Lesson From Across the Pond:

Clarity has a name: Melanie Phillips (even if she is British).

Her writings can be found here: http://www.melaniephillips.com/. And though she has an outsider's perspective, she makes points that are relevant to our experience here in the New World. Judge for yourself:

September 11, 2006
Five years on
So where are we now, five years on?

I am reading the response by the Guardian's Readers' Representative, Ian Mayes to the comprehensive analysis on Zombietime which has cast the most serious possible doubt on the claim by the Lebanese Red Cross that Israel intentionally fired missiles at two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. This claim was repeated by ITV News, Time Magazine, the Guardian, Boston Globe, The Age, NBC News, the New York Times and thousands of outlets around the world. Zombietime argues convincingly that this scenario is exceedingly unlikely, particularly since a direct hit by an Israeli missile would hardly have left the ambulance intact, as was shown in the photographs, with merely a hole in the roof. Mayes' response to this welter of circumstantial evidence?

The Zombietime version invites the conclusion that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired in an elaborate anti-Israel propaganda plot to dupe the world's media. I do not think that is proven at all.

Zombietime's claims are 'not proven' — so end of story. The Lebanese Red Cross claims were not only 'not proven' but, for anyone using eyes and a brain, were inherently implausible — and yet the Guardian (and many other media outlets) reported them as fact.
I am reading the remarks made by Muhammad Abdul Bari , the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, a few days ago.

'There are a few bad apples in the Muslim community who are doing terrible acts and we want to root them out,' Mr Bari told The Sunday Telegraph. 'But some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they're all terrorists - and that encourages other people to do the same. If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists - 700,000 of them in London,' he said. 'If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive.'

What was this 'demonisation'of Muslims? Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist branch, said 'thousands' of British Muslims were being watched by police and MI5 over suspected terrorist links. Was Mr Abdul Bari's reaction to this dismaying news one of shock and shame that his community was harbouring such an enormous threat to Britain, and his earnest pledge to root this out wherever he found it? It was not. It was to threaten Britain that its entire Muslim community of two million would turn into terrorists and attack the country of which they are citizens. Mr Abdul Bari is the head of Britain's largest Muslim representative institution. What was the response of the British media or politicians to this abuse of his position by threatening violence by an entire minority community against the British state? Silence. If anyone is demonising Britain's Muslims, is it not Mr Abdul Bari?

I am reading that the US Senate Intelligence Committee has now stated conclusively that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda. Leave aside for the moment the fact that the case for war against Saddam was not that he had links with al Qaeda but that he had not complied with the UN resolutions to prove he had abandoned his WMD programme. The Committee's reported conclusions are used exultingly by the anti-war crowd to crow that Bush's rationale for war against Saddam has now been well and truly thrashed.

Uh huh. Is that so.

The Weekly Standard reports:

One of Saddam's senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi's ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s. Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that 'this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact.' This is not true. Hijazi's best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, 'The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them.'

Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just 'boogie to Baghdad.' Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.

There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden–yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee's report. The Weekly Standard asked the staffers 'Why not?' They replied that there was no evidence of the meeting in the intelligence or documents they reviewed. That's hard to believe. Newspapers such as Milan's Corriere Della Sera and London's Guardian, and the New York Post reported on it. Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, approvingly cited several of these accounts (before his own flip-flop on the issue) in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes. Scheuer wrote that Saddam made Hijazi responsible for 'nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors,' including al Qaeda. All of this obviously contradicts Hijazi's debriefing; none of it is cited in the committee's report.

We know from various previous US and UK official reports, and from the work done by Stephen Hayes (see previous posts), that there were indeed frequent contacts between Saddam's senior people and al Qaeda, although there is no evidence of any 'operational' relationship. It is clear from this and from the way much other circumstantial evidence about these links has been glossed over or totally ignored that this report was pursuing a quite different agenda. As the WS observes:

This report was never really about investigating the relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. It was about giving certain senators more ammunition against the President.

I am reading that Joseph Wilson has been totally discredited. Wilson was a former US diplomat who provoked a firestorm when, following his claim that the Bush Administration had exaggerated the Iraqi threat to justify war, a claim made after he had been sent to find out whether Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in the late 1990s, it was further said that the Bush White House had breached national security by disclosing the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame – a former CIA agent — to reporters in an attempt to smear him.

Now it has been revealed in a new book that the source of the leak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state and a sceptic about, if not an opponent of, military action in Iraq. Yet for more than two years, the US Justice Department had investigated White House aides, and even indicted one, for providing false testimony in the Wilson affair in an apparent attempt to discover the source of the leak — even though it knew all the time that Armitage was the source.

And we also learn that Saddam was indeed trying to buy uranium, as Michael Barone observes:

He reported to the CIA that an Iraqi official had come to Niger on a trade mission in 1999 — evidence that tended to confirm rather than refute the British intelligence claim that Iraq was uranium-shopping in Africa — a claim that Britain's Lord Butler judged 'well founded.'

What do I conclude from such reports and from a welter of other similar statements and developments? That we are caught up in a religious war, both military and cultural, that has been declared upon our civilisation but which we cannot even bring ourselves to name, let alone fight properly; and that we are in acute danger of losing this fight because of the myopia, denial, craven cowardice and rank treachery by our own side.

We are told that we are creating more terror through the war in Iraq. In the desperate fight against jihadi fascism being waged against us, we are being blamed for our own potential destruction. The same people, of course, said exactly the same thing even before the Twin Towers disintegrated into ash on 9/11. Every single event that has happened on the international stage since then, every single act of self-defence on behalf of western civilisation, has been viewed through this same distorting prism. It Was All Our Fault.

But of course the war against the west did not start with Iraq. It did not start with Afghanistan. It did not start with 9/11. You could say that it actually started in the seventh century when Islam decided to conquer and rule the world, and was interrupted for a while after Islamic imperialism was repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1683. You could certainly say that it started with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s, which revived the call for holy war against the non-Islamic world and whose principal thinkers, Syed Kutb and Hassan al Banna, were the ideologues behind the current war. But let us be a little more modest in our perspective, in which case we might say this particular phase of this war of religion started in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran and reignited the Muslim world to the ancient cause of jihad by two things: the simple fact of the re-emergence in the 20th century of a theocratic Islamic state governed according to the principles of the seventh century; and the explicit programme of the Islamic Republic of Iran to wage war against the west on religious grounds. Nothing to do with the many Muslim grievances around the world. The aim was to impose the rule of Islam by force on those countries which were infidel.

That is what we are up against — not just from the Iranian Shia but from their Sunni rivals al Qaeda, whose fatwas call the world to Islam, and a myriad other groups pursuing the same global jihadi objective. That is why American interests were bombed and attacked throughout the 1990s. That is why countries with no connection with Iraq or Afghanistan or Israel have been attacked all over the world. This is a war of religious conquest.

Yes of course Iraq is a recruiting sergeant, as was also Afghanistan — although we hear much less of that, because of course those shrieking about Iraq supported Afghanistan — and as is the very existence of Israel. The fact is that every single act of self-defence by the free world against Islamic conquest acts as a recruiting sergeant for more would-be Islamic conquerors. It is self-evident that if those who are attacked don't fight, the jihadis attacking them won't continue their war. That's because they won't need to because their victims will have surrendered. The defeatist whinge that Iraq has merely made us even more unsafe is a bit like if people had moaned during World War Two that the Blitz wouldn't have happened if Britain hadn't declared war upon Hitler. And those willing on the extermination of Israel, on the grounds that its very existence is the cause of Islamic rage, are in danger also of repeating the world's connivance at that other, previous Jewish extermination.

The real problem is that we are in a world war but few will acknowledge that fact. In the Times at the weekend, David Selbourne laid out the gross delusions currently undermining the defence of the west. An enormous fifth column of appeasers, quislings and defeatist whingers across the political spectrum has been willing the west to defeat ever since 9/11. And even the most apparently bullish in the US and UK adminstrations are still failing to follow the logic of their own rhetoric. If this really is a war, as President Bush has constantly told us, then why isn't it being fought like one? How could the mayhem in Iraq ever have been prevented or controlled on the cheap with so few troops? How on earth can the conflagration in Afghanistan be contained with so few troops and equipment? How can order be brought to Iraq when no action is being taken against the principal causes of the disorder, Iran and Syria?

How can we act against the continuum of Islamic extremism which is providing the sea in which the jihad swims, when we are not even prepared to acknowledge that such a continuum exists, and demonise those who try to warn against it? How can we defend the free world when we are doing our damnedest to sacrifice Israel, the front-line nation in that defence, as a scapegoat instead of coming to its own defence? How can a war to defend a civilisation be fought apologetically, with two hands tied behind our backs and with the hostile camera lenses of CNN and the BBC trained against our own troops and primed to inflate every casualty into an atrocity, against an enemy that by contrast is prepared both to slaughter and to die in vast and bloody numbers for its beliefs? How can we defend our own beliefs if we can no longer even agree what they are?

Five years on, we are only now beginning to learn what it is that we are refusing to learn. But history will not wait for us to work out what the outcome of such denial might be.