It is obvious (to those of us that pay attention) that the MSM is slanting coverage making Iraq look like a failure. I think the Bush admin. failed to counteract the critics.Humbleness is an attribute but in this case it is a henderance. Most people don't know that most of Iraq is safe and secure, that it is only the 2 or 3 provences that is under attack.

Posted by: Ken at December 9, 2005 7:31 AM

It's encouraging to see our nation's soldiers eager to do their duty and defend our country. However, this "forever war" with Iraq and the Islamic world in general has the potential to turn into the next Crusades, which itself lasted hundreds of years. I also wonder how much this war will end up costing? If all they say about the spending is true, this could end up becoming the biggest expense in the history of humanity. It's sad to see such a waste of good American lives. The Old Men in Washington are destroying entire generations of men and women over this war in the desert. And most of them never even had the stones to fight in wars when they were young.

SAD.

Posted by: Luis Hernandez at November 30, 2005 11:52 AM

Al-Qaradawi was let into the UK to speak to various audiences this summer. I hope the UK government knows that the implications of his ruling are to urge Iraqis to attack British civilians and troops, as well.

Posted by: Stephanie_B at November 5, 2005 5:31 AM

The paragraphs quote below is from a July 2005 BUSINESS WEEK article on Robert Pape's report on suicide bombers:

"PREVAILING MISCONCEPTIONS. The implications: There's a connection between September 11 and the war in Iraq, radical Islamic fundamentalists are behind all of the suicide bombings in Iraq, and they're spurring insurgencies throughout the Islamic Crescent. Yet government studies of intelligence failures and Pape's analysis indicate there's no evidence that any of this is true.

About the only point Pape agrees with is that the bombers want to drive the U.S. out of the region. But he argues that American policies to combat the terrorists are wrong-headed. "The presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies likely to worsen America's situation and to harm many Muslims needlessly," he writes. Here's a summary of his analysis, which is based on the 315 suicide terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2003:

Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist Hindu group opposed to religion, committed the largest number of suicide attacks, 76. The Kurdish PKK, which used the tactic 14 times, is headed by a secular Marxist-Leninist, Abdulah Ocalan. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another Marxist-Leninist group, and the al-Aqsa Brigade, which has ties to the socialist Fatah movement, account for a third of the attacks against Israel. Communist and socialist groups account for 75% of the attacks in Lebanon. Islamic fundamentalists, he concludes, were associated with about only half of the attacks from 1980 to 2003. And such fundamentalist Islamic countries as Iran and Sudan aren't producing any suicide bombers."

Suicide bombers in Palestine/Israel and Iraq are trying to send a message: get out of my country. If we don't pay attention, our troops and the people of Iraq will keep paying the price.

Posted by: Linda Jansen at November 3, 2005 10:58 PM

Mary,
I couldn't agree more that the Saudis and their state-sponsored wahabbism are a major mover of Islamist terrorism, not to mention a big stultifier of reform in Islam in general.

But as for a full scale war across Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, surely you're joking! We don't ever commit to large wars lightly. On the eve of American entry into the Second World War, when the extent of the genocide the Nazis were committing was already pretty clear, and the potential for Hitler taking of all of Europe was visible, it was still an open question about whether we should go to war, and certainly whether we should go in full-scale. Recall also that many of the tactics used in that gruesome war (firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the a-bombs, etc.) would - thankfully - simply not be acceptable under the present circumstances, not by soldiers or civilians. And that war was against well-defined armies run by state actors, not diffuse hate-mongering organizations with varying degrees of rootedness in communities across the Islamic world. Not to mention that we surely did not fight WW2 alone - had the Russians not fought Hitler to the death, or had they made "peace in the east" we might well have been fighting him for many more years.

We clearly need to force change on Saudi Arabia, and that will be hard as long as they have their fingers on the spigot. But we also have to accept that the next stage of development in Islam will probably not be a secular democracy, and it will happen over decades.

Posted by: Eric E at November 3, 2005 10:36 AM