From great new blog BronxComix:

From NoMaas.org:

02.19.2007 Get in my belly

This guy wants an extension?!?!

02.20.2007 Lay off me, I'm starving

Berger Case Still Roils Archives, Justice Dept.

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 21, 2007; A13

In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.

While waving his own leg in the air in illustration, Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration, asked the group rhetorically if "something white" could be easily mistaken if it was wrapped around their legs, beneath their pant legs.

Under debate during the Nov. 23, 2004, meeting was Brachfeld's contention that President Clinton's former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger could have stolen original, uncatalogued, highly classified terrorism documents 14 months earlier by wrapping them around his socks and beneath his pants, as National Archives staff member John Laster reported witnessing.

Brachfeld said he was worried that during four visits in 2002 and 2003, Berger had the opportunity to remove more than the five documents he admitted taking. Brachfeld wanted the Justice Department to notify officials of the 9/11 Commission that Berger's actions -- in combination with a bungled Archives response -- might have obstructed the commission's review of Clinton's terrorism policies.

The Justice Department spurned the advice, and some of Brachfeld's colleagues at the Archives greeted his warnings with accusations of disloyalty. But more than three years later, as Brachfeld and House lawmakers have pushed new details about Berger's actions onto the public record -- such as Berger's use of a construction site near the Archives to temporarily hide some of the classified documents -- Brachfeld's contentions have attracted fresh support.

A report last month by the Republican staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said for the first time that Berger's visits were so badly mishandled that Archives officials had acknowledged not knowing if he removed anything else and destroyed it. The committee further argued that the 9/11 Commission should have been told more about Berger and about Brachfeld's concerns, a suggestion that resonated with Philip Zelikow, the commission's former executive director.

Zelikow said in an interview last week that "I think all of my colleagues would have wanted to have all the information at the time that we learned from the congressional report, because that would have triggered some additional questions, including questions we could have posed to Berger under oath."

The commission's former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was "a little unnerving" to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI -- including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

"If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?" Brachfeld said in an interview. "I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time -- in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records."

In an April 1, 2005, press conference and private statements to the commission, the Justice Department stated instead that Berger had access only to copied documents, not originals. They also said the sole documents Berger admitted taking -- five copies of a 2001 terrorism study -- were later provided to the commission.

Those assertions conflicted with a September 2004 statement to Brachfeld by Nancy Kegan Smith, who directs the Archives' presidential documents staff and let Berger view the documents in her office in violation of secrecy rules. Smith said "she would never know what if any original documents were missing," Brachfeld reported in an internal memo.

In a letter to House lawmakers last week, Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling did not address the issue of why the department told the commission so little. But Hertling wrote that in numerous interviews, "neither Mr. Berger nor any other witness provided the Department with evidence that Mr. Berger had taken any documents beyond the five."

Hertling said the department "stands by its investigation" and believes the guilty plea it negotiated with Berger on April 1, 2005, "was the best one possible in light of the available evidence." He also criticized the Archives staff for failing at the time to confront Berger, search him or contact security officials, saying this failure "had to be weighed against the evidence."

Brachfeld has similarly expressed frustration that Smith and others who suspected Berger of wrongdoing chose not to inform him of their suspicions until more than a week after Berger's last visit to the Archives. "If I had been notified, I would have put cameras in the room. I would have caught him leaving with documents on him. . . . We could have had FBI agents around the facility. . . . He would have been arrested," Brachfeld said.

Brachfeld pressed Justice Department officials on six occasions in 2004 to make a fuller statement to the commission about Berger's actions, to no avail. He also contacted Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who organized an April 2004 meeting between Brachfeld and Justice officials that convinced him that "these issues had to go before the 9/11 Commission," according to two people present.

But in a notification to the commission the following month, the department did not mention that Berger had cut up documents, that he reviewed uncatalogued originals or that Brachfeld worried that Berger's theft was greater.

In the Hertling letter, the department noted obstacles in its investigation. The FBI was not advised of the case until Oct. 15, 2003, almost two weeks after Smith concluded that Berger had stolen documents. By then, Archives General Counsel Gary Stern had called Berger and former Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey about it and obtained two documents from Berger, who surrendered them at home after first denying they were in his possession.

The letter also said that six months after beginning the probe and well after Berger testified to the commission, "the Department had not yet asked Mr. Berger any questions, as he had not yet agreed to an interview." Berger's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said Berger first spoke to the FBI in March 2005 and was interviewed a second time in July of that year, after his April 1, 2005, guilty plea to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case.

"It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake," Breuer said.

Some of Brachfeld's colleagues have not been cheered by his new congressional support. An Archives lawyer, who Brachfeld said was one of those involved in the Berger case, this month sent Brachfeld an e-mail accusing him of poor judgment and stating that "I don't think it comes as a great surprise if I were to venture the opinion that senior management at this agency have serious problems with the manner in which your office conducted itself . . . during the Berger investigation."

On Friday, Archivist Allen Weinstein assured Brachfeld in writing, however, that this criticism did "not reflect either my views or the views of the overwhelming majority of NARA employees."

From PowerLine: Good review of an excellent book.

Up from liberalism

Being a full-time lawyer and conscientious blogger has really cut into my reading time, and I rarely find the time to read the books sent to me for reviews and/or plugs on Power Line. Why I Turned Right, edited by Mary Eberstadt, promised to be a partial exception to that unhappy rule. It consists of essays in which twelve conservatives explain how they ended up as such, I figured I'd read the three or four by the writers who interest me the most.

In the end, I read the whole thing, and so should you. The essays essentially narrate the intellectual voyages of twelve leading thinkers under a certain age (I'm guessing around 60, with the average age under 50) who can be considered conservative. They are: Peter Berkowitz, Joseph Bottum, David Brooks, Danielle Crittenden, Dinesh D'Souza, Stanley Kurtz, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Heather Mac Donald, P.J. O'Rourke, Sally Satel, and Richard Starr.

Not all of them actually turned right. Lowry was never other than a conservative -- his tale is about how he became an armed and dangerous one. Crittenden was always conservative -- her tale is about how she shed the feminism of the 1970s. O'Rourke came from good Republican stock and returned to something like his roots after getting (in his telling) as much sex as he could from the "fetching" girls of the left who wore "peasant blouses, denim skirts, and sandals" and "strummed guitars, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and drank beer straight from the bottle."

The essays I enjoyed most were by those who turned right as a result of studying or working in a discipline that isn't (or, rather, that shouldn't be) political. I'm thinking in particular of Heather McDonald and Sally Satel, whose movement started when they were studying comparative literature and practicing psychiatry, respectively. (I could also include Peter Berkowitz and Stanley, who have studied many things -- some political, some less so -- and been influenced rightward in all instances).

Here's Mac Donald on the deconstructionists:

The professoriate has been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All that they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help their students see why they should fall on bended knee before Aeschylus, Mozart, or Tiepolo, in thanks for lifting us out of our usual stupidity and dullness. Instead, they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created a tangle of antihumanistic nonsense that merely licensed students' ignorance.

And here's Satel on what she learned working on mental health issues during a Capitol Hill fellowship:

My Hill experience gave me a startling insight: Liberals and conservatives seemed to have mirror-image approaches to paternalism. Liberals made intrusive laws for the competent while conservatives preferred to rely on individuals to make their own decisions. Conversely, conservatives preferred intrusive laws for the incompetnet to whom liberals applied a hands-off policy. Liberals were comfortable with public health paternalism: intrusive nonsmoking laws, taxes on unhealthy products, strict risk-averse EPA and FDA regulations. . . .Yet, when a person was incoherent, defecating in the streets, or freezing a limb off in the part, then -- and only then -- did the principles of autonomy apply.

As I suggested, read the whole thing.

Cartoon from CoxAndForkum.org

Why the Iraq war is turning into America's defeat
BY MARK STEYN

February 18, 2007

The week's news from Iraq: According to the state television network, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was wounded in a clash with security forces just north of Baghdad. A senior deputy was killed.

Meanwhile, the punk cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has decided that discretion is the better part of mullahs and has temporarily relocated to Iran. That's right: The biggest troublemaker in Iraq is no longer in Iraq. It may be that his Persian vacation is only to marry a cousin or two and consult with the A-list ayatollahs, but the Mookster has always had highly sensitive antennae when it comes to his own physical security -- he likes being the guy who urges martyrdom on others rather than being just another schmuck who takes one for the team. So the fact that urgent business requires him to be out of town for the Big Surge is revealing at the very least of how American objectives in Iraq are not at the mercy of forces beyond their control; U.S. military and political muscle can shape conditions on the ground -- if they can demonstrate they're serious about doing so.

Which these days is a pretty big "if." Reporting the sudden relocation, the New York Times decided -- in nothing flat -- that it was yet another disastrous setback. In Iraq, no news is good news, and Sadr news is badder news:

''With the new American offensive in Baghdad still in its early days, American commanders have focused operations in the eastern part of the city, a predominantly Shiite area that has long been the Mahdi Army's power base.

''If Mr. Sadr had indeed fled, his absence would create a vacuum that could allow even more radical elements of the Shiite group to take power.''

As my National Review colleague Rich Lowry marveled: ''So now we need to keep Sadr in Iraq because he's such a stabilizing influence!'' Of course! As Hillaire Belloc wrote, ''Always keep a hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse'' -- and, even when Nurse Sadr is blowing up the kids in the nursery every day, it's best to cling to her blood-drenched apron strings because the next nurse will be an even bigger psycho. America is a big helpless baby who's blundered into a war zone he can never hope to understand.

According to a report by the New York Sun's Eli Lake last month, Iran is supporting Shia insurgents in Iraq and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. In other words, it's on both sides in the so-called civil war. How can this be? After all, as the other wise old foreign-policy "realists" of the Iraq Study Group assured us only in December, Iran has "an interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.''

Au contraire, the ayatollahs have concluded they have a very clear interest in fomenting chaos in Iraq. They're in favor of Sunni killing Shia, and Shia killing Sunni, and if some vacationing Basque terrorists wanted to blow up the Spanish Cultural Center in Mosul, they'd be in favor of that, too. The Iranians don't care who kills whom as long as every night when Americans turn on the evening news there's smoke over Baghdad. As I say in my book, if you happen to live in Ramadi or Basra, Iraq is about Iraq; if you live in Tehran, or Cairo, or Bei-jing, Moscow, Pyongyang or Brussels, Iraq is about America. American will. American purpose. American credibility.

There was a TV station somewhere -- was it Thunder Bay, Ontario? -- that used to show a continuous loop of a roaring fireplace all night, and thousands of viewers would supposedly sit in front of it for hours because it was such a reassuringly comforting scene. The networks could save themselves a lot of money by adopting the same approach: Run a continuous loop of a smoking building in Baghdad all night while thousands of congressmen and pundits and think-tankers and retired generals run around Washington shrieking that all is lost. America is way out of its league! A dimwitted tourist in a fearful land of strange people who don't watch "American Idol." Iraq is so culturally alien that not a single Sunni, Shia or Kurd has come forward claiming to be the father of Anna Nicole's baby!

Get a grip, chaps! In Iraq, everyone's a tourist. This al-Qaida honcho, al-Masri, is an Egyptian. His predecessor, Zarqawi, was a Jordanian. Al-Sadr is a Persian stooge. For four decades, the country was a British client. Before that, it was a Turkish province. The Middle East is a crazy place and a tough nut to crack, but the myth of the unbeatable Islamist insurgent is merely a lazy and more neurotic update of the myth of the unbeatable communist guerrilla, which delusion led to so much pre-emptive surrender in the '70s. Nevertheless, in the capital city of the most powerful nation on the planet, the political class spent last week trying to craft a bipartisan defeat strategy, and they might yet pull it off. Consider this extraordinary report from the Washington Post:

"Democratic leaders have rallied around a strategy that would fully fund the president's $100 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but would limit his ability to use the money. . . . The plan is aimed at tamping down calls from the Democrats' liberal wing for Congress to simply end funding for the war.

"The Murtha plan, based on existing military guidelines, includes a stipulation that Army troops who have already served in Iraq must be granted two years at home before an additional deployment. . . . The idea is to slowly choke off the war by stopping the deployment of troops from units that have been badly degraded by four years of combat."

So "the Murtha plan" is to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. But of course he's a great American! He's a patriot! He supports the troops! He doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years. As John Kerry wondered during Vietnam, how do you ask a soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake? By nominally "fully funding" a war you don't believe in but "limiting his ability to use the money." Or as the endearingly honest anti-war group MoveCongress.org put it, in an e-mail preview of an exclusive interview with the wise old Murtha:

"Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president's foreign and national security policy."

"Undermining"? Why not? To the Slow-Bleed Democrats, it's the Republicans' war. To an increasing number of what my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls the White-Flag Republicans, it's Bush's war. To everyone else on the planet, it's America's war. And it will be America's defeat.

©Mark Steyn, 2007

House Call
Political expediency and the nonbinding resolution.

BY MARTIN PERETZ
Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Our political imagination of evil is impoverished, and nowhere is it more impoverished than in Iraq. Even today, when the blood of innocents flows so richly and regularly, we do not seem to grasp its origins, or its power. That is, we do not seem to grasp the centrality, and the perdurability, of culture. And in this regard, the president and his party, as well as the Democratic Party, are equally blinded by their respective orthodoxies.

When the administration took us into Iraq, it was in transports of universalism, as all democratizers must be. All that it wished to know is that people, all people, people everywhere, yearn for liberty and for a fair state. This was not the traditional Republican view of these matters, and it took some courage for George W. Bush to buck the cynical and cynically elitist view of his father and James Baker that arrangements can always be made with dictators, and satisfactory arrangements at that. It was actually refreshing to hear this Four Freedoms trace of Franklin Roosevelt from the smug Grand Old Party, although we had already heard it once before from its slightly dopey but truth-seeing president, Ronald Reagan. All men and women want to be free, Mr. Bush said, and Iraqis too.

The problem is that this belief, which is probably true, is not all we need to know. Whatever people want, they want in their particularity. General aspirations are always locally inflected, sometimes to the vanishing point. The people we set out to liberate were not just human beings, they were also Arabs, and Muslims; and more particularly, they were Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims, and Kurdish Muslims as well. We did not invade only an enslaved country, we invaded also an ethnos, a religion, a culture--none of which have been historically (and frankly philosophically) receptive to the great blessing that we wished to confer. The president's belief in the omnipotence of the American military--that it can outsmart and outfight militias that butcher indiscriminately--only confirmed him in his sense that the persistence of cultural and sectarian hatreds would be no problem, that a 1,300-year-old fact of culture and religion could be effectively overcome by a new doctrine of counterinsurgency.

The Democratic opposition went through a similar process, but in the reverse. It is true that liberals are keenly aware of difference, and lovingly celebrate difference. That is what multiculturalism is about, and moving toward open borders too. But they do not like to see the virulence of diversity--the historical persistence of the enmity of one element of the crazy quilt for the other, even one seemingly quite akin to the other. The liberal appreciation of the hateful dimensions of tribal and clannish identity generally extended no further than the blood rituals of "The Sopranos." Now they are so much wiser, and sagely lecture everyone within earshot about the permanent hatreds between Sunni and Shia, although their House chairman of intelligence oversight had not the foggiest notion of who was in discord and what the discord was about. In any case, they counsel smugness, since none of these inter- and intra-sectarian hostilities will ever come to our shores.

Where, then, are we in the war? No one knows exactly what to do about it. Everybody knows that we are in trouble. Even those of us who are skeptical about the ideological inclinations of many Democrats cannot but dignify the national anxiety that they represent. The House has passed a nonbinding resolution supporting our troops already in Iraq and disapproving the dispatch of 20,000 more. The measure is, strategically speaking, pointless: The new troops are already on their way. The Senate will figure out how to make its own sense of the politically fraught perplexity. Now, both houses of Congress are perfectly entitled to debate anything of this magnitude. Indeed, they have a responsibility to do so. A war should not shut down free opinion, or--worse yet--informed opinion. So the attempt of the House minority leader, John Boehner, to scare them away from a serious debate with demagogic references to the American Revolution is unseemly. This is a weighty war, very weighty. The absence of a serious debate about its ends and its means would rightly earn the national legislature the contempt of all Americans.

But the formula that the House Democratic leadership fixed on was a charade. It allowed each of the 435 representatives five minutes at the podium, enough for them to posture for local television but not so much that anybody can say anything serious, let alone deep or even brave. And the resolution's text itself is rather cowardly. For, since it purports to be a declaration of support for American soldiers actually fighting in Iraq--whatever "support" actually means--why does it criticize the only help that can possibly enable the military in the war: more soldiers and more weapons? And, if the Democrats do not want the war to be continued, then they should bring forth legislation either cutting funds or setting a date for withdrawal, in the manner of George McGovern. There is no rationale for troops in terrible danger to be held hostage to the political expediency of nervous Democrats, who are not prepared to do what they really mean to do and to say what they really mean to say.

Only one resolution was debated on the House floor, and no amendments were permitted. Not quite a debate, is it? One sees in Nancy Pelosi's iron-fisted eagerness to get everyone into line a measure of her years in the wilderness. She will have her way. And the political hothouse is even more torrid in the Senate. There, after all, sit the candidates for president. One would think that, given the threat to her nomination posed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton would be more flexible in her views on the war. Her insistence on not saying that she had made a "mistake" in voting for the 2003 deployment of troops to Iraq puts her out of the center of gravity of her party. Mr. Obama has set the tone and the pace for the Democrats, and he has the advantage of having been clearly antiwar from the beginning. I suspect that almost all Democratic aspirants will end up imitating him. Why won't Mrs. Clinton capitulate to Democratic orthodoxy that the war was always a "mistake"? Out of pride, of course: Hillary Clinton doesn't make mistakes. Only other people do, and especially George Bush.

Senate Democrats are also making sure that no real debate will be held in that body. But, in a certain material sense, the Senate has already approved the administration's enhanced strategy in the war by confirming Gen. David Petraeus's appointment as the U.S. commander in Iraq. Whose strategy do the Democrats imagine our soldiers will be following? If they didn't want this strategy and they didn't want to continue the war, they should have turned him down. That would have been a real message, and a true one.

But the Democrats want it both ways. One of the tropes of many Democratic critics of the war is that, in going to war in Iraq, we squandered our near-victory in Afghanistan. The defeat of the Taliban was actually exhilarating, what with women out in the streets with normal clothes they wanted to wear and children even playing musical instruments. But the enthusiasm of the Democratic Party for Afghanistan is rooted in the fact that Afghanistan is not a strategic asset for the West. It is only a moral triumph. The Democrats prefer to look away from the colder long-term calculations of American and Western interests in the Middle East. We need more than moral triumphs there. We need strategic triumphs. If Iraq turns out not to be the latter sort of triumph, it will be remembered as one of the most momentous blunders in our history.

I think the odds against us are huge. One reason is that Iraq is neither a state that coheres nor a society that coheres. Its civil society, if that is what it is, is not quite a civilized society. The carnage between Shia and Sunni, and the carnage among other religious and ethnic communions, since the end of Ottoman rule have left deep and bloodied breaches in Iraq. If these cannot be repaired, it will be a huge defeat for George Bush--and, whatever many liberals think of it, for liberalism as well.

Mr. Peretz is editor in chief of The New Republic.

From Chronicles.org:

Vampires Inside the Blood Bank Redux

By Srdja Trifkovic

The State Department Pushes European Muslims’ “Integration”

According to an inconspicuous article in the Washington Times the State Department is concerned about a “nativist surge” in Western Europe, and is seeking to counter it by creating “a position to coordinate efforts to reach out to European Muslims and help them better integrate into society.” Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said U.S. embassies and consulates in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries will introduce programs tailored to local conditions. The program will be managed by Farah Pandith, until recently a staffer on the National Security Council and a native of Srinagar (Kashmir), who moved to the State Department last week to head the new effort.

---

The growing Muslim presence in Europe is “a fascinating issue . . . that the American government is just now trying to get its mind around,” Mr. Fried says. “It’s a huge problem, we are thinking about it seriously, and we’ve tried to do some intellectual framing-up.” The conclusion of that framing-up is strictly orthodox-liberal: Muslims in Europe are experiencing a “process of alienation” due to “no sense of integration” in their host societies—and that is Europe’s fault, according to Fried: “Europe has to learn to do that. You have a weird nativist surge in Western Europe, and a kind of odd panic: Aliens are here, they don’t accept our values, they are a threat to our way of life and turn to radicalism.” Foggy Bottom’s solution is to bring American Muslims to Europe to meet with their counterparts and try to “break down stereotypes” and help them end their “self-isolation.” Fried insists that he has not found strong anti-American feelings among European Muslims during his travels, even though many disagree with U.S. policies: “I don’t get big speeches.” he said. “They say, ‘We want to live in Europe. Can you help us out? Do you understand us? We want to be good Muslims and good Europeans.”

Mr. Fried is dangerously deluded. His implied view that America has been successful in integrating “her” Muslims into the societal mainstream—so successful, in fact, that the model is ready to be exported to Europe—is not supported by facts. For the time being, America is in far better shape than Europe, but it would be dangerous to assume that this is so because Muslims have better assimilated into American culture. It would be an even greater folly to hope that America’s economic, political and cultural institutions act as a powerful source of self-identification that breeds personal loyalty and commitment to the host-society that is so evidently absent among the Muslims in Europe. As we shall see, there is ample evidence that Muslims in America share the attitudes and aspirations of their European coreligionists.

There are three reasons why things are not as bad in America.

First of all, Muslims do not account for much more than one percent of the population of the United States, in contrast to Western Europe where their share of the population is up to ten times greater. They like to pretend otherwise, of course, and groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and the Harvard Islamic Society routinely assert that there are between 4.5 and 9 million Muslims in the United States. It is remarkable that these sources do not provide any empirically verifiable basis for their figures. Impartial studies currently place their number at between 2 and 4 million. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) polled more than 50,000 people in 2001 and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million.

The second difference is in the fact that Muslim enclaves in Europe are ethnically more homogenous. Most Muslims in France, Spain and Belgium came from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. In Germany and Austria they are mostly Turks. In Britain they are overwhelmingly from the Indian Subcontinent. Their group cohesiveness based on Islam is additionally reinforced by the bonds of ethnic, cultural and linguistic kinship. In the United States, by contrast, neither Arabs nor Sub-Continentals enjoy similar dominance within the Muslim community, which is therefore not equally monolithic.

And finally, there are proportionately fewer U.S. citizens among Muslims in America. In France and Britain, by contrast, most Muslims are citizens of those countries and feel free to act assertively (or even criminally) without any fear of deportation. As permanent residents they continue to refrain from statements and acts that may make them excludable under current laws. But as soon as they gain citizenship, some among them soon rediscover the virtues of sharia and jihad.

On the whole, Muslim immigrants in the United States do not have different attitudes to the host-society from their coreligionists in Europe. The image of America in the Muslim world is far more negative than that of any European country: 81 percent of Pakistanis dislike America while only 10 percent have a favorable image of it. Furthermore, sizable percentages of Muslims all over the world—73 percent in Lebanon, which is considered ripe for a “Cedar Revolution” and has a large Christian minority!—believe that suicide bombings can be justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies.

That baggage comes to the West with the Muslim immigrants and it is transmitted to their Western-born children. In a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that Shari’a should be the law of the land. The picture becomes even more disturbing if we look at the incidence of terrorist threats America faces from the ranks of that one percent of its citizenry.

Fried’s assertions reflect a structural problem at the heart of this nation’s decision-making: the refusal of the American elite class to accept that Islam as such, traditionally interpreted, poses a threat, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of it. The enemy is well aware of the opportunity provided by this failure. It sees the liberal mindset as his most powerful secret weapon, while despising it at the same time. The MAS Chicago chapter’s Web site states matter-of-factly that Western secularism and materialism are evil, and that Muslims should “pursue this evil force to its own lands” and “invade its Western heartland.”

The outcome of the misnamed war on terror will depend on our ability to halt this ongoing invasion. The precondition is to accept that a practicing Muslim who comes to the US cannot be “absolutely and entirely” loyal to the United States by definition. The basis of the social and legal order and source of all obligation in Islam is the Kuran, the final revelation of Allah’s will that is to be obeyed by all creation. His divine sovereignty is irreconcilable with popular sovereignty, the keystone of democracy. Politics is not “part of Islam,” as this would imply that, in origin, it is a distinctly separate sphere of existence that is then eventually amalgamated with Islam. Politics is the intrinsic core of the Islamic imperative of Allah’s sovereignty.

The result of that imperative is that among some three million Muslims in the United States of America there are sufficient numbers of terrorist sympathizers and active human assets to justify expenditure of some $300 billion annually in direct and indirect homeland security costs, excluding military operations abroad. That money would not need to be spent if America had been prudent enough to devise a sane immigration policy back in the days of Lyndon Johnson. The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable.