We have to fight them, because their radical imams, mosques, and schools threaten us; they constitute an assembly line for the next generation of home-grown American jihadi killers. But we can’t ask the courts to silence them, because we want to maintain our 1st Amendment rights.

How, then, do we fight? There are three basic lines of attack. The first is to openly contest their odious doctrines and practices.

Second, we should prevent such people from entering America. Third, there is the “Al Capone strategy.”

By now, most people know that the Iranian regime treats its dissidents with unrestrained barbarity.  Even the leading dead tree media have reported anecdotally on the torture of prisoners and the bashing, beating, axing and stabbing of protestors in the streets of the major cities.  The rape of prisoners, for example, is a longstanding practice in the Islamic Republic, of women, men, and boys. The rape of virgin women is justified by a deranged appeal to sharia law, according to which virgins will go to heaven.  Ergo, according to the warped logic of the torturers, it is necessary to ensure that women guilty of capital offenses not be virgins, so that they will go elsewhere in the afterlife. The Western world, in the face of these outrages, maintains near-total silence.  Well, except when they choose to pretend that things are not what they clearly are.  Such as our Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton.

There's always a certain fascination watching tyrannies coming unstuck, and the convulsions of the Iranian regime are more colorful than most., You'd expect this from such a rich and ancient culture, and from such clever and imaginative people who specialize in illusion.  Last week (7/24) all these qualities were on display in Tehran, at a central mosque where Hashemi Rafsanjani was preaching to the faithful.  There were masses of people in and around the mosque, and at a certain point in a scene that would have delighted Fellini, the two sides faced off in a chanting contest.  The pro-regime crowd shouted "Death to America!"  The much larger pro-democracy crowd responded, "Death to Russia!"  Then came from the pro-regimers: "Death to Britain, Death to Israel!"  And the reply:  "Death to China!" Which pretty much sums up the contemporary strategic landscape, enacted in a Persian morality play in front of a mosque in Tehran.  Plus this: The stench of panic is now widespread in Iran. 

Seven days to go to the Iranian "elections" on June 12.  Of course Iran doesn't have elections, as we understand the term.  It has circuses.  Most people don't bother to vote, since they think - with good reason - that the outcome simply reflects the wishes of the only voter whose opinion matters:  Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  But even so, the "campaign" is quite lively, and some very unusual things are happening.  Can we read the entrails of the latest dead chicken?  Let's give it a try.

In American custody in Iraq are two Iranian terrorists, Ali Musa Daqduq and Qayis Khazali. Both were captured in Iraq in the spring of 2007, following the bloody attack in Karbala in which five American soldiers were murdered.  U.S. military forces in Iraq discovered that both of them were working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force.  The British want them released.  They want them exchanged for Brits being held hostage in Iran.  Those hostages are used to blackmail their country into doing things it might not otherwise do.  Knowing all this about the Brits, one has to wonder to what extent we, too, are being blackmailed by the mullahs.  There are now four Americans held hostage now in Iran, the most well-known being Roxana Saberi, and two in North Korea.

Laurent Murawiec's The Mind of Jihad is, at last, a book on radical Islam that does it all. Unlike many engaged in the heated debate over the nature of our enemies, Murawiec does not believe that ancient texts tell us all we need to know. He insists that all ideas change over time, even those believed to have been dictated by God's angel. He has therefore immersed himself not only in the sacred texts of Islam but also in the richly variegated speeches, writings, and actions of its most extremist practitioners: the jihadis waging war against us. He candidly admits that it was not easy, that many of his initial ideas turned out to be wrong, and that his current understanding of "the mind of jihad" surprises him. This understanding holds that the current doctrine is far more than the resuscitation of medieval commandments, and in fact has a lot to do with modern European and Soviet totalitarianism.

For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it's not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon. Sarah Palin is a frontierswoman. Her state capital, Juneau, cannot be reached on the highways of Alaska. If you want to get there, you must either fly or sail. And for much of the year, sailing isn't smart. No subways in Juneau, but lots of bars. The main bookstore caters mostly to the tourist trade, with a small selection of used paperbacks and a few recent best sellers. It's not so much authenticity as independence and self-reliance, which have always been the basic characteristics of frontier people. They think for themselves. They have to think outside the box, because there's no available box for them to think in. If they accepted the conventional wisdom they wouldn't be on the frontier, they'd be in some city and they'd brag about their degrees from the failed institutions of higher education. They're not big on "conflict resolution," they prefer zero-sum games. If you go up against a grizzly, you're poorly advised to look for a win-win solution.

We've got war already, and it was a big war, long before the invasion of Georgia. The battlefield runs from Afghanistan into Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel, across northern Africa, and deep into Europe. The latest Russian gambit is part of that big war, as any of our friends and allies in the war zone will tell you. Insofar as America is seen as weak, our enemies will redouble their actions and our friends will hold back, fearing that association with us will not protect them, and single them out for attack. Those consequences are immediate, traveling across the airwaves of the BBC and al Jazeera and the other propaganda outlets favored by our enemies. Once you grasp the full dimensions of the war, it becomes easier to conceive useful options, military and other. We are well placed to demonstrate that this is not a one-way street. The Russians think they have shown that it's costly to be a friend of the United States. We need to show that there can be a high price for friendship with Russia.

The mullahs in Tehran love hoaxes.  The most hilarious was the recent photo of a "new warplane," which on examination was a plastic toy model. This was of a piece with the Photoshopped "evidence" of "new Iranian missiles," which was doubly deceptive: it was an old missile, not (as claimed) a new one, and there was only one of "them," not (as claimed) four launched simultaneously. Alongside these hoaxes, designed to convince their people and the West that Iran is a mighty military power, Iranian leaders brag about their economic power as well. It's another hoax; every Iranian knows that the country is a basket case. Yet our government plays right along.  We act in such a feckless way as to permit the mullahs to say to their people, "You see, the Americans are afraid of us. They will do nothing. You have no hope." And the hell of it is that the Islamic Republic is hollow, as its own behavior and its own results on the battlefield prove abundantly.

Even though they still call themselves communists, and the Communist Party rules the country, classical fascism should be the starting point for our efforts to understand the People's Republic. We are certainly not dealing with a Communist regime, either politically or economically.  Chinese leaders are keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise. Their political methods are quite like those used by the European fascists 80 years ago. The short history of classical fascism suggests that it is only a matter of time before China will pursue confrontation with the West. That is built into the DNA of all such regimes. Sooner or later, Chinese leaders will feel compelled to demonstrate the superiority of their system, and even the most impressive per capita GDP will not do. It follows that the West must prepare for war with China, hoping thereby to deter it. A great Roman once said that if you want peace, prepare for war:  Si vis pacem, para bellum. This is sound advice with regard to a fascist Chinese state that wants to play a global role.

Senator Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. wants to talk to our Middle Eastern enemies, notably Iran. He can't imagine a happy resolution of the war without such talks. And he seems to think this desire is something new, maybe even revolutionary. He apparently does not know that it is not at all new, and certainly not revolutionary. It is instead the fully tested "policy" of the United States for the past thirty years, ever since the seizure of power by the mullahs in 1979. We have had high-level and low-level talks, public and private talks, talks conducted by diplomats, by spooks, and by a colorful array of intermediaries. All failed.  We tried everything. The Iranians were not interested. It reminds me of that great scene from Goldfinger, with Sean Connery as James Bond spread-eagled on a sheet of gold, and a laser beam slicing through it, headed for his private parts.   "Do you expect me talk, Goldfinger?" he asks. "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die." That's Iran. The mullahs want us to die.  Mr. Obama won't allow himself to understand this.  Perhaps his book should have been entitled The Audacity of Naïveté.

There were no elections in Iran last Friday (3/14), whatever you may have heard. The "turnout" was shockingly low, even by past standards, as is demonstrated by the obvious panic in Tehran, where the mullahs kept the polls open an extra five hours. This was not, as they said, to make sure the patriotic citizens of the capital could drop their ballots in the box, but because they had to bus the reluctant faithful and the subservient government employees to the election offices, so as to be able to claim a large, voluntary participation. Even so, the official figure of 60 percent has no relationship to the actual event, in which perhaps 10 or 15 percent actually "voted." The fraud was so obvious that even the European Union denounced the "elections" as neither free nor fair, despite their wish to pass off the Islamic Republic (as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and current McCain-campaign advisor once famously put it) as "a democracy."

I'm in Denmark this week as an observer at an Iraqi "reconciliation conference" that has brought nearly two dozen political and religious leaders to Copenhagen. It's a fascinating group. The clerics range from Sunnis and Shiites to members of little-known pre-Islamic sects like the Yezidis (who seem to be historically linked to the Zoroastrians) and the Mandaeans (the central figure of whose faith is John the Baptist), all of whom have suffered ghastly depredations in the terror war following the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Political figures include National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubayie, who spent a long and intense day here on Tuesday (2/19), and remains in close contact as the participants try to hammer out a collective document. It's probably sheer coincidence that this conference takes place at the moment General Petraeus is expressing considerable hope for reconciliation, and his statement that Iraqis need to shout instead of shoot is very much in the forefront of the discussions here.

Lately, we've been doing much better at catching the Iranians, often in tandem with the Syrians, who are giving a lot of support to terrorists in Iraq. Better yet, we are slapping penalties on them, most recently on three terrorist supporters and leaders in Iran and one in Syria, where he runs the al-Zawra television station. Americans are henceforth forbidden to do business with these rogues, and if the USG - Iraq Reconstruction Task Force can get at any of their assets, we'll grab them. That's excellent news, and the announcement is helpfully accompanied by considerable documentation of the terrorists and their supporters singled out by our Treasury Department. Undersecretary Stuart Levey, who has been one of the driving forces behind this program, puts it in a broad context: Iran and Syria are fueling violence and destruction in Iraq. Iran trains, funds, and provides weapons to violent Shia extremist groups, while Syria provides safe haven to Sunni insurgents and financiers. All of which and more clearly shows what I and others have been arguing for a long time:  Iran supports al-Qaeda.

If you were Vladimir Putin, what would you think of Iran? You'd worry a lot about it, that's what. Your own Russia is losing Russians, due to the usual grim demography that characterizes most of Europe. And, like the others, you've got a Moslem problem, with surging birthrates both within Russia and all along its borders, from Chechnya to the ‘Stans. Lots of those Moslems are under Iranian sway. The Iranians want to build on that foundation to extend their power deeper into your domain. You therefore want to see this regime destroyed. The last thing in the world that you want is a gigantic Chechnya, armed with nuclear weapons, launching waves of fanatical terrorists against infidels like you. But you don't have much of an army any more, and anyway you don't want a war with the mullahs. Direct attack is not your way; you prefer cunning. You'd rather have someone else do your dirty work for you. Someone like Israel, or better yet, the United States. And best of all would be to get the Americans to do it in such a way that the whole world condemns them for it. So what you'd do is...

In reality - for what little it matters nowadays, either here or in the Middle East - we are winning the battle of Iraq. The percentage increase in Iranian activity, combined with a drop in the number of attacks, is another way of saying that al Qaeda is being destroyed for a second time, and the Iranians are scrambling to fill the void. But they are on the run, just as is al Qaeda, as you can tell by the back-and-forth shuttling of their factotum Moqtadah al Sadr, between Iran and Iraq. If their scheme was working in Iraq, he'd sit still. He's scrambling because they're in trouble. They're in trouble at home, too. Indeed, things are so bad that the government itself has open fissures, the latest caused by the resignation of the minister of industry and mines, and by the public testimony of the minister of welfare:

Mansour Osanloo, who heads the Tehran bus workers' union, was thrown into the infamous Evin prison for the third time last month, after a highly successful European trip on which he tried to inform his Western trade-union brothers of the mounting repression against Iranian workers. During his previous incarcerations, Osanloo had been brutally tortured. Films were distributed showing bruises on his body, and his tongue had been slit. One of Osanloo's fellow union organizers, Mahmoud Salehi of the Saqez Bakery Workers' Association, has been jailed in the city of Sanandaj (Kurdistan Province), where he is said to be in serious medical difficulties. The International Trade Union Confederation and the International Transport Workers' Federation have appropriately called for pickets, protests, and letter-writing campaigns demanding the release of these two brave men. So far as I know, no labor union is planning to demonstrate for them in this country, and certainly the American government has not said a word on their behalf.

At his press conference last week, President Bush - echoing the public assessments from his military underlings in Iraq - gave a clear picture of the war. Remarkably, not a single political leader or pundit saw fit to notice the dimensions of the war he described: The fight in Iraq is part of a broader struggle that's unfolding across the region...The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers. The same Hezbollah terrorists who are waging war against the forces of democracy in Lebanon are training extremists to do the same against coalition forces in Iraq. The same Syrian regime that provides support and sanctuary for Islamic jihad and Hamas has refused to close its airport in Damascus to suicide bombers headed to Iraq. ...the war against extremists and radicals is not only evident in Iraq, but it's evident in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Afghanistan.

It's hard to think of a more dreadful action against the Almighty than the orgy around the golden calf, while Moses received the tablets of the Law. No wonder, then, that Moses ordered the Levites to draw their swords and kill all the idolators. Yet, as our rabbi reminded us last Sabbath, many Jewish scholars believe the Israelites en route to the Holy Land performed an even greater sin when they believed ten of their twelve spies who said that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan were too strong, and that any effort to conquer them was doomed to failure. The other two, Joshua and Caleb, said that victory was possible.

Rarely have so many journalists, politicians and commentators so totally missed a headline. There are now five American hostages in Iran. Each case has been largely treated by itself, almost as if it were an oddity, something requiring a special explanation, instead of another piece in a luminously clear pattern whose meaning should be intuitively obvious to us all. Iranian and Iranian-supported terrorists have been trying unsuccessfully to capture armed Americans in Iraq for some time (a hostage-taking operation failed last September, for example), but they found that the Americans fought back. They have now snatched unarmed Americans within Iranian borders.  The five American hostages are:

It had been a while since I'd roused my old friend James Jesus Angleton, the late chief of CIA counterintelligence, and it was clearly time to do that, what with two recent books out about the CIA. The one by George Tenet is all over the media, but the one by Tennent "Pete" Bagley, one of Angleton's colleagues, has been hardly mentioned. Bagley's book, Spy Wars, contains lots of new information - much of it based on conversations with former (?) KGB officers and some stuff from Soviet archives - and a very important reflection on how CIA judgments are reached. Who better to navigate these still-churning waters than JJA himself? So I revved up my old ouija board, and after several failed efforts I got him loud and clear.

In December 2001, I participated in discussions between two Pentagon officials and Iranians who claimed knowledge of Iranian-sponsored efforts to kill Americans in Afghanistan. We met in Rome, Italy over several days. The discussions were approved by Stephen Hadley, the deputy national-security adviser, and the two Defense department officials' travel was approved by their superiors. The American ambassador in Rome was fully informed in advance, and fully briefed afterwards. The conversations produced detailed information about the identities, locations, and plans of Iranian-trained terrorists in Afghanistan. This was passed on to the proper authorities at the DoD, and I was later told by military officers that the information likely saved American lives. Now comes the former DCI (director of central intelligence), George Tenet, with several pages about the meeting in his new book.   His every word, it seems, is meant to justify the chilidish tantrum he had over the meeting.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose tenure at Foggy Bottom began with such energy and fine language about support for freedom in the Middle East, is begging the Iranian foreign minister to come to a "future of Iraq" conference in Egypt next week. She told the Financial Times that it would be a "missed opportunity" if Minister Mottaki didn't show up. In the same interview, she denied ever thinking about regime change in Iran. Our Iran policy, according to the secretary, is to "have a change in regime behavior." Some day she will perhaps explain how any rational person can believe this cast of characters capable of changing behavior that has been constant for 28 years. We are back to the days when Madeleine Albright went to international meetings hoping to get a one-on-one with an Iranian minister so she could apologize for past American sins and get on with the glorious business of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs.

There's an easy answer for the deep thinkers now torturing themselves for an explanation of the Iranian seizure of 15 British hostages:  The mullahs took the hostages because that is what they do. They've been doing it for a long time. Why now? Because now is when they succeeded in doing it; they've been trying all along. The interesting and important question is what we - yes, we - are going to do about it. You can be sure that the "professionals" in Foggy Bottom and Whitehall are giving learned memos to their leaders in which the word "de-escalate" appears with some frequency, along with "diplomatic solution." I doubt many of them will lose much sleep over their own considerable responsibility for the current unpleasantness, but let's write a footnote to their memos that says: The Brits have labored mightily for many years to prevent the United States from pursuing vigorous action against Iran.

A great hoax is being perpetrated on the world, the hoax of negotiations as an untried method to "solve" the "Iranian problem." In fact, we have been negotiating with the mullahs ever since-indeed even before-the 1979 revolution that deposed the Shah and brought to power the Islamic Fascist regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the intervening 28 years, we have participated in countless face-to-face encounters, myriad "demarches" sent through diplomatic channels, and meetings-some on the fringes of international conferences-involving "unofficial" representatives of one government or the other. The lack of any tangible result is obvious, yet the chatterers, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and cheered on by intellectuals, editorialists, and instant experts on Iran, act as if none of this ever happened.

There is so much wonderful nervousness in Tehran right now. Ayatollah Khamenei probably knows he's going to die without any of the great victories he has pursued:  Lebanese democracy has not yielded, there is no Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Israel is still there. Indeed, our recent adjustment to his agents' behavior in Iraq - arrests of Iranians, exposure of their weapons supply - must send chills through his malignant body, since it shatters the great lie in which he and his followers had so passionately believed: that America has no stomach for war, and will break and run when attacked systematically. Other wonderful news is that physical attacks against the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij-the prime instruments of repression-are taking place all over Iran.  See Jack Wheeler's Pelosi's Primrose Path for details. All this adds to the intensity of the War of  Persian Succession, the fierce power struggle within the regime for the succession to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  The political war between the two men who fancy themselves the logical tyrants of the Islamic Republic-Rafsanjani and Ahmadi-Nezhad-is heating up by the hour.

I think that, for the most part, Americans' knowledge of history comes from movies and television. It's hard to deal fully with real history in either medium. Hardly anyone knows, therefore, that after the death of Hitler in the bunker and the surrender of Germany in World War II, there was a vicious Nazi terrorist resistance to the occupiers of the Reich. Formed by remnants of the SS who called themselves the "Werewolves," they are described by Canadian historian Perry Biddiscombe in his book, The Last Nazis: "The Werewolves did considerable damage. Their...guerrilla warfare and vigilantism caused the death of several thousand people, either directly or through the...reprisals that they provoked. The property damage...equaled tens of millions of dollars." Big numbers in that long-ago world, big enough to constitute an "insurgency" every bit as worrisome as the Iraqi version, at least early on. And it provoked a brutal repression on our part.

The Supreme Leader of Iran - the man who really runs the place, not the Persian Midget Ahmadinejad - is the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.  Some people confuse him with his mentor and founder of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as the spellings are confusingly similar. But Khomeini died in 1989, and Khamenei assumed power after that.  Ever since, he has been the Terror Master in Chief, the principal sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, especially against Israel and America in Iraq.  Now, at age 66, he is dying. Thus the mullahs are now engaged in a succession struggle, and they are worried that the Iranian people might seize the moment to act against the regime.  Most worried of all is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as there is an effort being made in the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, to impeach him.

You may have missed it in all the holiday excitement, but on December 30th the main Madrid airport (Barajas) was hit by a car bomb. It's a real blow to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero, whose nickname, believe it or not, is Bambi. The appropriately nicknamed coward was elected on the backlash of the 3/11 (2004) Madrid train bombings by cowardly Spaniards rejecting the courageous Jose Aznar. Bambi immediately withdrew Spanish forces from Iraq (where they had performed extremely well, by the way), proclaimed al Qaeda guilty of the train attacks (after Aznar had fingered the Basques), and then immediately started a Peace Process with ETA. Bambi Zapatero is one of those appeasement enthusiasts who yearns for defeat and humiliation at all costs, and just the day before the airport car bomb he had triumphantly hailed the great success of his pre-emptive surrender.

Con Coughlin is one of the best British journalists on the military/intelligence/national security beat, and he is privy to the thinking of top policy people and field commanders. In the London Telegraph (12/22), he reveals that both Washington and London are grudgingly coming to accept the fact that Iran is waging war against us in Afghanistan and Iraq. This reluctance was obviously peculiar to anyone who knew anything about Iran's real activities in the region. Commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan always knew that the Iranians had helped "orchestrate the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many soldiers," and are "actively supporting and providing equipment to Taliban-related groups" in Afghanistan. It's quite a change, and a welcome one, although there was never any excuse for the willful and deliberate refusal to see what Iran has been up to since 2001.

The first step toward understanding the Iranian "elections" last Monday (12/18) is that they weren't. Elections, that is, at least in our common understanding of the term, namely the people vote and the counters count those votes and so we find out what the people want.   That's not what happens in Iran, where both the candidates and the results are determined well in advance of the casting of ballots. Yes, people get mobilized and go to the polls and mark their ballots and put them in the ballot box. But then Groucho Marx comes into play: "I've got ballots. And if you don't like them, I've got other ballots."   So, as usual, candidates (featuring, as usual, the unfortunate Mehdi Karubi, the eternal loser who nonetheless remains at the top of the mullah's power mountain) complain that ballot boxes disappeared, and new ones magically appeared, and numbers change, and counters are replaced. It's all part of the ritual. Which is not to say they weren't significant. They certainly were.  They mean that Mr. Ahmadinejad usefulness to Iran's real rulers may have run its course.

At first I, too, thought the Iraq Surrender Commission Report was a total downer. But I'm more and more convinced that it was a great blessing. Not that they intended it to work out this way, but the Wise Men (and the token Lady) have elevated Iran to its rightful place in our national squabble over The War:  dead center. The Surrender Commission Report underlines the basic truth about The War, which is that we cannot possibly win it by fighting defensively in Iraq alone. So long as Iran and Syria have a free shot at us and our Iraqi allies, they can trump most any military tactics we adopt, at most any imaginable level of troops. Until the publication of the report, this was the dirty secret buried under years of misleading rhetoric from our leaders; now it is front and center.

The liberal media got itself in such a tizzy this week over the "leaked" memo of National Security Advisor Steve Hadley to President Bush that disparaged Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. It hasn't dawned on our genius reporters that the memo was written to be leaked. I can't believe that the president's national-security adviser would write something so long, so rambling, and so mediocre to George W. Bush. I mean, I'd die of embarrassment before I let any such thing go into the Oval Office with my name on it. You can see it's a group effort, because with one exception - the sensible suggestion that, at long last, we expand the program that embeds U.S. military personnel in Iraqi military and police units - there's hardly a serious thought in the whole document.

She's a Renaissance woman, whose talents run from scholarship to music and sport. But in this interview with Bret Stephens of the Wall St. Journal, Condoleezza Rice often seems oddly detached from the life-and-death quality of the war against the terror masters. Indeed, she doesn't even call it a war, and the things she says about it are sometimes striking - headline quality remarks - but more often very peculiar. To begin with, she doesn't expect us to win this "battle, if you will, or a struggle," during the Bush presidency. Her mission for the next two years is not victory, but to put "some fundamentals in place." I wish the interviewer had asked her to define these "fundamentals," so that we could better judge whether or not they are worth the lives and limbs of our children.

Watching the war in Lebanon and listening to the debate about it is just like watching the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and its attendant debate. Israelis are demanding the resignation of Olmert, just as Americans are demanding the head of Bush. Israeli military experts, real and self-proclaimed, are explaining how the Lebanon war could have been won if only the ground campaign had started earlier, or had been more ambitious. American strategists of varying competence are explaining how the Iraq war could have been won, if only there were more boots on the ground, or if only a different strategy had been employed, or if only the Baathist army had been kept intact. I think it's nonsense. Both campaigns and both debates suffer from the same narrow focus, the same failure of strategic vision, when the war itself - the real war - is far wider.

Certainly there is lots of bad news, most of which confirms what we already knew: The Western world hates Israel; the taboo on anti-Semitism is off; the Western world has been P.C.'ed to the edge of death; there is no stomach for fighting the war against Islamic fascism. Sounds like the thirties to me. The history of 20th-century America is largely about a country that never prepared for war, and was always compelled - by our enemies - to conduct enormous crusades. The history of America in war, like that of most others, is largely about making enormous blunders at the beginning, and then sorting it out. Our great strength is not so much avoiding error, but the ability to recover quickly, change tactics and even strategy, and get it done. The scary thing about our current jam is that 9/11 was supposed to have been the wakeup call, but we are again asleep. For this I blame our leaders - both the administration and the Dems. Their greatest failure is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria.

I suppose if you live long enough you get to see everything at least twice, and in recent days I've seen replays of two old blunders that I'd hoped I wouldn't have to endure again. The first is the Friend Who Has Gone Too Far, and the second is the Enemy Who Is Really Our Friend. The first time I saw the Friend Who Has Gone Too Far was in December 1981, a very long quarter-century ago. Reagan was finishing his first year in office, and the first signs of the fall of the Soviet Empire were bubbling to the surface in Poland, where the Solidarity trade union was challenging the Polish Communist regime. Pope John Paul II was using the word "solidarity" in some very provocative ways, and you could feel the earth shifting beneath the feet of the Soviets. It was pretty clear, even then, that if the Kremlin did not find an effective way of breaking Solidarity, the entire structure of the Soviet empire might well crack wide open. And so, late in December, as I recall, military rule was declared in Poland, Soviet military forces were moved to the borders, and Solidarity leaders were rounded up and arrested. And a liberal Republican Senator got on national television to excuse the Soviets.

9/11 happened when Osama bin Laden looked at us, and thought we were ready to be had. We were politically divided, and squabbling over everything. We clearly were not prepared to take casualties in direct combat. The newly elected president seemed unable to make a tough decision. And so Osama attacked, expecting to deliver a decisive blow to our national will, expecting we would turn tail and run, as we had in Somalia, and expecting he would then be free to concentrate his energies on the defeat of local apostates, the creation of his caliphate, and the organization of Muslim revenge for the catastrophes of past centuries.

No one should have any lingering doubts about what's going on in the Middle East. It's war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted "insurgency" in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable. It is very good news that the White House immediately...