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We have a couple of items on the progress in Iraq. Christopher Hitchens, the stalwart, is first.
… As I began by saying, I am not at all certain that any of this apparently good news is really genuine or will be really lasting. However, I am quite sure both that it could be true and that it would be wonderful if it were to be true. What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism, which is pardonable, but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn’t pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either.
Newsweek is next.
For someone who has returned periodically to Baghdad during these past four and a half years of war, there has been one constant: it only gets worse. The faces change, the units rotate, the victims vary, but it has always gotten worse. Brief successes (elections, a unity government) collapse as still greater problems rear up (death squads, Iranian-made bombs). The country’s sects grow ever more antagonistic; the killings become more depraved; first a million, then 2 million, then 4 million Iraqis flee their homes. Al Qaeda loses its leader when Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is killed. But it steadily replenishes its ranks of suicide bombers, and morphs from a largely foreign force into a far more dangerous indigenous one. And so on.
For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable. “It’s hard to believe,” says a friend named Fareed, who has also gone and come back over the years to find the situation always worse, “but this time it’s really not.” Such words are uttered only grudgingly by those such as me, who have been disappointed again and again by Iraq, where a pessimist is merely someone who has had to endure too many optimists. …
… The most important repairs—to Baghdad’s psyche—may be out of anyone’s control. “The greatest obstacle [to reconciliation] is what the social fabric was subjected to,” Tareq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president, said last week. For the first time in years, Baghdad’s citizens now feel reasonably safe in their own neighborhoods. But they remain fearful of moving between them, across the capital’s myriad sectarian borders, some invisible, others marked by high concrete. There continues to be a handful of sectarian killings daily in the city, most attributed to rogue Shiite militias ignoring the ceasefire, but each one leaving a family with a potential vendetta. Patching up Baghdad’s social fabric may prove a lot harder than defeating Al Qaeda. And, yes, it could still get worse again. A pessimist is also an optimist who has too often been proved wrong.
Jack Kelly says Iraq is indeed a quagmire – for al-Qaida.
… Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous “capitals” of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.
Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.
Al-Qaida’s support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group’s lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida’s attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.
“Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization’s reputation as a defender of Islam,” said StrategyPage. …
Norman Podhoretz defends against Andrew Sullivan.
In my article “The Case for Bombing Iran†(COMMENTARY, June 2007), in my book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, and in various public appearances, I quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini as having said the following:
We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.
My source for this statement was Amir Taheri, the prolific Iranian-born journalist now living in London, who has also contributed a number of articles to COMMENTARY. Now, however, the Economist, relying on another Iranian-born writer, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, has alleged on its blog “Democracy in America†that Khomeini never said any such thing. “Someone,†says Mr. Bakhash, “should inform Mr. Podhoretz he is citing a non-existent statement.â€
That “someone†has turned out to be Andrew Sullivan in his widely read blog, “The Daily Dish.†Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error†in relying on a “bogus quotation†to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.
I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes†out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible. …
Thomas Sowell tries to help us make sense of income statistics. Part I was in Jewish World Review, and Part II was found at Townhall. Looks like there will be more, which will be included later.
Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.
On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.
The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.
Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.
How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions? …
Phil Valentine, a columnist for The Tennessean, has a column on Al Gore; Al Gore is like Jim Jones, and we’re drinking his Kool-Aid. We’re gonna have Mr. Valentine back.
… Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We’re trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.
The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement’s devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming. …
Tech Central writes on the findings that a little extra pounds are good for you.