Note from Robert Spencer:
Common sense from Dan Greenberg in the MetroWest Daily News (thanks to Nicolei)

But the current campagin is a diversion of men, materiel, and attention. We should be winning back Europe by promoting a long-overdue alarm about the demographic invasion. We should expose the international alliance of fellow-travellers of Islam, from certain members of the BBC (such as John Simpson), Agence France Press (which is, in its MIddle East coverage, virtually a handmaiden of the PA), and elsewhere in the European media and in the EU hierarchy, including Javier Solana, Chris Patten,and others (antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are mutuallly reinforcing; those who display either or both are obviously, in their analyses and attitudes, the ones least inclined to see Islamic tenets as a threat to Western (and other ) civilizations, and most inclined to ascribe our problems to that pesky affair in western Palestine -- like the antisemites who were those most inclined, of course, in the 1930s to pooh-pooh the Nazi threat).

But the winning of "hearts and minds" in Iraq cannot be accomplished. It is a chimera, a Sisyphean and hopeless task, and it is cruel to cause American soldiers to risk their lives to do something which is impossible. There is almost no gratitude directed at the Americans by more than a small fraction of the Iraqi population -- for rescuing them from a monstrous regime. There are many reported cases -- and returning soldiers have many more to tell -- of mobs celebrating the killing of Americans. They will pocket the rebuilt infrastructure, the electricity grids, the dams, the hospitals, the schools, the soccer balls handed out by touchingly trusting and hopeful Americans -- but what will be taught in those schools? what will that electricity light up? how will that hydroelectric energy be used? if not to recreate an even more Muslim civlization, at least as hostile, and perhaps more potent in its hostility, toward Infidels?

It is not "democracy" that matters, but human rights -- the rights enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights, which, as Reza Afshari, Ibn Warraq, and others have shown, are in every single particular contradicted by Islam and the Shari'a. Will the new Iraq allow real free exercise of religion? Will those born into Islam be allowed to convert out, or openly show their lack of belief? Will women be given equality? In Islam, the greatest reforms that Infidels should welcome -- that is, the reforms which limit precisely the power of Islam -- have not emerged from "democracy" (a democratic but Muslim state is only more, not less dangerous, to Infidels), but from enlightened despots. These include the vain, stupid, but relatively decent Shah Reza Pahlavi, the farsighted Habib Bourguiba and the Destour Party in Tunisia, King Mohammed V of Morocco, King Hussein of Jordan (the "oily little king," as Alan Clark once dubbed him, was a great favorite all over the West, from that eternal innocent, Anthony Lewis, to Prince Charles, that great admirer of what he takes to be Islam), and by far the most important, Kemal Pasha Ataturk).

The "democracy" industry -- all those bright-eyed people in Washington with Centers for This and That Pertaining to Democracy -- has failed to adequately study, understand, and thoroughly assimilate the doctrines of Islam, or to study Islamic history. They understand there is something deeply wrong, but they cling to the notion that it is not the basic texts of Islam itself, but some perversion of those texts. They have it wrong.

No, the troops should not all come home, but a much smaller force, in the Syrian desert, well away from roadside bombs, should replace the current crazy "hearts and minds" effort. The invasion was completely justified; that was War #1. The remaining around to search for, collect, and destroy major weaponry (not just WMD), to find Saddam Hussein, to capture or kill most of the top Ba'athists, was also fully justified. That was War #2. But the current attempt to do the imposible, to make those three former Ottoman vilayets into a single nation-state (when, since 1920, the Arab treatment of the Kurds, and the Sunni treatment of the Shi'a, has only made things much worse) is hopeless. The Administration should declare that it has done all it can: removed Saddam Hussein, sought for and destroyed WMD programs, sought and destroyed all major weaponry, effectively demollished the Ba'athist structure, and left a small -- 50,000 combat troops -- force in the desert to keep the essential peace.

It is time to get serious about destroying the real WMD threat in Iran, which incidentally will put a nail in the mullahcracy. If the U.S. fails to do so, and the Iranian regime obtains such weaponry, its prestige among the simple Iranians will be sky high and the reformers will be doomed -- so they too have a vested interest in seeing us destory the Iranian WMD program.