Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Euros would rather see the terrorist win

Thomas Friedman:

There's only one thing you can say about the elections in Iraq: They are either going to be the end of the beginning there or the beginning of the end.

Either Iraqis turn out in large numbers to take control of their own future and write their own constitution - and I think they will - or the fascist insurgents there prevent them from doing so, in which case the Bush team will have to move to Plan B. What's sad is that right when we have reached crunch time in Iraq, the West is totally divided. All that the Europeans care about is being able to say to George Bush, "We told you so." What happens the morning after "We told you so" ? Well, the Europeans don't have a Plan B either.

Ever since 9/11, I've argued the war on terrorism is really a war of ideas within the Muslim world - a war between those who want to wall Islam off from modernity, and defend it with a suicide cult, and those who want to bring Islam into the 21st century and preserve it as a compassionate faith. This war of ideas is not one that the West can fight, only promote. Muslims have to fight it from within. That is what is at stake in the Iraqi elections. This is the first great battle in the post-9/11 war of ideas.

...

"The most important threat [to the West] is Islamic terrorism," said Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, and one of the few French intellectuals to support the ouster of Saddam. This is not a war with the Muslim religion, he stressed, but with a violent "fascist" Muslim minority. "We [in the West] have always been allied against fascism since the Second World War," he said. "We have to be together, America and Europe, because our enemies are the same, Muslim extremism and fascism," but right now, unlike in Bosnia, "we are apart."

Mr. Kouchner blames Paris for having been too quick to threaten a U.N. veto and blames even more the Bush team for having been too quick to go to war without a real U.N. alliance, and for mismanaging postwar Iraq. At least he cares. Most of his countrymen, I sense, are hoping Mr. Bush will fail in Iraq so that the ends will never justify his unilateral means. It's quite amazing, when you consider that Europe, with its large Muslim minorities, needs the moderates to win the war of ideas within Islam so much more than America.

I do not accept the premise that the US "mismanaged" post war Iraq. That premise fails to account for the dynamic nature of warfare where each side is attemoting to bend the other to its will and both react in different ways to different events. The fact that there is an insurgency of sorts does not mena that it was a mistake toliberate Iraq. It does not mean that it was a mistake to disband Saddam's army. After Lee's surrender at Appomatix the Confederate Army was disbanded and the Klu Klux Klan began terrorizing people. Does that mean that the Union should not have been preserved? The al Qaeda and Baathist insurgents are the Islamic equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan. They both refuse to accept their defeat and seek to terrorize the innocent. The Europeans who are rooting against the US are reacting emotionally and irrationally to the rejection of their arguments on how to handle Saddam.

Friedman's comments on the "war of ideas" are a little more rational than most discussions of that phrase. Like many others he is using ancedotal evidence to suggest a trend that is not reflected on teh ground in Iraq. Of around two billion Muslims only a few thousand have been persuaded to join the war against the liberation of Iraq. It is a small fraction of less than one percent of the Muslim population. That is hardly winning the war of ideas. What exactly is so persuasive about the idea of joining a death cult. There is a fairly small group willing to drink that Kool-Aid.