MiniSky: Thoughts About Everything

A bokay of opinion from Townhall.com:

• Dinesh D’Souza writes about Jimmy Carter in “Giving radical Islam its start” in response to a recent appearance by the former president:
  

  Recently Jimmy Carter was on television, denouncing President Bush’s policies in Iraq. I find this highly ironic, because Jimmy Carter and his liberal advisers helped the Ayatollah Khomeini to come to power in Iran a quarter of a century ago. Thus they gave radical Islam control of its first major state. How this happened is worth recalling, because from Carter’s failure there’s a valuable lesson to be learned in Iraq.

  I think this is mildly misleading. Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini is the first Shi’ite Islamist state. The first major state to fall under the sway of radical Sunni Islamists is Saudi Arabia. Mr. D’Souza’s analysis is hampered by not keeping the two threads of Islam distinct.

• Paul Greenberg looks at changing strategy (and generals) in Iraq through the prism of the Army’s newly published counter-insurgency manual. General Petraeus, now heading the military effort in Iraq, was a major force behind its publication. Mr. Greenberg notes that the manual emphasizes the importance of domestic support:

  Militarily, the new strategy may work, but only if given time, patience and support. But what about politically? None of the lessons from this new manual will avail if the war isn’t won on the decisive front in any such conflict: the home front. That is where another war was lost, the one in Vietnam.

  In the long shadow of that defeat, it became easy to forget that the now defunct Republic of Vietnam was holding its own, thanks to American air and logistical support, until Congress pulled the props out from under the Vietnamese. The same impulse can be seen in today’s demands that American troops be withdrawn from Iraq, or at least not reinforced.

  To quote General Petraeus’ manual again, our enemy will “try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining and outlasting public support.”

  Quite right. The assorted weaselly resolutions in the Senate should be blocked using every available means.

• Michael Barone, always worth listening to, views the Senate resolutions with disapproval as well:
  

  So the upshot of the resolution is that we should keep doing for some undetermined period of time pretty much what we have been doing, though it hasn’t been working, and we should not do the different things that Petraeus thinks have a chance — he’s not guaranteeing success — of working.

  What the resolution tells us is that most members of Congress, echoing what they think is the view of most voters, yearn to return to the holiday from history that we thought we were enjoying between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Sept. 11, 2001. And that they have no idea at all of how to get there.

  The trick is to yell loud enough to be heard through the din of the Beltway Echo Chamber.

And this from Patrick Ruffini on YouTube: George Will on Rudy Giuliani. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit.)

Now back to work…