Leaving Islamic Fascism

Ed Hussain, former militant agitator for islamist causes in Londonistan, moved to Saudi Arabia with his wife and went through a process that ended up with Hussein being disgusted by Saudi Arabia, Arabs, Jihadism, and eventually rejecting Islamism. Now he believes not in Islamism, and moreover believes that Hizb ut-Tahrir and other Islamist groups should be banned in England and elsewhere.

• He started with indoctrination into Islamism when he lived in England. He believed in segregation of the sexes, segregation of the races, veiled women, strict separation between Muslims and non-Muslims, sharia, jihad, dhimmi and jizya, overthrow of non-Islamic governments, reconquest of all formerly Islamic lands, a Caliphate, and conquest of the world for Islam.
• Then he and his wife moved to Saudi Arabia to teach.
• The propaganda that there is no racism in Islam came up against the fact that there is no more racist place than Saudi Arabia, and that Muslims are not equal if their skin is dark.
• The propaganda that there is no sexism in Islam because women are covered came up against the fact that there is no land on earth that is more difficult for women to live in than Saudi Arabia. They cannot drive, they cannot leave their homes because they are likely to be kidnapped by sex-crazed Saudis, they cannot work or even leave the country. Hatred and objectification of women is endemic in Wahhabist Islam.
• The propaganda that Islam is a religion of peace came up against the fact that the state sect of Wahhabism really does mandate the jihad of the sword against non-Muslims, or actually of non-Wahhabists, and prohibits those who believe in it from feeling any shared humanity with anyone who is not a Wahabbist Arab Muslim.
• The propaganda that Islam respects facts came up against the widespread refusal of Wahabbists to believe anything bad about Muslims and to blame everything bad that happens on Jews, who are accused of engaging in the wildest conspiracies imaginable.
• The propaganda that Jihad isn’t really criminal mass-murder and a wicked perversion of the religious impulse came up against the fact of 7/7/2005 in London, and the near death of the author’s sister who was nearly caught in one of the blasts. Combine this with the total callousness of Saudis after 7/7 for a shock to anyone who keeps an innate sense of morality or decency or goodness and acts on it.

The trick is not to recognize the wickedness and weakness of the Wahabbist Assassin ideology, an ideology that promotes death and hatred instead of life and love, but to find out how to spread this knowledge to Muslims to save the Muslims who already believe in the Assassins’ ideology, and to inoculate those who believe in a kind and humanist non-political Islam against the propaganda of the Islamists so they don’t fall for it when they encounter it.

h/t: Pajamas Media

Technorati Tags: Moral Clarity, Jihad, Counterjihad, Wahabbism, Islam, Islamism

Talibanistan devouring Pakistan: Afghanistan next

The surrender of the Waziristans to the Assassins of the Taliban and Al Qaeda was only the beginning. Now nuclear power Pakistan’s deterioration accelerates, bringing ever closer the spectre of a nuclear Jihadist state.

Only a few days ago, there was shock, widely expressed, at a video circulating in Pakistan that showed a 12 year old boy beheading a Pakistani militant accused of being a U.S. spy.

Jihadist media sources in Pakistan are prospering, and widely disseminate this sort of material. Osama bin Laden’s newspaper in Pakistan is known as the Ummat.

In related news, the uprising at Lal Masjid (aka the Red Mosque) in Islamabad has been continuing for several months now. The staff-wielding, niqaab wearing militant women in Black of the Red Mosque have been demanding the replacement of Pakistani civil law with sharia for a while. The Red Mosque has set up a sharia court on its territory. The Red Mosque’s chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz recently declared war on Pakistan. Specifically he stated that Musharraf’s government is un-Islamic and that every Moslem should wage jihad against it. “Banned” terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed has declared it will fight the government on behalf of the Red Mosque, claiming that police officers have raped their “sisters.” The government is trying to put lipstick on a pig by claiming the standoff has been resolved amiably, but the Red Mosque leadership disputes the government’s claims.

The Red Mosque isn’t the only source of Assassin agitation in Pakistan. The Darul Uloom Haqqania in the North-West Frontier Province is one of Pakistan’s largest madrassas, and was the main training madrassa for the original Taliban. Roughly 3,000 jihadists graduate from it every year. It is one center of gravity for the new, Pakistani Taliban that now controls the Waziristans, the North-West Frontier Province, and adjoining terrortories including Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Bajaur, Bannu and Lakki Marwat. As the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor notes:

A more startling view by another Pakistani observer notes that the male custodians of Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa seminaries confirm that “Pakistan’s mosques and seminaries raise terrorists and not scholars” (Dawn, April 15).

Lal and Haqqania have plenty of company in the Assassin indoctrination biz.

As Mullah Dadullah, a hardened Taliban assassin, told Al Jazeera, Osama Bin Laden is alive in Pakistan. Bin Laden is monitoring and supervising Al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bin Laden personally ordered the attack on U.S. Vice President Cheney in Bagram base in Afghanistan. And the U.S. has no authority to strike Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, even if he were identified down to the square meter.

Pakistan does the absolute minimum to discourage Jihadist Assassins from crossing the border into Afghanistan to wreak havoc against Afghan and NATO military and civilians. Pakistan’s foreign policy is based on the reckoning that NATO and the U.S. are weak and will soon abandon Afghanistan, leaving the Karzai government susceptible to a Pashtun revolt led by a vanguard of Taliban and Al Qaeda that would restore a jihadist government friendly to Pakistan in Afghanistan.

The government of Pakistan continues to crumble on other fronts. The government is promising to reconstruct illegally built madrassas, the demolition of which sparked the rebellion of the Lal Masjid. Now the Taliban in Bajaur is distributing pamphlets calling for the release of all Jihadists imprisoned by the Pakistani government… or else. The Pakistani government’s affinity for giving in to Jihadist threats does not fill one with confidence.

One area where Pakistan is cracking down on border-crossing Jihadists is in Baluchistan. Of course, these Jihadists are attacking targets in Iran, not Afghanistan. Worse yet in Pakistan’s eyes, these Baluchi Jihadists threaten Pakistan’s agreement with China to build a massive deepwater port in Gwadar.

What does all this mean?

In my estimation, we are coming ever closer to nuclear war. Pakistan is a nuclear power that is becoming increasingly dominated by Jihadist Assassins including Osama Bin Laden, the New Old Man of the Mountain.

Technorati Tags: Pakistan, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Jihad, Afghanistan, Nukes, Assassins, War on Terror

Hamid al-Ali: Cleric for Al Qaeda and other Jihadists

The Jamestown Foundation comes out with yet another important article.

Hamid bin Abdallah al-Ali is an influential Salafi cleric in Kuwait. He is designated by the U.S. government as a global terrorism financier and supporter, yet his website is registered in Vancouver in Washington state. Figures such as al-Ali are critical to the education and doctrine of Salafis—especially those that join the armed resistance of the jihadi movement—yet they often fall under the radar while they continue to radicalize thousands of followers. Part of the reason behind the lack of attention that clerics like al-Ali receive in the West is due to the pronounced cultural differences between opinion-makers in the United States and in the Muslim world. It would be hard to imagine a leading public figure in the United States composing lines of poetry, for example, in response to a security or political development.

Yet, among Arabs—and true as well of Salafi-Jihadis—poetry remains a respected form of expression and one lauded by the elite. One of al-Ali’s poems, entitled “These Lines Were Composed By the Sheikh upon Hearing the News of Iran’s Nuclear Announcement,” published on http://h-alali.net on April 10, was read by more than 6,300 users. The poem offered al-Ali’s historical perspectives on Iran’s potential rise to power (in a fashion typical of his strong position against Shiite Muslims). However, the dense religious rhetoric typical of Salafi clerics, more than anything, prevents the West from understanding the message and importance of these individuals.

As one of the leading public Salafi personas in the Arab and Muslim world, al-Ali frequently comments—and sways Muslim opinion—on a variety of critical issues. He is outspoken about Iraq and the direction in which jihadi groups are moving the country; he regularly calls for unity among Salafi and jihadi groups; and he encourages the mujahideen to adhere strictly to the doctrine of the Salafiyya. His fatwas, articles and sermons have been received by hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims. Yet, he is perhaps most famous for his fatwa, issued in early 2001, sanctioning suicide bombings—and specifically the flying of aircraft into targets during such operations.

Clerics such as Hamid al-Ali are clerics in the same way that Christian priests or ministers are in the west. In Islam, religion is government and government religion. The only leader to be respected is a devout Moslem. Whether he rules wisely or ruins his country is irrelevant, as long as he follows the Koran. Islam is profoundly political, especially when interpreted the traditional Wahabbist (aka Salafist) way, or Deobandist (that’s the Taliban), or Khomeinist (that’s Hizballah and other Iranian militants).

Hamid al-Ali didn’t stop at condoning the 9/11 attacks (ahead of time). He has gone on to recruit jihadists for the Al Qaeda insurrection in Iraq, and also against the government of his own country Kuwait.

In January 2005, arrests by Kuwaiti security forces uncovered a Kuwaiti al-Qaeda cell planning attacks within the country. The arrests also led to evidence that al-Ali had been actively recruiting Kuwaiti youth for jihad in Iraq and in his home country [3]. The U.S. Treasury Department also maintains that al-Ali provided funds to training camps in Kuwait and posted technical assistance on explosives making and other training materials to his website. Yet, the specific acts of support to local terrorist groups pale in comparison to the effect he has had on countless Muslims guided by his teachings. His rulings and commentary on current events and political issues—like his contemporaries Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Basir al-Tartusi—frame the debate among Salafis, and between them and other Muslims.

Fellows like Hamid al-Ali must be exposed for what they are: Extremist preachers of the wicked perversion known as Jihad, inspirations and apologists for Al Qaeda, who wish to use modern weapons to force a medieval way of life on the Islamic world first, and then on the rest of the world.

Technorati Tags: Al Qaeda, Jihad, Sharia, Islamism, Al Qaeda, Kuwait

On Retiring Clausewitz (Please)

I wish now that I had read the article on which I will write six months ago, when it came out, instead of waiting until the other night to get into the six-month-old printout. In the important (and sharply sarcastic) Clausewitz in Wonderland, Tony Corn introduces the problem:

Once it becomes clear, as in the early 1990s, that [the] U.S. is peerless in conventional warfare, isn’t the duty of [military] educators to anticipate that the enemy will have no choice but to choose an asymmetrical approach — as in “irregular warfare?” Yet, while the Osamas of this world were issuing fatwas against “Jews and Crusaders” and defining their own struggle in terms of “Fourth-Generation Warfare,” our Clausewitzian Ayatollahs were too busy turning Vom Kriege in[to] a military Quran and issuing fatwas against the theoreticians of 4GW, Netwar, and other postmodern “heresies.” […]

It does not take an Einstein to realize that, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, the greatest generals for 20 centuries had one thing in common: They have never read Clausewitz. And conversely, in the bloodiest century known to man, the greatest admirers of Clausewitz also have had one thing in common: They may have won a battle here and there, but they have all invariably lost all their wars.

Corn continues with a thorough exploration of the landscape of military affairs that face the U.S. and how Clausewitz’ maxims apply… or don’t. Among the terms Corn explores are:

The Revolution in Guerilla Affairs

The French-Algerian War of 1954-1962. By 1962, the Algerian FLN was reduced to 10,000 hard-pressed jihadists, while there were 100,000 Algerian military volunteers in addition to native French forces. Yet by cleverly using the media, the UN, and the Arab League, the FLN was able to prevail politically after being utterly defeated militarily.

Deep Coalitions

Emphasis on terrorism as a result of a crisis of legitimacy in a state ignores the more problematic use of terrorism as a force multiplier by rogue states, who are led by their conventional military weakness to engage in “war by proxy”, which expresses itself as a Deep Coalition between Rogue States, friendly International Organizations and terrorist Non-Governmental Organizations. A major example is the Shiite Crescent, centered on terror-exporting Iran with satellite minority populations of Shiites in the oil-producing areas of Muslim countries from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. There is some relationship between Iran’s government and jihadist NGOs such as Hamas and Hizballah.

COIN and DIMEFIL

COIN is COunterINsurgency. DIMEFIL (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, Law enforcement) is the vast spectrum of action over which modern asymmetric warfare must be waged if it is to be won.

The vocabulary that Corn covers is an important first step on the road of the successful counterjihad. The Jihadist New Assassins, both of the Khomeinist and Qutbist/Wahabbist sects, have not won a single military battle of their army against a U.S. army. However, they have a successful pattern to follow in the French Algerian War, and have created a movement with its own doctrine that results in a decentralized, yet coordinated campaign of crime, diplomacy, propaganda, brainwashing, demographic expansion, mosque and madrassa building, threats, and terrorism, with a distant goal of conquering everyone and converting, killing, or enslaving them for Allah.

And yet they also have weaknesses. Inter-tribe and inter-sect rivalries riddle and weaken every Muslim nation or military, as do inter-state rivalries weaken every Muslim coalition. The post-1979 cold war between the Shiite caliphate in Tehran and the Sunni caliphate in Riyadh must be exploited, as should the weaker cold war between pan-Islamist Saudi Arabia and pan-Arabist Egypt. Also there are (religious) Khomeinist and (ethnic) Persian components to Iran’s relationship with Hamas and Hizballah, as there are (religious) Wahhabist and (ethnic) Arab components to Saudi Arabia’s, Pakistan’s and Yemen’s relationship to Al Qaeda, Hizbut Tahrir, Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Tablighi Jamaat, al Muhajiroun, and other jihadist NGOs. And this hasn’t even introduced into the equation whatever may be fermenting in Turkey, where the most savage armies of the last two thousand years settled and formed the Ottoman Empire.

A small consolation: when it comes to identifying the “operational code” of deep coalitions, neither “game theory” nor “structural realism” is likely to shed any light either. Forget about “rational choice” theories: In the non-Western world in general, and in the Middle East in particular, state actors have a long record of self-delusion, miscalculation and defection. Rather than “structural realism,” it is a “cultural realism” approach which will make intelligible the constantly shifting evolution between cooperation and confrontation, whether among nonstate actors (Hezbollah and al Qaeda, e.g.) or state actors (Saudi Arabia and Iran).

And so he concludes with the same theme with which he introduced his article, that anthropology, not logistics, will be what the smart warrior thinks about when he makes battle plans for Counterjihad.

Corn’s article is both cleverly written and exceptionally rich with new concepts and helpful references, and I highly recommend reading it all.

Technorati Tags: Counterjihad, Infowar, Military

Pulitzer Prizes are Biased Left

On Townhall.com, Brent Bozell outlines the Pulitzer Racket.

Any conservative student who aspires to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist should really try another line of work. Here’s the list since George Will won in 1977 and William Safire won in 1978: Charles Krauthammer in 1987, Paul Gigot in 2000 and Dorothy Rabinowitz in 2001. That’s five conservatives in 30 years.

Three of the last five winners — [Cynthia] Tucker, Leonard Pitts and Colbert King — were leftist black columnists. William Raspberry and E.R. Shipp have also won. But the Pulitzer Prize glorifiers have never honored Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams, or other black conservatives.

Since 1992, eight of the 16 Commentary prize winners have been women. Rabinowitz is the only conservative. Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd, Eileen McNamara and Shipp are on the liberal list. Mary McGrory (1975) and Ellen Goodman (1980) also won that prize. But there’s been no Pulitzer for Mona Charen or Michelle Malkin or Linda Chavez or — the Pulitzer people will faint — Ann Coulter.

There’s never been a Pulitzer for Bill Buckley or Pat Buchanan or Cal Thomas or Robert Novak. Need we say more?

30:5 is roughly 85% liberal to 15% conservative. This is not based on the quality of argument, writing, or reasoning. It is based on not challenging the liberal mindlock on newsrooms. If argument or writing were the determinant then Thomas Sowell would have won every Pulitzer since he started writing.

Read it all.

Technorati Tags: Pulitzer Prize, Media Bias

On the VT Massacre

Words fail me. Read Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred for what I wish I had been able to write.

Lessons

1. Evil is a real problem. People with evil intentions and plans search out weakness and prey on it. If they are convinced that some group of people won’t fight them, then they will treat those people as their prey. Combine this with the idealism common on almost all university campuses, where wishful feelings that the world is harmless, or can be made harmless by decreeing a gun free zone, displace the urge to know that everything has been done to protect the campus from harm. As part of the ivory tower fantasy life, wishful thinking is preferred over a difficult plan for dealing with evil. Pacifism in the face of the evil that Cho wrought resulted in dead pacifists. Action and survival, and if necessary an honorable martyrdom, is greatly to be preferred to inaction and death.

   Michelle Malkin says the solution is to teach our young people a culture of self defense. Allen Hill agrees. Burleson, Texas shows us how it’s done.

   The instructors tell students to throw their books, book bags, desk and chairs using everything and anything to disrupt and take down a gunman. Robin Browne, a major with the British Army, helped design the training course and says it is necessary for students and teachers to throw themselves into the line of fire.

   “This is not a burglar. This is not a bank robber,” Browne said. “This is someone who has come onto school property with the express intention of using a deadly weapon to hurt and dominate people who cannot necessarily defend themselves.” A person who enters a school, Browne said, “is in the same category as serial killers.”

   “We are dealing with a predator here and a predator, when he is offered prey and the prey gives in will take advantage of that prey,” he said. “What we are teaching here is for the children to not allow the predator to take control. … They actually become the superior the dominant party in the room, and it is actually the gunman who becomes the prey.” […]

   Browne says waiting for police to take control is a deadly mistake and says that 15 people who died and 24 were injured at Columbine as police struggled to take control. By the time police responded the hostage at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Penn., students and school officials had lost control and ultimately, five girls died and the gunman, Charles Roberts, killed himself.

   Malkin is right. Gun Control is not the answer, no matter how right the answer feels when you let feelings and emotions overbalance rational thought. As Hurricane Katrina proved, the authorities don’t arrive in time, and they have too few resources to help at first. This will always be true in a free society. Citizens need to be ready and willing and help themselves.

2. Dennis Miller said something very interesting on the O’Reilly Factor today. I will riff on it. As Ryan Seligman proved at Duke, it is possible to tie together digital video and photographs from surveillance and provide an entire time-line to blow malicious, false criminal accusations out of the water.

   The VT police made a few understandable mistakes in investigating the first killing at 7:30AM. But there is one simple resource they didn’t have that they should have had. If they had access to video footage that showed Cho Seung-Hui walking out of his victims’ dorm room, footage of him leaving the dorm and footage of him entering his own dorm, they could have located and arrested him before he left for the post office to mail his package to NBC. They could have caught him before he got to the classroom building and killed thirty more. There is no good reason why university campuses, and other areas that are self-disarmed and target rich, should not be filled with plenty of digital video cameras to record everything. Combined with face recognition software like that used at air terminals, it would make it possible for campus security to locate dangerous people much more quickly than would be possible otherwise.

   Privacy in public places is pretty much obsolete already, with camera cell phones, ATM cameras, and general surveillance cameras. I know this seems like a big step toward Big Brother, but the missing and most important piece of that nightmare scenario is the totalitarian government.

3. Finally, and also mentioned by Dennis Miller, the revelation that Cho had been referred to a state mental facility for observation in 2005, and that his very disturbed behavior and diagnosis hadn’t appeared on the two background checks he had to pass to buy his two guns, sound just like the CIA and the FBI and the Gorelick wall of separation that left the US vulnerable to 9/11. The gun background check bureaucracy doesn’t talk with the mental health bureaucracy, at least as much as they should. And the university apparently didn’t hear from either, though the English department’s cluelessness about his violent streak could have resulted from administrative privacy concerns.

Technorati Tags: virginia tech, massacre, cho seung-hui

Max Boot on the Counterjihad Infowar

Max Boot gets it 100% right in the Contentions blog

The conventional military mindset sees the media as a potential enemy to be shunned at all costs. Officers who get quoted too much are derided behind their backs as “glory-seekers” or “self-promoters.” The focus is always supposed to be on the team, not the individual, and there is a general assumption that good deeds will speak for themselves. General George Casey, the former U.S. commander in Iraq (now about to become Army chief of staff), exemplified this point of view. He seldom spoke to the media and tightly limited who could speak on behalf of his command.

The result of such caution is to cede the “information battlespace” to critics of the war and even to outright enemies such as Osama bin Laden and Moqtada al Sadr, who have shrewdly manipulated press coverage.[…]

What the armed forces have to realize is that in today’s world engaging in information ops can no longer be a peripheral part of a military campaign. In a sense, the kinetic operations have come to be peripheral to the core struggle for hearts and minds in Iraq—and back home. If the armed forces don’t do a better job of waging this part of the struggle, they can lose the war, no matter what happens on the battlefield.

Read it all.

Technorati Tags: Counterjihad, Infowar

Echoes

Tarek Heggy writes at Winds of Change:

Before Second World War broke out in 1939, the Soviet Union was contained within its borders although, it had patriarchal relations with other communist movements worldwide through an organization that the Soviets established to support such movements, which was called Communist International or the Comintern.

The military defeat of Germany and Japan, created a power vacuum in the international arena after the Second World War. In Europe, the German army began withdrawing westward after it had reached the gateway to Stalingrad. Simply speaking, as the German army retreated from east to west, the Soviet army occupied the territory that they abandoned. At first the Soviet forces moved forward within their own territory then they advanced into other countries that later formed the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon and were known as the Eastern European countries or the countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Consequently, all the lands that were removed from the realm of German sovereignty became new areas of influence for the Soviet Union and its political and economical ideologies. As a result of the German retreat to the west the bloc of countries in Eastern Europe was formed and became like planets orbiting around the Soviet Union.

A similar process took place in Asia. When the Japanese army retreated from the vast territories that it had conquered outside of the Japanese home islands, communist parties in those areas took over the evacuated lands.

Although this process took place in more than one country, there are numerous examples including; Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Mongolia, the greatest and the most important case in point was that of Mao Tsetung in China. He, and after him the remnants of his communist followers, proceeded to replace the withdrawing Japanese forces and simultaneously swept away the Chinese anticommunist alternative led by Chiang Kai-shek who withdrew from the Chinese mainland and settled on the island of Formosa.

I commented on the post there:

When the Nazis and Japanese withdrew from conquered areas as WW2 drew down the resulting power vacuum led to the domination of communist parties. When the USSR left Afghanistan the Taliban took over. When the Shah of Iran fell the Khomeinistas took over Iran and Wahhabist hardliners took more power in Saudi Arabia. Also see Somalia, Gaza, Lebanon, Chechnya and Algeria. Is this the genesis of a new world war, that wherever communism or autocracy fails as a system and political islam is available, political islam will take over?

What does this promise for Egypt, Libya, Morroco, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma? What does it promise for France and Netherlands?

Heggy addresses what Muslims must do in this post. Read it all.

The follow-on question for the free, non-Muslim world is: What strategy is available for containing this pattern? There are hard questions that need to be answered after much thought. Only after these questions are answered will it be possible to define, understand, and communicate the proper strategy for the new Cold War against the Assassins.

• Should the free world prop up failing dictators?
• Should the free world prop up failing communist states?
• What can the free world do to reclaim its own renegade academy and media, that reflexively sides against difficult freedom and with easy tyrrany and barbarism whenever possible?
• What can the free world do to strengthen itself?
• What can the free world do to weaken the appeal of political islam?
• Should the free world attempt to weaken political Islam?
• Should the free world attempt to weaken Islam? Is there anything in Islam uniquely worth saving?
• What can the free world do to protect ex-Muslims from the vengeance of political Islam?

Technorati Tags: Nazism, Communism, Islamism, Jihad, Counterjihad

Petraeus talks to the Sadrinistas

After the 5,000 to 7,000 man protest in Najaf where Sadr’s remaining zealots protested against the U.S. led Coalition, Gen. Petraeus reminded Iraqis how they gained the freedom to protest.

“Those who take to the streets to protest … should recall that were it not for the actions of coalition forces in 2003 (and to be sure actions by Iraqis and coalition forces since then) they also would not have been able to celebrate the recent religious holidays as they did in such massive numbers.”

The protests Monday in Najaf, the holiest city in Shia Islam, were primarily followers of cleric Muqtada Sadr, who claims one of the largest militias in Iraq and believed to be behind much of the sectarian violence in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Petraeus wrote in his April 9 message that it was particularly important to him that the people of Najaf remember that it was the 101st Airborne Division that he commanded in 2003 that liberated Najaf and nearby Kufa in 2003, battling Saddam’s forces.

“Our soldiers sacrificed greatly to give the Najafis and millions of other Iraqis the freedoms, however imperfect they may be, they enjoy today,” Petraeus wrote.

Petraeus has not been reluctant to highlight the mistakes and failures of the U.S. occupation.

“The past four years have been … disappointing, frustrating and increasingly dangerous in many parts of Iraq for those who have been involved in helping to build a new state in this ancient land,” he wrote. “I would add however that the coalition has, at the least, consistently sought to learn from its mistakes.”

Petraeus called on all Iraqis to “reject violence and the foreigners who fuel it with their money, arms, ammunition and misguided young men.”

“This is a time for Iraqis to demonstrate to the world their innate goodness, their desire to respect those of other sects and ethnic groups, and their wish to stitch back the fabric of Iraqi society,” Petraeus wrote. “Only in this way can the dreams of those who live in a country so rich in blessings and promise be fully realized.” (UPI)

It does a man good to remember how things have worked in the past, so as not to attempt the impossible in pursuit of the ineffable.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Military

Genocide Maps on Google Earth

Foreign Policy points to a Google Earth map for genocide in Darfur. Also see a timeline for Nazi death camps and a Google Earth map of the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Technorati Tags: Human Rights, Genocide