Iraq doesn't need to be a Kodak moment for us to be winning in the greater view - Victor Davis Hanson

In "Winning Ugly," Victor Davis Hanson puts America's response to Islamist imperialim in perspective in this column in the National Review Online:

"... In the long-term, global conditions favor the West. Western free expression, consumer capitalism, consensual government, and popular culture are far more dynamic — and less insidiously intrusive — than is 7th-century Islam. If this generation of Westerners can prevent radical Islam from obtaining the means to destroy a Western capital, our own way of life will prove far more disruptive to al Qaeda’s worldview, than radical Islam has proven itself to the West.

All that the autocracies have going for them in the Middle East is the accident of a commodity beneath their feet that someone else found, developed, and buys. But $80-a-barrel oil eventually will anger Western democracies, India, and China enough for them to change. Those who produce global goods and services are handing over their profits to those who don’t — and that will spurn them on to find alternatives to current petroleum consumption. Remember these price hikes are probably permanent, and not the result of embargos or voluntary cutbacks; so the likelihood that OPEC can turn on the spigots and crash oil prices to deflect efforts to find alternate energy are far less true than during the 1980s.

Discover how to cut American imported oil, and we can prevent trillions in windfall profits from going to the Middle East. And if we can curtail American casualties in Iraq, then neither the length nor the size of the deployment become sources of acrimony. Instead the war in the public mind devolves into a long-term necessary challenge, analogous to our current deployments in Afghanistan or the Balkans.

There are a great number of uncertainties ahead. The Pakistani-Saudi nexus — that provides both sanctuary and money for terrorists — seems sacrosanct from criticism, and makes our efforts elsewhere to promote democratic reform hypocritical, when these two autocracies, one nuclear, the other laden with oil and cash, get a pass.

The United States must put its financial house in order, curtail its imported oil, stabilize Iraq, prevent somehow Iran from getting a bomb, find ways to continue to support democratic reform in the Middle East without providing one-vote, one-time plebiscites to radical Islamists, and explain all that we are doing — and why — far more coherently and eloquently to the American public.

But the current orthodoxy that America is losing the war on terror inside and outside Iraq, while bereft of allies, is simply not true. Instead we are winning — it’s ugly perhaps, but winning nonetheless.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This September he is teaching at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan as the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History.

A War We Just Might Win

By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

... How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

How Israel Could Lose the Next Media Battle

The enemy uses the media as a tool of warfare - by Dr. Joel Fishman

"On the military level, our enemies have been able to create a situation in which Israel hesitates to use its superior military force and expertise in its own defense. This was also a major strategic accomplishment.

Israel's leaders must find suitable responses to the enemies' tactics of media warfare. They must find a way to neutralize the influence of figures such as the producer-director of the scene at Kfar Kana, who wore a green helmet, and his evil collaborators in the Western media. If they don't, then Israel will suffer more miserable defeats in the media battle. Such failures in the war for public opinion carry a high military and political price. "

Dr. Joel Fishman is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

World's Fate Rests Upon Defeat of Islamists' War / Israeli Front- Physician & Statesman Dr. Arye Eldad

Zionist statesman & former IDF Chief Surgeon, Dr. Arye Eldad, exemplifies the humane essence of Israel, contrasted with popular misconceptions.

He personally heals the wounds of Palestinian terrorists injured in the process of murdering innocent Israeli civilians.

Here, he shines light on the true goals the Islamist conspiracy against Israel and de-programming a brainwashed Muslim world (& global media) to see that the key to peace lies in overcoming Muslim rejection of Jewish autonomy.

He discusses the Palestinian crusade to destroy Israel and the difficult steps Israel must take to defend itself from subversion from within, and from external threats in the absence of adequate U.S. support. He seeks international political support to keep Israel safe and secure.

Isolate Apocalyptic Iran Regime- Exploiting Islamist-Imperialism to Destabilize World Through Gulf, Islam

Iranian reformer in exile, Morad Moallem, explains the mentality of the totalitarian regime ruling Iran seeking the defeat of the West through petro-economic destablization, to be replaced with their brand of Islamist, social and political control.

He encourages the steps that the West ought take to save the world from Iran's fascist regime, including a boycott of Iran's oil (and cutting most economic ties to Iran) in order to spur a popular revolt against the Mullahs and to usher in a democratic Iranian administration.

He advises that to call attention to the plight of disappeared, political prisoners languishing in Ahmadenijad's jails, political prisoners throughout Iran will commence a hunger-strike in prisons throughout Iran beginning this Saturday.

Iran's Global-Dominating, Apocalyptic Mentality Explained

Iranian democracy pursuer, Morad Moallem, explains the threat posed by the oppressive, global-domination-seeking, Islamic-totalitarianist movement. He explains the mentality behind the Islamic-motivated, nuclear-apocalyptic-seeking regime and it's real threat to the world.

Resisting Jihad Discussed on iLife TV Network

Crusader Islamists Seek to Dominate West; Fueled by US-pressured, Israeli Concessions.
iLife TV's Danny Fontana interviews Democracy Broadcasting spokesperson about the religious motivations of the global Jihad; the war-footing necessary in the West and in Israel to defeat the Islamic totalitarian movement.

Broadcast nationally on i-Life TV network.

"How the West could lose"

Daniel Pipes' essential column in The Jerusalem Post:
Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam, the Shari'a) might in fact do better than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That's because, however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them - pacifism, self-hatred, complacency - deserve attention.
Islamists deploy formidable capabilities, however, that go far beyond small-scale terrorism (including):
A non-violent approach - what I call "lawful Islamism" - that pursues Islamification through educational, political, and religious means, without recourse to illegality or terrorism. Lawful Islamism is proving successful in Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Muslim-minority ones like the United Kingdom.
Please read it all: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1164881991915&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

What the West must to to Win

Why Radical Islam? Why Now? by Victor Davis Hanson in the Washington Times

Read any newspaper or turn on any news broadcast and you're bound to encounter stories of Islamic radicals fighting, killing and threatening each other -- and just about everyone else.
• In Somalia, jihadists, with the support of al Qaeda, have clashed with troops loyal to the country's internationally recognized interim government and now threaten neighboring Ethiopia with all-out war.
• Nearby in Darfur, Muslim militiamen called janjaweed wage genocide against black Christian and animist villagers -- apparently with the Sudanese government's consent.
• Shi'ite and Sunni militias, each claiming to represent true Islam, keep slaughtering each other in Iraq.
• Hezbollah ("Party of God") seeks to destroy democracy in Lebanon by provoking Israel, which it is sworn to eliminate.
• On the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah have taken time out from their attacks on Israel to murder each other and innocent bystanders.
• The Iranian Shi'ite theocracy -- when not hosting Holocaust deniers or sending terrorists into Iraq -- issues serial pledges to finish off Israel.
• Pakistan's shaky leadership pleads it can neither target Osama bin Laden nor stop Taliban jihadists hiding in its remote regions from streaming back into Afghanistan.
• In Europe, opera producers, novelists, cartoonists and filmmakers are increasingly circumspect out of fear of death threats from Islamists.
While each conflict is unique and rooted in its own history, the common thread -- radical Islam -- is obvious. It's thus worth asking why this violent, intolerant strain of Islam has taken hold in so many unstable places -- and at this particular time.
The ascent of radical Islam is, perhaps, the natural culmination of a century's worth of failed political systems in Muslim countries that were driven by morally bankrupt ideologies, led by cruel dictators, or both.
In the 1930s, German-style fascism appealed to Arabs in Palestine and Egypt. Soviet-style communism had sympathetic governments in Afghanistan, Algeria and Yemen. Ba'athism took hold in Syria and Iraq. The secular Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser promised a new pan-Arabism that would do away with colonial borders that divided the "the Arab nation." Then there is the more pragmatic authoritarianism that survives in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya or in the petrol-monarchies in the Gulf.
Radical Islam may be as totalitarian and as morally bankrupt as any of these past or mostly defunct "isms," but its current appeal isn't hard to figure out. Unlike fascism or communism, radical Islam is locally grown and not plagued by charges of foreign contamination. Indeed, Islamists claim to wage jihad against the modernism and globalization of the outside, mostly Westernized world. Such a message resonates in stagnant, impoverished Muslim countries.
Of course, while the people of the region may be poor, the Islamist movement isn't. Huge oil profits filter throughout the Muslim world, allowing Islamists to act on their rhetoric. In today's world, militias can easily acquire everything from shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to rocket-propelled grenades. With such weapons on their own turf, Islamists can nullify billion-dollar Western jets and tanks.
There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers.
So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:
(1) Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic -- without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.
(2) At the same time, keep encouraging consensual governments in the Middle East and beyond that could offer people security and prosperity, while distancing ourselves from illegitimate dictators, especially in Syria and Iran, that promote terrorists.
(3) Establish that no more autocracies in the Middle East and Asia will be allowed to get the bomb.
(4) Seek energy independence that would collapse the world price of oil, curbing petrodollar subsidies for terrorists and our own appeasement of their benefactors.
(5) Appreciate the history and traditions of a unique Western civilization to remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for but rather much good to offer to others.
(6) Finally, keep confident in a war in which our will and morale are every bit as important as our overwhelming military strength. The jihadists claim we are weak spiritually, but our past global ideological enemies -- Nazism, fascism, militarism and communism -- all failed. And so will they.

Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

Islam-ism threatens democracies - its ideological, mortal enemy

Andrew C. McCarthy writes in National Review Online:

"Nor do I remember, in two decades as a prosecutor, anyone saying, “Y’know, maybe if we just talk with these Mafia guys, we could achieve some kind of understanding ...”Sitting down with evil legitimizes evil. As a practical matter, all it accomplishes is to convey weakness. This spring — after trumpeting the Bush Doctrine’s “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” slogan for five years — Secretary of State Rice pathetically sought to bribe Iran out of its nuclear program with a menu of all carrots and no sticks … and certainly no demand that the mullahs stop fomenting terror. The result?

They’re still laughing at us, even as they build their bombs, harbor al Qaeda operatives, and arm the militias killing American soldiers in Iraq.While our rhetoric blathers that we’ll never let them have a nuke, our talk begs them, pretty-please, to stop building one. And our actions all but hand them one. If all that makes you wonder who’s the superpower, what do you suppose they’re thinking? That’s talking with an enemy that has us pretty well pegged, while we stubbornly resist even thinking about what motivates him. We wouldn’t want to question his ideology. After all, what would CAIR say?

The democracy project tells Islamists that we don’t understand them — or care to try understanding them. The “let’s talk” gambit confirms that we’re not just studiously ignorant; we’re ripe for the taking.

For our own sake, we need to respect the enemy. That means grasping that he’s implacable, that he means us only harm, and that he must be subdued, not appeased. Negotiating with such evil is always a mistake, for any accommodation with evil is, by definition, evil.

Rejecting the democracy project is about respecting the enemy. Declining to talk to the enemy is about respecting ourselves."