Unlike, apparently, most of the rest of the universe, we were all for the war on Saddam Hussein. We rejoiced in his defeat and capture and hanging. We wish that all tyrants could be punished in the same way. We believe that America won the war, though we don’t believe that Iraq has been transformed into a democracy or is likely to be. We would be happy to see Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, North Korea and above all Iran overcome by American might. We believe such victories are perfectly possible militarily, but impossible under the leadership of an Islam-loving, America-hating, radical left administration. We are of course for the pursuit and destruction of  al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If war in Afghanistan would achieve their destruction, we would be  for its continuance. But we don’t believe in the possibility of any sort of victory in that benighted country; not even if the war was being prosecuted as ruthlessly as war should be. Since it  is to an absurd extent being ‘fought’ as a form of community service – not even as ‘an overseas contingency operation’, to use the Obama official euphemism for fighting terrorism – we recognize that there is zero chance of achieving anything there at all. The onslaught was started in order to destroy al-Qaeda, rightly blamed for 9/11, but it hasn’t and it won’t. It has long since become an exercise in community outreach. The feebly-named International Security Assistance Force (American and British troops – who are really fighting bravely –  plus some German snoozers and a few not very vigorous others) is  there primarily, according to General McChrystal, to ‘provide for the needs of the Afghan people’. (As we have opined in our post of September 21 below, The stupidest reason for a war – ever?, this is the stupidest reason for a war, ever.) The use, by a  Commander-in-Chief and his generals, of soldiers as social workers is an extremely expensive, idiotic, and ruinous exercise in national self-abasement.

The fact is that the appalling method of terrorism has won huge victories in this century, in which almost all terrorism has been committed in the name of Islam. The West has let its practitioners win. The jihadists have won all over Europe,  by using and all too credibly threatening violence, as in their protests over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. All west European nations have already been reduced by their own fear and moral weakness – aka political correctness  – to dhimmi status. Islam goes from triumph to triumph in Europe, and is being allowed steadily to gain power in the United States. The Islamic jihadists are plotting against us in our cities, in Europe and America. They have murdered thousands of Europeans and Americans. Daily, they carry out acts of torture and murder in Asia and Africa. At the time of this writing, there have been more than 14,000 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 (see our margin where we quote the tally being kept by The Religion of Peace). No wonder the greater part of the world has become Islamophobic in the true meaning of the word: it is afraid of Islam. Why do Muslims object to that? Isn’t it precisely what Islam has always intended to achieve? It is the barbaric enemy of our civilization.

Nothing that is done in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, not even total military victory – however that could be reckoned – will defeat Islamic jihadist terrorism. The one and only use now of military force that might score a victory against it, would be the physical destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability. Iran is a  terrorist state, spreading terrorism in the Middle East through its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, so that is where force is needed and would be truly effective. Such a strike would not only disarm the mullahs, it would also send a shock-wave throughout the Islamic world.

That will not be done. But other than for that, what is the use of vast nuclear and conventional arsenals, huge armies, great navies, fighter aircraft that can elude radar-detection, if the enemy is standing beside you and has only to utter a threat to make you fall on your knees and give him whatever he asks?

Jillian Becker    September  25, 2009

The International Atomic Energy Agency has written a report stating that Iran can now make the bomb and is now developing a missile delivery system.

VIENNA — Experts at the world’s top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by The Associated Press.The document drafted by senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency is the clearest indication yet that the agency’s leaders share Washington’s views on Iran’s weapon-making capabilities.It appears to be the so-called “secret annex” on Iran’s nuclear program that Washington says is being withheld by the IAEA’s chief.The document says Iran has “sufficient information” to build a bomb. It says Iran is likely to “overcome problems” on developing a delivery system.

A Daily Telegraph report has more:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, has always publicly denied any ambition to build a weapon. But the IAEA report says that he wanted to acquire nuclear weapons as long ago as 1984, when he served as president. He allegedly told a meeting of senior officials that a “nuclear arsenal would serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers”.

Emanuele Ottolenghi also writes in Standpoint about the Iranian nuclear programme and the West’s possible response:

The American report was a game changer. It declared that Tehran had “halted its nuclear weapons programme” in autumn 2003. It suggested that Iran had suspended its military programme “primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.”

There were many caveats to this judgment, buried in the footnotes and intervening text, but the headline was that Iran no longer pursued nuclear weapons. The report undermined any residual credibility to the threat of US military action. Diplomacy was the only option left. George W. Bush endorsed it — and a new proposal was delivered to Iran with the signature of the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in June 2008. President Obama picked up where Bush left off, and made engagement with Iran a centrepiece of his new foreign policy. Then, recently, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a nuclear umbrella to US allies in the region, as if to suggest that the US was now resigned to a nuclear Iran.
…

The answer came recently, in two separate reports that were leaked to the press. Last March, a German intelligence report was submitted to Germany’s Constitutional Court to back the conviction of a German-Iranian businessman accused of supplying Iran with technology for its nuclear programme. The defence had cited the NIE to suggest that the transaction, which occurred in 2007, could not have been used to supply Iran’s military programme, given that the latter had been halted four years before. The court upheld the conviction based on the intelligence, which contradicted the NIE — the weapons programme, the German spies said, had never been suspended. A more recent report, published in July in The Times, cited Western intelligence sources as suggesting that Iran had indeed halted its weapons programme in 2003 but only because by then it had been successfully completed.

If the report is accurate, it answers the question the NIE did not address. Iran stopped its nuclear weaponisation programme in 2003 because its strides had far outpaced the enrichment programme. The decision to suspend had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq or with the much-vaunted secret negotiations between the US and Iran that were ongoing in Paris at the time. It mattered little that IAEA inspectors had started snooping around the recently exposed nuclear installations. Rather, Iran had finished the weaponisation part of the programme before it had completed perfecting a delivery system and mastering the enrichment process.

Iran’s decisions have never been influenced by offers and incentives. The only thing that has ever mattered to Tehran was time. The only reason Iran might still be willing to negotiate is again time: if it still needs time to complete its goal of nuclear weapons capability. US engagement will not change this. Iran can build a bomb, has been busy building one and has never even considered changing its mind.

There are some analysts who believe that the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) will prevent war between Israel and Iran. IMED believe this to be completely untrue. Iran’s autocratic regime is not rational, and the concept of self-destruction in the name of religious self-sacrifice is not just likely; it is expected. After all, praise and encouragement of suicide bombers is not an uncommon sight in Iran.

This excellent article by Shmuel Bar explains the need to negate the (apparently) comforting theory of MAD:

The countries of the Middle East will probably be more predisposed than the Cold War protagonists to brandish their nuclear weapons, not only rhetorically but through nuclear alerts or nuclear tests, leading to escalation. Once one country has taken such measures, the other nuclear countries of the region would probably feel forced to adopt defensive measures, leading to multilateral escalation. However, such multilateral escalation will not be mitigated by Cold War-type hotlines and means of signalling and none of the parties involved will have escalation dominance. This and the absence of a credible second-strike capability may well strengthen the tendency to opt for a first strike.

True, we may safely assume that the leaders and peoples of the Middle East have no desire to be the targets of nuclear blasts. However, the inherent instability of the region and its regimes, the difficulty in managing multilateral nuclear tensions, the weight of religious, emotional and internal pressures and the proclivity of many of the regimes in the region towards military adventurism and brinkmanship do not bode well for the future of this region once it enters the nuclear age.

For news on Iran and the nuclear programme, visit IMED’s blog – also look out for our campaign against the Iranian nuclear programme, coming soon in the UK.

A fascinating article by Nick Cohen on the horrific oppression of women in the Middle East.

“If this sounds harsh, consider that Sharia adultery laws state that
a raped woman must face the next-to-impossible task of providing four
male witnesses to substantiate her allegation or be convicted of
adultery. When rapists leave Pakistani women pregnant, the court takes
the bulge in their bellies as evidence against them. In Nigeria, Sharia
courts not only punish raped women for adultery, but order an extra
punishment of a whipping for making false accusations against
“innocent” men. In Israel, ultra-Orthodox gangs in Jerusalem beat up
women seen in the company of married men. In the United States, the
Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints give teenagers to old men in arranged
marriages and tell them they must completely submit to their wishes.
In Saudi Arabia, women live in a theocratic state that stops them
walking unaccompanied in the street, driving a car and speaking to men
outside the family. After unwisely taking a sprig of the bin Laden
family to be her husband, Carmen Dufour described the consequences.

‘At first, I wasn’t even aware of what seemed so strange about this
country, but then it hit me: half the population of Saudi Arabia is
kept behind walls, all the time. It was hard to fathom, a city with
almost no women. I felt like a ghost. Women didn’t exist in this world
of men.’

To move from ghosts to corpses, if the Taliban
retake power in Afghanistan, they will once again ban women from public
spaces, thus depriving them of employment, and thus closing the health
and education services. Any teacher who presumes to teach them to read
and write will be executed. Meanwhile the Islamic Republic of Iran has
almost certainly renewed its terror tactic of raping women prisoners
before killing them. Because religious law declares it illegal to
execute a virgin, the guards arrange a “wedding” ceremony and rape the
prisoner once it is over.”

There was an appalling case in Israel recently of an Orthodox women who was cruelly starving her child. When the police intervened, there was a strong and horrifying backlash from the Orthodox community. The Jerusalem Post correspondent Alisa Ungar-Sargon speaks of the divide between some of the orthodox Jewish community and the secular majority.

“With the haredi woman suspected of starving her three-year-old son,
the evidence from doctors, social workers, and police appears to leave
little room for doubt regarding the severity of the situation. The
woman was allegedly a danger to her child, and thus measures were taken
to protect him from further harm.

The facts are presented; the evidence is concrete. Yet there
are people rallying to her defense who are convinced of her innocence.
They call the whole situation a blood libel, a condition of malicious
slander and a vengeful nature. Whether or not her actions were
intentional does not change the effects, yet the haredim purport to be
certain. How can a community be so confident that she is not guilty
when everyone else is resisting their every claim?

…

The general animosity between the haredi and secular communities is
rooted in the State of Israel itself. While none of the haredim support
the state, the mainstream sects at least cooperate with it and agree to
participate in the elections.

…

Dr. Yehuda Goodman, a lecturer and anthropologist at Hebrew University,
explains that the tendency to riot is a part of the haredi identity.
“They feel it’s invading and corrupting and fighting to break down
their way of life,” he says. The haredi community is not just a ghetto,
set up to keep out those who would threaten their way of life, Goodman
says, it must also fight and maintain the superior stand they feel that
they have over the secular world. He explains that the haredim need
these fights as a part of the formation of their identity, in finding a
symbolic place to fight the social other.

…

Whether or not the haredim actually believe in the woman’s
condemnation is irrelevant at this point. They can testify for her
character and they can portray her doctor as evil incarnate, but it is
immaterial since their loyalties would not allow them to operate any
other way. They will argue for her since to them, she represents their
community to the outside world.”

There is a perilous inclination in the Western World to tolerate immorality on the part of others on the grounds that there is a cultural divide that cannot be infringed upon. Although this case in the more liberal and democratic Israel is of less notoriety than the more systematic problem of ‘gender apartheid’ of Saudi Arabia and the countless numbers of unpunished rape in Iran, it is just as horrifying.

The definition of tolerance in the West, Israel included, now seems to include turning a blind eye to depravity, in an attempt to avoid being seen as interfering and imperialistic.

The plight of women in the Middle East is just the tip of the iceberg, but where is the condemnation from the West? And as Nick Cohen concludes in his Standpoint article: ‘I accept that this may seem an odd thing to wish for, but what the
world needs now is an uncompromisingly militant feminist movement.’

Further reading:

Clive James on honour killing

Asad Abu Khalil on US policy and the suffering of Arab women

Some exercepts from female Saudi writers on the subjugation of women (Provided by MEMRI)

The Blog (of the Weekly Standard) brings us this piece of dumbfounding news:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don’t read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites — the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

The reference here is to the USS Liberty which was fired on by Israel during the Six Days’ War in June 1967. It was a friendly fire error. (See Michael Oren’s article on the incident here.) Brzezinski is implying that Israel attacked the ship deliberately, and that the US should avenge it. To him, Israel is America’s enemy and not Iran.

Contrary to Brezinski’s half-hearted disclaimer that no one wishes for such an outcome, there are plenty on the left who would delight in a pitched battle between the United States and Israel. Democrats in Congress routinely support resolutions affirming Israel’s right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to assure its own national defense. And Obama has at least paid lip service to the concept. But hostility to Israel among the rank and file is very real on the left — and among “realists.”

So conjure the image — the Obama administration sending U.S. aircraft up to protect Iran’s airspace and it’s nuclear installations from an attack by a democracy that is one of America’s closest allies. Unfortunately, this may not be so hard to imagine in Israel, where the number of people who believe Obama is pro-Israel is at just 4 percent — and falling. And given Obama’s (literally) submissive posture to the Saudis, his indulgence of the Iranians, and his simultaneously hard-line approach to Israel, it seems even some of Obama’s supporters can savor the possibility of a “reverse Liberty.”

Zbignew Brzezinski , who was National Security Adviser (1977-1981) to that 0ther anti-Semite Jimmy Carter, is now influential again as adviser to Obama.

Two articles in Investor’s Business Daily (find them here and here) describe the perils we are faced with from nuclear aggressors now that our defenses are being weakened.

First, this:

The Associated Press reports that ElBaradei’s self-styled nuclear “watchdog,” the IAEA, has concluded that Iran’s Islamofascist regime can now design and produce a nuclear bomb, according to an unpublished section of its analysis of Iran.

The IAEA also believes Tehran has “probably tested” a key component for an implosion-based nuclear warhead, and has been developing a missile chamber to carry such a warhead…

Why should all this be in a “secret” section of an IAEA report? U.S., British, French and German intelligence all report that Tehran has been at work on an atomic warhead. The only need for secrecy is to shield this defective, incompetent agency from embarrassment.

Earlier this month, diplomats gave ElBaradei a standing ovation at his going-away party…

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ElBaradei, who has held his “nuclear watchdog” position for well over a decade, is actually one of the most dangerous men in the world today.

He has gone out of his way to play down the genocidal threat that terror-sponsoring states in general, and Iran in particular, constitute. And he has emphatically insisted that the free world negotiate with the gang of fanatic mullahs and their henchmen who run that country. Remember: They’re the same ones who’ve vowed to wipe Israel off the map, and who also seek a world without the U.S.

Moreover, ElBaradei has almost certainly suppressed evidence discovered by his agency of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons development — in the name of peace, of course.

It’s like some twisted nightmare — an agency whose supposed purpose is to prevent the spread of the deadliest weapons instead hiding the fact that a terrorist regime is building them. And not only is its director not censured — he gets showered with awards and a grand send-off for presiding over such inexcusable acts.

The bad dream continued with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland last week being marked by the U.S. scrapping plans for long-range missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, two of our strongest allies in Europe. Instead, we’ll have sea-based sensors and interceptors that can stop only short-range missiles from Iran or Russia.

Unfortunately, it’s no nightmare. Our leaders being asleep to the growing threat of nuclear terror is very much a reality.

Or maybe they don’t want to defend America?

Next, this:

“Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in 2005. “But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

He added that Iran had a strategic “war preparation plan” for what it called “the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high above America.

This is where the Airborne Laser aircraft program, canceled by this administration, would come in handy.

Or it could be an upgraded Shahab launch, masked as a satellite attempt and flying over where the European defense sites would have been. It would wreak near total devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure.

The threat is called electromagnetic pulse. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls it the one way we could lose the war on terror. As he notes, a single nuclear warhead, detonated at the right altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating to the surface at the speed of light.

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology instantaneously regresses almost a century in time.

Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and as rail and air traffic controls collapse. Farmers would be unable to harvest crops, and distributors couldn’t get goods to market. Energy production would cease. Computers and PCs would become large paperweights. Telephones, even cell phones, wouldn’t work.

Retaliation would be futile and meaningless — if it were even possible — since communications with our deployed forces overseas, including ballistic missile submarines, might be cut off. A presidential authorization might be impossible to send, so fried might be our communications infrastructure.

To defend Europe — and American troops stationed there — against the possibility of a missile attack from Iran requires a European third site. We now maintain one ground-based missile site in Fort Greely, Alaska, and a second at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates cite intelligence indicating that Iran’s long-range missile development is going slower than previously thought. So ignore that Iranian Omid satellite. There’s time, they say, and for now our existing Aegis and other defenses should do fine.

But shouldn’t we have our long-range defenses ready before their offense is?

The fact is, we simply have too few Aegis-equipped and SM-3 armed vessels to provide defenses for Japan and Hawaii from the North Korean threat, both long- and short-range. Where are the Aegis ships to patrol the waters between Iran and Europe — or off our own coasts, for that matter? If the administration is planning a massive shipbuilding program, we missed the announcement…

President Reagan’s dream of a layered missile defense defending against, rather than merely avenging, a nuclear attack is being suffocated in the crib.

Now the only option may be for Israel to take out the nuclear facilities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and save us from our folly.

Or we can wait for the day when nuclear-armed missiles are in the hands of a man who wants to wipe Israel off the map as he waits for the arrival of the 12th Imam and the apocalypse.

From The Blog:

If Iran can credibly hold Washington and New York City at risk, we’ll be essentially locked in to a Cold War style deterrence paradigm with Tehran — a country that will have no problem unleashing their proxies against US interests and allies (like the Soviets did) without fear of serious conventional reprisal.

The president has at his disposal two tools to ensure that Iran can never threaten the United States: either an offensive, decapitating, conventional strike on Tehran’s leadership, ballistic missile inventory, and nuclear weapons program, or a defensive missile shield so tight a bottle rocket couldn’t slip through. In a critical juncture in history, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans can no longer assure our security, Obama has opted for neither.

Why? For the answer, see our two posts below, Promoting American weakness and US security will depend on the kindness of (evil) strangers.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

Today it is officially announced that Obama has broken America’s promise to Poland and the Czech Republic to supply them with anti-missile defense shields – as we said he would two weeks ago (Obama abandons Poland and Czech republic to the enemy, September 3). Why is he doing it? The Russians were furiously against the plan, so that’s one poor reason. But the main and outrageous reason is, of course, that Obama is not interested in defending America or its allies or the free(-ish) world.

At ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger writes:

I thought Barack Obama would be a poor and troublesome president. Did I think he would yuk it up with Hugo Chávez, smirk with Daniel Ortega about the Bay of Pigs, turn his wrath on a Central American country trying to follow its constitution, denounce President Bush abroad, bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, endorse a radical Middle Eastern view of how Israel came into being, knock Western countries that try to protect Muslim girls from unwanted shrouding, invite the Iranian regime to our Fourth of July parties, stay essentially mute in the face of counterrevolution in Iran, squeeze and panic Israel, cold-shoulder the Cuban democrats in order to warm to the Cuban dictatorship, scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe, and refuse to meet with the Dalai Lama [this item doesn’t annoy us as much – JB] — in addition to his attempts to have government eat great portions of American society? No, I did not. You?

Yes, we did. We said so, in generalized prediction. We only don’t understand why the whole country couldn’t see what Obama would set about trying to do: at home, turn America into an impoverished socialist country, and abroad, ally America with its enemies and alienate its friends.

From American Thinker:

It must be recognized and acknowledged by Americans that all governments of Islamic countries, secular and sectarian, cannot divorce themselves from the religious Jihadist aspect ever-present in their societies. The yearly surveys showing large majorities in these countries favoring strict Shariah is but one piece of the evidentiary puzzle. Almost without exception, to a greater or lesser extent, the governments of Islamic nations, irrespective of their official ties to Islam, find themselves in a confrontation with a discontented Jihadist element in their respective populations. In order to preserve their iron grip on the national treasury and the security forces, these governments (examples: our “allies” Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia), either directly or through surrogates in the royal or landed aristocracy, direct and support the Jihadist hostility toward kafirs, unbelievers in Islam, that are most often represented as Israel and the US; although Britain and India are also frequent Islamic terrorist targets. Even Turkey, founded 86-years-ago as a secular state to free the Turks from their repressive Ottoman Muslim past, has recently come under increasing Shariah-Islamic influence. The unavoidable conclusion is that radical Islam (understood as Shariah-Islam), often manifesting itself in Islamic Jihad, is a fact of life in all of our dealings and endeavors in the Islamic world. This omnipresent jihad aspect of Islam is the element that must be added to the debate over our Afghan strategy to supply the much needed clarity.

So how does this reality factor into the military strategic equation? Primarily it means that no Islamic government can ever be truly counted on to affirmatively eradicate Jihadist violence against US interests. This in and of itself suggests at the very least that the objective of nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand simply or so remote as to make it foolish. It also … would mean that, while it may be to our tactical advantage to temporarily ally with Islamic governments, it would be blood and money wasted to invest in trying to change an Islamic society. Consequently and most importantly, it would mean that, while denying Afghanistan to al Qaeda as an operational base and assisting the Pak government in defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda within Pakistan are vital national priorities, the delusion that these Islamic societies can be “Westernized” must be re-thought…

The American illusion that we can ever fight “a war to end all wars” is just that, an illusion. Shariah-driven Islam has been waging Jihad against the West for 1300+ years, why would we expect it to stop because we manage to facilitate democratic elections that empower corrupt Islamic leaders like Nouri al-Maliki or Hamid Karzai? We are just going to have to “shoot the closest bear” one at a time and reconcile our thinking that Jihad will reappear periodically like Haley’s Comet.

We think it probable that one great shock, such as a devastating attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, could send a message that would keep the jihadists still and trembling for years to come.

We do not think it remotely likely that Obama will order such a strike.

The world must look to Israel to save it from a nuclear-armed Iran.

Iran was given until this month to respond to Obama’s appeal to negotiate over its nuclear threat. Do we expect Ahmadinejad any moment now to say, ‘Okay, world, I was only kidding about wiping Israel off the map – we’re don’t really want to threaten anybody, least of all with nuclear weapons, so come and inspect us to your entire satisfaction’?  No, not many of us, we’d guess. Maybe the folk at Foggy Bottom who see, hear, and speak no evil.

Jennifer Rubin writes:

At some point, even the Obama team may recognize that diplomacy, however “smart,” isn’t paying off. What then? Well they might have to do something. They might need to take a breather from hollering at Israel over East Jerusalem apartments and begin to rally international opinion to take some meaningful action in an attempt to dissuade Iran from going down this path [to nuclear war capability].

Now, you may think that’s not likely — because the Obama team lacks the ability or the will to get tough with any power (well, other than Honduras and Israel), or because it’s getting to be too late for economic sanctions. And then we arrive at the real choice: military action or a nuclear-armed Iran. You can see why so many would rather not take “no” for an answer.