really bad international bad guys). If we scarfed him up for something he did when he was wearing his TB hat, we had to expect a protest from the local Jamiat general (Aghan "general": anybody who has more than six full-time followers) and probably a rocket from State or HQ after the general went to his boss, Mohammed Fahim Khan (who wore the two hats of head Jamiat warlord, and Defence Minister in the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan).
Steyn: the Iraq–Syria frontier ... certainly porous, [but] porousness cuts both ways.
Simply brilliant. And if the PTB are looking forward, what they are doing now is recruiting and organising the core of a "Free Syria" movement that will put Bashir Assad's dictatorship on the defensive. Let him worry about spray-painted slogans and things that go bang in the night.
The key to winning a war on global islamist terrorists, is fighting that war not where the terrorists would like (among our women and children) but where we would prefer (in their back yard).
They key to fighting that war is to have muslims who reject islamist terrorism fight for a just and righteous government in their own nation -- or at least, if they are going to have a medieval dictatorship, one that is hostile to Islamist terrorism (viz., Egypt). I think the Saudis are moving crabwise in that direction. They hate to see the line drawn from their clerics to their terrorists, but the terrorists are making it unavoidable.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
