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“They”? Don’t you mean “we”, Bonnie?

With that little adjustment, I’d say Bonnie actually has a point, as recent events in Britain are illustrating. We do need to recognize that there are fascist terrorists amongst us, along with their sympathizers, enablers and abettors — “Bonnie” herself being a good illustration — and that they mean us harm, unless, of course, we do as they tell us. We need to decide either to do as we’re told, or fight back. And if we decide on the latter, we better mean it, for as long as it takes.

The “surge” depended on Iraqi politicians and security forces doing their jobs, too.

I guess some people just can’t learn anything new, Neo. And that’s sad, given the progress some folks have had since 9/11. It simply contrasts the lack of progress by others in far uglier tones.

Ignorancy may be cured, but after 6 years… the opporunity for learning has long passed you by. There’s a time for everything, and thus you can always miss your opportunity.

Whatever our troops in Iraq do now is almost irrelevant.

Whatever the soldiers do to protect women and children have nothing to do with the Iraqi government’s ability to function in a terrorist environment in which their children and wives are threatened with execution if they do not behave according to Shariah Law.

Everyone here obviously agrees with the above summated Alphie position, right?

http://www.juancole.com/2007/06/sunni-bloc-pulls-out-of-government-5-us.html

As stated in that link, what is the surge for if not to give the government of Iraq a chance to succeed? The biggest problem in Iraq is the lack of cooperation between political parties, religious sects, tribes. Regardless of what happens with the surge, these different groups in Iraq need to start getting along better, or all our military efforts will be in vain.

Also, it is very dangerous to place faith in the activities of the Sunni tribes of the Anbar province. I see no indication that, in the long run, they want to cooperate with Shiites in Iraq, or even support a democratic, secular government in that country. If you have evidence of this, please point me to it.

Stumbley, I’m afraid that I don’t see how our military involvement in Iraq is helping with respect to any of the questions you listed in your comment.

The Jews belong in Europe?

You mean the Europe that tried to exterminate them, during the 20th Century? Don’t read much history, do you.

Bonnie, I really don’t mean to be rude but you are either woefully uniformed (misinformed?) or intentionally delusional. The history of Israel/Palestine/the Levant has not been all that peaceful, going back to ancient times. If you don’t like reading history texts, have a look at the Tanakh.

After the establishment of Christianity and Islam the region did not experience peaceful coexistence between the faiths. Mohammed drove the Jews out of Medina and Chaibar either killing them, selling them as slaves, or turning them into serfs. And you forgot two centuries of wars fought between Christians and Muslims over Jerusalem. You know, the Crusades? They were hardly times of brotherly love.

In more recent times, there were major Arab riots across Palestine in 1929 that left a lot of Jews dead and from 1936-1939 was the Arab Revolt headed by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. The Mufti demanded an end to Jewish immigration and an end to sales of land to Jewish owners. By the 1940s he was collaborating with Hitler.

If you doubt the imperial aspirations of the Islamists, I highly recommend reading historian Efraim Karsh’s “Islamic Imperialism: A History” (Yale University Press, 2006). Here is a brief bit from a book review at “Democratiya” (http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=32)

Contrary to most explanations popular in Middle Eastern Studies, then, Karsh does not see Islamism as a response to the domination of European imperialism or to the growing embrace of Western ideals and practices by Muslim societies. Rather, the early Muslim Brotherhood traced the societal breakdown in the Islamic world ‘to the disintegration of the first umma and the creation of the Umayyad and Abbasid empires, where the notion of Allah’s universal sovereignty succumbed to the reality of human kingship and hereditary rule in the most decadent and un-Islamic forms’ (p.110). Thus, just as the first umma included an enormously diverse number of peoples, the Islamists’ ‘vision of peace and harmony under the banner of Islam was a worldwide, transnational order’ (p.212). As the first umma was produced by Muhammad’s military triumphs, so this new transnational Islamic order would be ushered in by politically motivated violence.”