I’d not listen to those voices, Lem. Next, that voice will be telling you what a good investment the Brooklyn Bridge would be.

“Seems to be” is the operative phrase here. Remember, the people who are getting information out to you don’t appear to have any particular interest in any good news, and the people who know what’s going on don’t really have any interest in publicizing what they’re doing.

I should have been more specific. I was not talking about an end to terrorism as a tactic everywhere, but as an ends in and of itself within the confiness of the religion of Islam, in this place and amnong these people.

PJ: I see what you mean, but in truth I doubt it woud have mattered, sooner or later something like this could happen. And maybe there is a reason the White House is not saying anything, these people are fighting a war not doing a traffic report. It might be they are looking for these guys and they do not want to alert the people who have them that the locals described the vehicle or whatever, well thanks to the NYT we can forget any secrecy on the issue.

But I think people’s expectations were too high if they thought all the violence could be stopped in a city the size of Baghdad with all these factions virtually overnight.

We hear about the violence, but there is more than that going on.

My God there are millions of people in that city.

I once met a mercenary who greased his bullets with pig fat when fighting African Muslims. Other opponents have considered burying Mulsim dead in pig skins. But the Islamists have a trivial way out – Islam is simply whatever the Mullahs say it is, and it only takes one to say (as was done) that when fighting Jihad, being exposed to pigs as described above is okay. Likewise, suicide is prohibited in Islam (and by the way, for the person above who said that Christianity favors self imolation, that’s a total crock), but not when you have a mullah who says otherwise.

In other words, it is easy to get a religious ruling saying whatever is needed. Islam has no central authority (unlike, say, the Catholic Church) to define itself. This leaves the door open to any convenient mullah/ayatollah/whatever to justify anything they want.

However, we shouldn’t get too focused on the situation in Iraq. The homicide rate in Baghdad right now is lower than it is in Washington, DC.

We need to do three things:

1) Defeat our own LSM/MSM, and do so ASAP.

2) Stop worrying about Iraq so much. It is simply one battle in a much larger war – as Bush enunciated years ago now.

3) Demonstrate to the world, and especially future adversaries, that we are just as capable now as we were in WW-II of inflicting real serious warfare on enemies. Let us remember that most of the world remembers WW-II as “the great war” including our own MSM. I suggest Iran as a demonstration, since they are pushing us to the brink anyway and will shortly have nuclear deterrent. This is somewhat in line with thefascinating comment by Tom Holsinger on genocide against Japan…

I have come to favor the idea of a full scale war with Iran: we destroy their entire military capability, their transportation system and seaports, all of their utilities (water, power, etc), their entire industrial base, INCLUDING their oil capabilities. Oh, and we aren’t too careful about collateral damage, and we put an embargo (with minefields) to keep them from getting aid by sea for a while.

Such a demonstration just might convince the rest of the world that they really do not want to mess with us. They will, of course, hate us for this… but they already hate us and there isn’t a damn thing we can do to change that (I reference again the Commentary article on the subject).

I suspect an action like I advocate – one which clearly causes us significant sacrifice due to its damage to world oil production, would produce remarkable effects in getting the world to take seriously the danger we are all in, and would put an end to coddling of terrorists by most of the other countries of the world (those without a current, credible nuclear deterrent).

I may be somewhat naive on this, but the Zarqawi papers mention something about expanding the war by making us go to war in Iran.

Why can’t we turn the tables by making more Muslims go and defend Iraq?

Is it possible that entry into the coalition of the willing was a one time deal? I mean I can’t believe that with so many “Muslim” countries in that region the bulk willing still western. Something tells me that the insurgency would have a harder time of it shooting and blowing up Turks and Egyptian troops.

Why aren’t there more soldiers from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and Libya?
Why cant we militarily Islamitise Iraq?

Why do we a State Department for? I cant believe we lack the imagination necessary. Is our enemy better at recruiting than us?

I haven’t seen the news today, but it seems we again are being given no news at all from the White House, so I agree with Roger, and iraqthemodel, that it seems to be going badly.

What you have in Iraq is a low level insurgency that targets civilians. You also have a small shiite mililtia that fights back (it is not larger due to Sistani’s influence.

And you have a press that has a short memory about much more fatal “insurgencies” in the recent and distant pass, perhaps because these “insurgencies” were communist and politically correct…

Suicide bombers are worrysome, but next to the lethality of fascist governments, they are a minor irritation.

There is a simple answer to suicide attackers. You won’t like it one bit.

Genocide. We were about to do just that to the Japanese in 1945 when they surrendered.

Here is the long-since scrolled-off article I wrote on Strategy Page on the subject:

“When A Democracy Chose Genocide

The United States government decided on June 18, 1945, to commit genocide on Japan with poison gas if its government did not surrender after the nuclear attacks approved in the same June 18 meeting. This was discovered by military historians Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen while researching a book on the end of the war in the Pacific. Their discovery came too late for inclusion in the book, so they published it instead in the Autumn 1997 issue of Military History Quarterly.

Polmar & Allen ran across references to this meeting in their research and put in a Freedom of Information Act request for related documents. Eventually they received, too late for use in their book, a copy of a document labeled “A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.” The word “retaliatory” was PENCILED in between the words “possible” and “use”.

Apparently there were only five of these documents circulated during World War Two. The document was requested by the Chemical Corps for historical study in 1947. In an attempt to “redact” history, another document was issued to change all the copies to emphasize retaliatory use rather than the reality of the US planning to use it offensively in support of the invasion of Japan.

The plan called for US heavy bombers to drop 56,583 tons of poison gas on Japanese cities in the 15 days before the invasion of Kyushu, then another 23,935 tons every 30 days thereafter. Tactical air support would drop more on troop concentrations.

The targets of the strategic bombing campaign were Japanese civilians in cities. Chemical Corps casualty estimates for this attack plan were five million dead with another five million injured. This was our backup to nuking Japan into surrender. If the A-bombs didn’t work, we were going to gas the Japanese people from the air like bugs, and keep doing so until Japanese resistance ended or all the Japanese were dead.

Genocide is defined by treaty as the murder of a large number of people of an identifiable group, generally a nationality or religion, which number comprises an appreciable percentage of the total group. Five million dead is 6.4% of then 78 million people in the Japanese Home Islands, so this proposed gas attack would certainly have qualified as genocide.

What brought the United States government to that decision was the prospective casualties of a prolonged ground conquest of Japan against suicidal resistance, after Japanese Kamikaze attacks and suicidal ground resistance elsewhere had thoroughly dehumanized them to us.

The American people certainly would have supported such tactics at the time, especially as Japanese Imperial General Headquarters issued orders a month later, provided to us courtesy of code-breaking (MAGIC), to murder all Allied prisoners of war, all interned Allied civilians, and all other Allied civilians Japanese forces could catch in occupied China, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Malaya, etc., starting with the impending British invasion of Malaya in late September 1945. The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and more lethal. They’d probably have killed at least an additional 50 million people, more than had died in all of World War Two to that point, before Allied armies could eliminate Japanese forces overseas.

The horror would not have stopped there. An estimated ONE THIRD of the Japanese people (25-30 million) would have died of starvation, disease, poison gas and conventional weapons during a prolonged ground conquest of Japan. The Japanese Army planned on locking up the Emperor, seizing power and fighting to the bitter end once the US invasion started. Thank God for the atom bomb – killing 150,000 – 200,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved 75-80 million lives. One of whom would have been the writer’s father, an infantry lieutenant who survived Okinawa.

So the United States has within living memory made a decision to commit genocide on a whole people as a matter of state policy. We didn’t have to do it because the Japanese Emperor knew we’d do it.

The relative power of America’s armed forces vis a vis the rest of the world has grown to the point where genocide is unlikely to be necessary to impose our will on any possible combination of enemies lacking the ability to seriously menace the American homeland. The American people might support genocide as policy if further attacked at home, but the American government will act based on its perception of American interests, and keep that demon in the bottle, absent overwhelming public demand. Nuclear weapons use is another matter – the American government has used nuclear weapons to avert greater evils and recently indicated some willingness to do so again, albeit with non-genocidal force.”

Why think that “terrorism” will end then? It was used before Islamic theocratic fascism — see Genghis Khan or the Irish Republican Army — and I’m sure it will show up again. The campaigns against the Barbary States and pirates like Blackbeard didn’t end piracy for all time either.

Let’s not set our goalposts too high — the key is to break the control of ITF on the Islamic world, and the key to that is to make sure it’s not a paying strategy. We don’t have to eliminate the tactic.