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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
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Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
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Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
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Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
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Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
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Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review June 29, 2005 / 22 Sivan, 5765

Dems' irrational fear doesn't allow them to see clearly

By Jack Kelly

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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The civil war in Iraq that journalists long have been anticipating appears finally to have broken out, reported Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times June 21st:

"Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west."

She quoted a UN official who is in contact with "militant" groups:

"There is a rift," said the official... "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalists want to make a deal with the Americans, while al Qaeda wants to fight on, the UN official told Tavernise.

When the bad guys are shooting each other, it's hard to say the insurgency is worsening, but Democrats are escalating their rhetoric:

Iraq is "a seemingly intractable quagmire," said Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) at a contentious hearing Thursday.

Disaster in Iraq "is a real possibility," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del) after announcing his intention to run for president.

"There is rising concern that everything seems to be going the wrong way," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-Cal).

People who've actually been to Iraq recently see things differently:

"To represent the situation in Iraq as a quagmire is a misrepresentation of the facts," the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told Kennedy.

"Iraq is producing new police and military forces that are gradually winning the confidence of the people they serve — so much so that the public is providing more and more valuable information on insurgent activity," wrote A. Heather Coyne in the Christian Science Monitor June 7th.

A former Army officer, she heads the Iraq office of the U.S. Institute for Peace.

Austin Bay was in Iraq last year as an Army colonel. He came back in June as a journalist:

"Last year, Haifa Street (in Baghdad) was a combat zone where U.S. and Iraqi security forces showed up in Robo-Cop garb," Bay said. "(Brigadier Gen. Karl) Horst (of the Third Infantry Division) told me that he and his Iraqi counterpart now have tea in a sidewalk cafe along this once notorious boulevard."

Suicide bombings continue, as the news media make sure you know. But they haven't slowed recruitment for the Iraqi army or police, and have turned even most Sunni Muslims against the "insurgents." The blowback is so fierce that al Jazeera has stopped referring to the terrorists as "the resistance," and is now calling them "gunmen" or "suicide bombers."

"The fact that Iraqi civilians are the main victims of attacks is increasingly being stressed," reported the BBC in an analysis of broadcasts by al Jazeera and another Arab network, al Arabiya.

Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute was embedded with U.S. troops in April and May. He'd been in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. He said neighborhoods in Baghdad which were war zones a year ago are safe to walk in now.

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"With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over," Zinsmeister said. "Egregious acts of terror will continue...But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war."

Zinsmeister's declaration of victory is premature. But I suspect the increasingly over the top rhetoric by Democrats is motivated by fear there are only a few months more in which a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq could lead to a Vietnam-like defeat.

Six months from now, after an Iraqi constitution has been adopted and a permanent government elected under it, and after more Iraqi army and police units have been fielded, it may be too late to prevent an American/Iraqi victory. A year from now, it almost certainly will be.

It is hard to say which is sadder, that Democrats are lost in a Vietnam time warp, or that they regard our abandonment of an ally in 1975 as a precedent to be emulated

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. Comment by clicking here.

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