A Few Good Men
 

You can't have a meaningful discussion until you drop the fiction of "a few individuals."

A Few Good Men
 

Seriously.

Have some of you people been reading the papers?

You've got hundreds of thousands in the streets each day - all over the world - screaming "Death to the West" and burning embassies and Christian churches.

You have leading Imams now demanding that the United Nations create new international law making the display of the "prophet" a punishable offense.

And Wonk, where are all these "millions" of moderates you are referring to? I sure don't see any of them telling these illiterates to shut up and go home.

A Few Good Men
 

Huh. Do the articles I've read about Middle Eastern governments (or portions thereof) playing a role in orchestrating those burnings help or hurt the "they're all fucking fanatics" theorem?

Three steps back, two steps forward
 

Dexter Filkins is a NYT reporter whose writing on Iraq has always impressed me. I remember his missives (and subsequent interviews) about the taking of Fallujah some time ago, as he went in with US forces, and IIRC managed to capture both the horrors of war, the regular ambiguity and disappointments of US policy in the region, and profiles of courageous US personnel.

Since I suspect it'll soon go behind the firewall, I'm including the majority of this article, but click and read it all if you're able to. It's a good piece that makes me both encouraged and saddened.

Gattigap

• 
  Strategy Tragedy?
  
  By DEXTER FILKINS
  Published: February 19, 2006
  
  When I recently spoke with Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson at his headquarters in Baghdad, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by a feeling of what might have been. Peterson, a big, witty officer in charge of training the Iraqi police force, spent two hours laying out a plan to bring order to a fractious country, a plan that was everything the American enterprise had always failed to be: bold, coherent and imagined all the way down to the hinges on the office doors.
  
  The general volunteered for this job, leaving his family in Washington, and he works every day and every night on an assignment that will probably keep him in Baghdad for a year. When we met, he was wearing a blue baseball cap that said "police" in English and in Arabic, and he keeps a woodcut of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king, on his office wall to make sure he doesn't get ahead of himself. "An eye for an eye" Peterson said. "This society has been living under that rule for 3,700 years. Are you going to change this overnight? Did we change it overnight in our country?" Peterson seemed utterly determined to succeed. And it was not terribly difficult to imagine that he could. And then you think: if only we had done this three years ago.
  
  In nearly every military and diplomatic realm, the American effort in Iraq is finally beginning to show the careful planning and concentrated thinking that seemed to vanish the moment American troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. We've heard progress reports in the past, of course, and they have often preceded a stunning setback. But what is new is the level of sophistication that Americans are bringing to their work, and the intensity of their engagement across so many fronts.
  
  A more subtle response to the insurgency was a long time in the making. American generals were caught flat-footed by the resistance that bloomed in 2003; they didn't plan for it, and they had no playbook to fight it. The result in the field often amounted to a war of attrition, which was designed to kill and capture as many insurgents as possible but which ended up alienating Iraqi civilians. These days, however, the military is making new efforts to help local Iraqis feel safe and secure in their homes. The two top American commanders, Gen. George Casey and Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, are proponents of placing far less emphasis on killing guerrillas and much more on working with the locals. In Baghdad, General Casey has set up a local counterinsurgency school, through which American officers must pass before they can head into the field. Find an American officer these days, and he is likely to tell you about the police officers he is supervising or the local council he's helping to set up.
  
  A new approach is equally evident at the American Embassy, where the current ambassador and erstwhile neoconservative, Zalmay Khalilzad, is employing a hands-on strategy that is positively Kissingerian in its realism. On some days, Khalilzad, a native of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, and a Sunni Muslim, sits with Iraqi leaders for hours, fingering his prayer beads and hearing their complaints. In that sense, Ambassador Khalilzad could hardly differ more from his two predecessors, L. Paul Bremer III, who dispatched orders with the curtness of a viceroy, and John Negroponte, who, on instructions from Washington, stood largely out of view.
  
  According to Iraqis and Western diplomats, Ambassador Khalilzad is orchestrating an extraordinarily ambitious power play: coaxing Sunni political leaders into the government while splitting the more moderate Iraqi insurgents from the beheaders and suicide bombers of Al Qaeda. If he succeeds, Khalilzad could remake the political landscape, curtail the insurgency and give the Iraqi government a bit of solid ground to stand on. If he doesn't succeed, the possibilities are endless, few of them good. Still, the ambassador's strategy is bolder than anything yet attempted.
  
  Meanwhile, General Peterson, along with his boss, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, is trying to construct nothing less than a new national army, a police force for every city and the logistical and educational apparatus to support them. In earlier American efforts, an Iraqi policeman was considered "trained" if he had passed through a few days of schooling. These days, the training is much more extensive. On most mornings, the streets in Baghdad echo not just with the sounds of car bombs but also with shots fired from the police shooting range.
  
  So far, there are signs that the new strategy may be working. As the Iraqi Army has taken over substantial portions of Iraq, insurgent attacks have declined from their peak in October. Of course, it's not clear whether that trend will continue. In the past, such trends have not. And Peterson isn't operating under any illusions about how long it will take him to complete his work. The charts that he uses to brief traveling Congressional delegations offer no date for when Iraqi Interior Ministry forces will be able to take full control of internal security.
  
  And there's the rub: the Americans have already had three years in Iraq. It seems reasonably clear, given the opinion polls at home and the elections ahead, that they will not get three more, at least not with troop deployments at their current levels. The prediction floated by senior Iraqi officials is that American, British and other foreign forces, now numbering 160,000, will fall below 100,000 by year's end.
  
  Given the chaotic situation that prevails in much of Iraq, that might not be enough. And even if American troops were to stay, it's not clear that the new American approach could succeed anyway. It may be that there are too many Sunnis with too many memories of being the group in power. Even with the best of intentions, Americans are still foreigners in Iraq; every day they do things — shoot up a car approaching a checkpoint, for instance — that make the Iraqis resent their presence. And the sectarian violence, which is turning every mixed Iraqi neighborhood into a battleground, might be too far along to turn around. Some officers, in private conversations, concede that they could lose.

A Few Good Men
 

If there are 700,000,000 to 1,200,000,000 Moslems in the world, and hundreds of thousands of them are marching in the streets -- hell, let's round up to a million, though that seems high to me -- that leaves, oh, about 699,000,000 to 1,199,000,000 moderates, no? Give or take, I mean.

A Few Good Men...albeit none of them are muslim
 

Let's see:

1. Saudi Arabia sponsors Wahhabism as its State religion

2. Palestine (if they get to sponsor an Oscar, tey have a country) elects Hamas and sponsors pushing the Jews to the sea.

3) Syria - see #2

4) Iran - see #4

5) Indonesia - see #5

I could go on, but the point is obvious, and yours is naive.

A Few Good Men...albeit none of them are muslim
 

I agree with you on 1 through 4, but I think the Pacific Rim Muslims are a different, more moderate variety. Their govts have actively tried to root out the radicals. In fact, I think Indonesia has been involved in actual guerilla combat with radical Islamists for some time.

I think... I hope... that as India, Australia, Japan and China have gone will go all the nearby nations. From my layman's perspective, it looks to me like the Far East and India and West will squeeze radical Islam into a corridor from Afghanistan through the Middle East and throughout Africa. Europe is going to be a real battleground. It has all the economic stagnancy that radical Islam requires to take hold. Where you find robust welfare systems and abject poverty, Islam tends to breed (check the location of your closest mosque).

Europe needs to make a choice; placate the bastards or take them on.

A Few Good Men
 

Obviously the issue extends beyond the individuals marching. Even polls that show "improvement" still have high percentages of Muslims saying they support suicide bombings and other terrorist acts. Example - even 7% of the "world's largest religion" is more than "a few individuals." This type of crap is a problem in the Muslim world -- something even Muslims have acknowledged. And what's up with the "non marchers=moderates"? You can blame this or that poster for drawing you into some useless argument but you sound retarded with this stuff.

A Few Good Men
 

Pass the law; it'll be as enforceable as a Canadian speeding ticket. You'll see every newspaper in the civilized world publish a cartoon of the Prophet the next day.

A Few Good Men...albeit none of them are muslim
 

Ah. So your argument extends beyond current events to more of a well-rounded, historical argument that Muslims are All Fucking Fanatics. Certainly, SA is a good place to start.



It's hard to argue with this logic. It's what makes circular reasoning so strong.

Mine was a question, but don't let that stop you. I take your point. They're All Fucking Fanatics. So come on, let's suit up, soldier!

A Few Good Men
 

They need to fucking lighten up about their religion. Judaism is about 4000 years older than Islam, and Israel is a secular state. Even the most Christian nations don't have theocratic or pseudo-theocratic systems. Until Muslims - everywhere - recognize that govt is secular and religion a private matter, we're going to have this shit going on. A full or partial theocracy simply can't co-exist with secular governments in the modern world. You can't reason or compromise with people who can't separate state action from duties of faith.

We're to blame for a lot of this, because we support SA, the fraudulent theocracy at the heart of radical Islam.

Three steps back, two steps forward
 

This is just flat out wrong. Bush has three more years, so the troops have three years, regardless of what happens.

A Few Good Men...albeit none of them are muslim
 

You lost me here. What post were these referring to?

P.S.

With the amount of Johnny Walker you sucked up last night, I am surprized to see you posting before noon. I bet Less won't be conscious until late afternoon.

Three steps back, two steps forward
 

Not to quibble, but Congress could cut the funding. Similar to what happened after Watergate, when Ford -- even if he wanted to -- couldn't send in the B-52s to stop the North Vietnamese tanks rolling south down Highway 1 in the Spring of 1975 because Congress had eliminated money for military operations in Southeast Asia.

They won't, of course, but it is possible, if enough of the members suddenly decided that it was in their political interest to do so. Although Bush has no more elections to worry about, they do. Not that it will probably get that bad, but you never know.

Three steps back, two steps forward
 

Well, no shit. That's because you cut off the rest of his sentence, which ended, "at least not at current levels."