The result of the Pelosi trip on Middle Eastern reformists is having quite a chilling effect. Five years of investment by the US State Department and the Bush administration in organizations and people who have committed their lives to helping their oppressed countries is being flushed away by the Democrats in Congress who, with the visit of Pelosi to Syria, have shown that they favor the stability of dictatorships to freedom even if they had a direct hand in killing American troops in Iraq. more»

Since Day One of the planned operation to snatch British sailors from Iraqi waters, the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) “War Kitchen” in Tehran had already drawn multiple recipes for the following weeks and potentially months to come. Indeed the regime, reacting to rising pressures from sectors of its own population and from the American-British-led coalition, engineered an “escalating” incident. The main scenario, as projected inside the minds of the Iranian “Jihadi-cooks,” is based on one request from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime: waste time, as much time as possible.

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast
it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the “end of days.” The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

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Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals–who unceasingly claim to support human rights–have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western “progressives” pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

Congressman Tom Lantos, who is a member of the delegation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading to Syria, put the mission clearly when he said: “We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy.”

Democrats can have any foreign policy they want — if and when they are elected to the White House.

Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and — like him or not — he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.

All that Pelosis trip can accomplish is to advertise American disunity to a terrorist-sponsoring nation in the Middle East while we are in a war there.

Complete success is being claimed for the largest Afghan-led operation yet against the Taliban.

It has been painfully clear that Speaker Pelosi was serious only about scoring political points. Her big grin when she won a narrow vote for a non-binding resolution was grotesque against the background of a life-and-death issue.

You dont grin over a political ploy that you have pulled when mens lives are at stake.

This latest hostage-taking incident smacks of desperation, not revolutionary fervor.

Should a peace candidate win the American presidency in 2008, prompting the U.S. to pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized, in the short term we will save lives and money. But as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle. Hamas and Hezbollah will still rocket Israel. Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers. Iran will still try to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb. Ayman al- Zawahiri will still broadcast his al-Qaida threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan. The oil-rich, illegitimate Gulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone. And jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us.

…our long-term plan is to go on the offensive to confront radical Islamic terrorists on their own turf, and try to foster a democratic alternative to theocracy or autocracy.

That may be felt by the American public to be too expensive or too naive, but it is a direct strategy aimed at an enemy who seeks to terrorize the West and plans on being around well after 2008.

Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.