Posse Incitatus

A demographic thought experiment

Mark Steyn is on vacation, but between Jonah Goldberg’s latest excerpt on NRO and my earlier post on the Pope, demography is back on my mind.

I’ve written before that I do not believe that Steyn is right about Western Europe succumbing to radical Islam.  Here I would like to explore a little more of my thinking.

Steyn focuses a lot on birth rates. That’s understandable, and they are a useful statistic, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Consider that here in the US the average woman has about 2.0 kids.  That’s pretty close to the replacement rate of 2.1 and it is in fact rising.  We are actually at the highest birth rate since the end of the Baby Boom in the early 1970s.

Now what does this mean?  It does not mean that every woman has a kid, it means that some have four, some have one and some have none.  No one can have a fraction of a child.

I bring this up because Steyn likes to point out that other countries, particularly in Europe and Japan, are at 1.5 or 1.3 births per woman.  Steyn then goes on to point out that these are not equally distributed and that many of the ones having the kids are Muslim immigrants in the ghettos – people who are very receptive to radicalized Islam and terrorism.

All well and good, and sorry to bore a bunch of you with this, but I need to get it out of the way.  Anyhow, my point is that Steyn’s assertion about birth rates being unequally distributed between Muslim and non-Muslim is arguably true that it is not equally distributed – in Europe in particular – between what I will call “culturally confident” and “culturally ashamed.”

To put it another way, the non-immigrant Europeans who are having kids, who in fact tend to have larger families, are probably not likely to be nihilistic Bohemian types, but rather old-guard traditionalists who still believe in the greatness of their ancient land.

Here in the US we use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” but I don’t think they fit. For one thing, “liberal” in Europe (and Australia) actually means “conservative” in the American sense (that is, a focus on small government, individual rights and support for free markets).

Okay, so the notion here is that Europe is not in a “death spiral,” but rather it is undergoing a transformation.  Those who have no confidence in their civilization are having no children, but that fragment that does is still reproducing.

How big that fragment is I have no idea, but I’ve read enough posts from Europeans to know that is still out there.

Europe, far more so than the US, is divided by social class.  Despite the prevalence of republics (or at least constitutional monarchies), birth matters a lot more over there than over here.

One of the best demonstrations of this I’ve seen is the contrast between the movies “La Femme Nikita” and the American version “Point of No Return.”  Same story, different countries.

In both versions, our criminal-turned-assassin meets a guy while in deep cover and falls in love.  Yet the differences are telling.

In the French version, it is her reluctance to discuss her family that causes the love affair to falter; in the American one, she is easily able to dismiss family as something she doesn’t talk about – it is her feelings that matter more.

Friends of mine who visit Europe often note that in Europe, people as you where you are from, while Americans ask you what you do.  Again, class still matters.

Why bring this up?  Because Europe’s emaciated militaries still retain a cadre, a “hard core” of professionals who have been there for generations.  Two world wars didn’t wipe them out, and these folks are still serving.  They know their craft and are good at what they do, and I guarantee you they have plans to rapidly mobilize the country for war if it comes to that.  All professional militaries do.

So the thought experiment is this: What if the bulk of the births in Europe among the “natives” are concentrated within this subset?  Mark likes to trot out the example of the Spanish and Italian weddings between two only children.  Okay, but where does the .5 come from?  Some have none, others have many, and not all of them are Muslim.

What this would mean is that Europe’s native population may be dwindling, but it may also be getting more culturally assertive.

The multi-culti, global warmingists have no kids, or at most one, whilst the nth generation Prussian professional has four.  In absolute terms, Muslims will make up a higher percentage, but the remainder could well be the grimly determined heirs of Charles Martel.

Anyhow, I’ve got nothing solid to back it up.  The closest I can come is the fact that the US is having a similar pattern: “red states” have higher birth rates than “blue states,” and even in my local area, religious/cultural conservatives tend to have bigger families than the liberal/progressives.

The Year of St. Paul

I was out of town last week and the nice weather has made me strangely reluctant to sit down inside and bang away on the computer.

However, during my absence, the wide world kept right on turning.

Apparently Obama came up with a seal and discarded it.  Ah for the days when lese majeste was a capital offense.

Meanwhile, the inimitable Spengler has another piece on Pope Benedict XVI and his bold strategy to confront the rising tide of radical Islam – through conversion.

Spengler cites several key developments we’ve already discussed here – such as the conversion of Magdi Christian Allam – as well as something we missed: a Note reminding the faithful of the importance of evangelism.  Something that may have escaped Spengler is that His Holiness has declared June 28, 2008 to June 29, 2009 to be the Year of St. Paul the Apostle, a.k.a the “Apostle to the Gentiles.”

On the one hand, it is an innocuous celebration, marking the 2,000^th birthday of a seminal figure in the Church.  At the same time, it is a pointed reminder that even today, there are nations where the Gospel cannot be legally spoken, where possession of the Good News is a criminal offense, and where conversion to the True Faith brings a sentence of death.

Spengler’s writings capture the curious contradictions of Pope Benedict’s actions: conciliatory yet confrontational, passive yet aggressive.

He is sending a message that there are limits to even Christian tolerance and forgiveness; that the wholesale persecution of his flock is no longer acceptable. 

Benedict may also be one of the few Westerners who is not daunted by the Islamic tide; to put it another way, he is the “Anti-Steyn.”  Whereas Mark Steyn sees Western decline as almost certain the face of a reinvigorated and confident Islam, Pope Benedict sees the indiscriminate violence of the Islamists as a sign of their own weakness – both political and spiritual.

Under this interpretation, the increasingly elaborate and hard-line doctrines of the Islamists are a death spasm, not a growth spurt.

It is a curious question, and one that is rarely asked:  why would a Muslim attempt to “reform” his faith so that it can coexist with modernity when Christianity is already there?

Current efforts to reform Islam have been met with often brutal violence.  By now it is clear that “moderate Muslims” have no champions on the world stage.  The “human rights” community will not lift a finger for them and no nation – not even the United States – will ride to their rescue when co-religionists torture and execute them.

But Christianity still has its champions. 

Consider the two scenarios:

1. A moderate Muslim scholar is reviled by his home country and threatened with death for teaching his humanist doctrines. 

2. A Muslim converts to Christianity and is threatened with death for “apostasy.”

In both cases, a religious court could try the man and find him guilty, with a sentence of death – perhaps reduced to torture in a show of “clemency.”

In the first example, world criticism will be muted; after all, who are we to judge the “true Islam?” Leading opinion makers may well conclude that it is better to let Muslims “work this out themselves” and that for “unbelievers” to intrude would only “incite additional violence.”  Indeed, this Western reticence to interfere in Islam’s “internal conversations” has resulted in creeping Sharia throughout Europe and Canada.

But for the convert, very different rules apply. 

Thus is it an inescapable fact that it is far easier to leave Islam than to reform it.  Benedict knows this, and, one suspects, to do the imams with whom he is going to meet.

I am reminded of the old story about how when Joseph Stalin was asked to change Soviet policy because it was angering the Vatican, he replied:  “And how many divisions has the Pope?”

At the time, people held it up as a witty reminder of how feeble the Church was compared with the raw coercive power of the Red Army and the Soviet Union.

But sixty years later, the Church is still here, and the Soviet Union and its vaunted Red Army are consigned to the history books.  Benedict is clearly hoping for a similar outcome against radical Islam.

SCOTUS: Make judges targets, too

Looking at the various court rulings over the Guantanamo Bay prisoner, I am coming to the conclusion that there is actually no reason any sensible enemy of the United States would bother to follow the laws of armed conflict.

After all, if you take off your uniform, you become an instant civilian, making it that much harder for your enemy to pick you out of a crowd.

If you are killed, why then your side can immediately say you were an innocent bystander, and accuse the US military of atrocities – claims that will immediately be echoed by “human rights” organizations around the world.

If you are captured, you will be treated to the full protections of the United States Constitution.

At least, that’s what the courts say.

From the “human rights” groups’ perspective, this ruling is a two-fer.

First, it makes it that much harder for nation-states to wage war, thus reinforcing the goals of the peace movement, from whom they are essentially indistinguishable.

Secondly, it allows the courts – which are far more easily manipulated and less democratically accountable – to effectively manage military campaigns.  Instead of military commanders determining rules of engagement, the courts will do so, and often ultimately determine the outcome of those campaigns.

If courts, for example, rule that prisoners have been taken improperly, they can be set free and the soldiers responsible can be punished. 

As I said, it’s a win-win for the peaceniks, at least I’m sure that’s how they see it.

One of the funny things about the left, however, is its inability to foresee how their actions can drive the motives of others.  For example, gun control’s primary effect is to disarm victims, thus making guns more desirable for the criminal class. 

In this instance, the trends will be twofold: on the one hand, the militaries of law-abiding countries will adopt increasingly secretive and extra-judicial means of dealing with enemies.  Since waging war is what they do, indeed what they MUST do, they will avoid court scrutiny by increasing the “gray area” around their operations.  This is not a Democrat or Republican thing (remember, the Clinton Administration came up with rendition).

The secondary effect will be that terrorists will increasingly see the judicial system itself as a viable and relatively cost-effective target.

Consider: to blackmail or otherwise influence a military tribunal, you have to effectively defeat the military that supports it.  Assassinating its members merely brings in replacements.  What is more, they will be held on military bases, which by definition are fairly tough places to get into and move around in.  Infiltrating Guantanamo Bay would be quite the feat.

Civilian courts, however, must be accessible to function within all the Constitutional constraints the judges crave.  They will therefore be in easy to reach urban areas, the judges will be easily identifiable, and blackmail will be that much easier to achieve.

This was in fact what happened in Columbia, where judges, police chiefs and prosecutors were regularly assassinated and kidnapped.  Only taking a more military approach to fighting the rebels allowed the government to restore law and order.

So the unintended effect will be that assassinating the judges – like the Supreme Court Justices who made this ruling – will now serve much more of a purpose than if the military addressed the situation.  I believe that if Al Qaeda and its affiliates in fact figure this out, we will ultimately return to using military tribunals, but not before a lot of well-meaning but unwise people are killed.

A long way from D-Day

I noticed on the ‘net yesterday that the Secretary of Defense has basically decapitated the Air Force: both the Secretary and Chief of Staff were forced to resign.  What is more, their successors are expected to undertake a housecleaning and remove or reprimand other officers.

Heads are rolling.

If one ventures over to the Air Force Times, and particularly to their comment boards, one sees the same thing again and again: that the problems the Air Force has experienced of late would never have happened if General Curtis Lemay were still in charge.

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, and if the massive heroism, stupidity, achievement and waste of that great and terrible day stand in stark contrast to our own, so do the leaders of that era.

They were not politically correct. They were not interested in fair fights.  They were interested in victory.

Lemay essentially took William Tecumseh Sherman’s view of war:  It cannot be civilized or refined.  If one hates war, one must make it so terrible that no one will ever want it again.  I think history has vindicated them both.

From the bomber crews torn to shreds by flak over Germany and Japan to the grunts drowning in the bloody surf of Normandy Beach – and everywhere in between – World War II was waged with a ruthlessness we cannot even fathom today.

The wholesale bombing of Germany and Japan killed hundreds of thousands of civilians – but it also has turned both nations from warlike aggressors into devout pacifists. 

The revisionists are still at it, trying to argue that even the “good war” wasn’t so good, and even though the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were bad, we were no better.  Of course they can say this with the luxury of 60 years of prosperity and a comfy chair in the faculty lounge – not to mention the protection of the US military that they so dislike.

This is a strange time: our military is at war, while the nation as a whole is at peace. Sixty-four years ago there was and understanding that we were not in “Mr. Roosevelt’s War,” we were at war, period.  To the media and many political elites, that is but a distant and increasingly distorted concept.

Sixty years ago today, things were very different.  I think tonight I’ll light up a cigar in memory of “Old Iron Pants” the brave warriors who fought along side him.

Debate of the century

Via Pajamas Media, I found this fascinating tv debate between Mark Steyn and some of his antagonists.

Having not really paid attention to the "sock puppets" before, I am amazed at how immature they are.  The two women sound like valley girls - they don't know their facts, don't really care to, and assume that everyone will just let them have their way.  They have the victim tone of voice down pat.

The fellow is painfully earnest, yet his reading of Ayatollah Khomeini's remarks were one of the best examples of unintentional self-parody I've ever seen. 

These three have learned the liberal debating method well: misquote and distort whenever possible and when challenged, change the subject.  The moderator gamely tries to pin them down, but they won't have any of it.

I give them credit for staying on message - but it is a pretty weak message.  I also enjoy the kids insisting that they feared to debate Mark because he might shout at them or call them names.  Nice.

I have to wonder what the rules will be in the Brave New Canada they wish to make.  Will you have to get government permission to quote well-known public figures, or will a permission slip from these guys suffice?

And if, say, Khadaffi or someone of his ilk goes on about the inevitable defeat of the West, will that also be a hate crime?

There is a real danger in this case.  The kids are very earnest in their objective, which sounds okay on the face of it: we just want to publish a rebuttal.

But if they (and their hidden compatriots) win, they will destroy the free speech of Canada.  Publishers will effectively lose editorial control of their papers; any controversy will be answered with a complaint and the resulting chill to free speech will mean that even vital news of the day may go unreported.

Hopefully, Canada's legislators will pull them back from the brink.

One final observation:  It is highly amusing to see that even as Mark is making his (understandably) passionate rebuttals, he can't resist throwing references in to musicals ("South Pacific") and his copious knowledge of celebrity gossip (Zsa Zsa Gabor).

A true renaissance man.

Making a virtue of apathy

Serial commenter Nurglitch seems determined to reprise the roll of our old pet troll, but hey, it's a slow news day.

Heaven forbid Zimbabweans should take personal responsibility for their own nation-state. After all, foreign intervention has worked so well for Zimbabwe in the past, right? Right?

Oh, wait, intervention by a foreign power violating Zimbabwe's sovereignty would validate Mugabe's motivation for clinging to power.

Trying to solve the problem by force, by matching Mugabe's force with greater force, is pointless (and hypocritical) if your complaint is Mugabe's use of force against his political (and personal) enemies.

Okay, let me try to follow this logic (such as it is).  Mugabe uses violence to oppress his people.  This is bad.  Therefore, we should not use violence to liberate them because that will legitimize the violence being used to keep them down.

Uh, no.  That is like saying that the rape victim deserved it because if she had he means, she might kill her attacker, so better to keep her in  her place.   And anyway, it's none of our business.

Furthermore, forceful intervention would be like trying to put out a fire by pouring lighter fluid on it. The point, presumably, would be to stabilize the region, which isn't going to happen if it gets turned into a war-zone. More to the point, who's going to pay for this war? Who's going to fight it?

Isn't it a war-zone already?  Last time I checked, three million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa, which is seeing growing violence directed against them.

Let us not pretend that the state of affairs in southern Africa is anything approaching peaceful.

It isn't Conservative thought or Liberal thought (you know Neo-Conservatives are Liberals, right?), it's good old fashioned human apathy.

It's also immoral. 

The fact is that you don't feel it's your personal responsibility, and the further fact is that your gov't is filled with like-minded individuals who couldn't give rat's ass about Zimbabwe.

Actually, I do feel it is my responsibility, which is why I am drawing attention to it.  I also do not feel the Bush administration is doing enough.

So when do you start fundraising to take your private army to Zimbabwe and show those people what they're doing wrong?

Ah yes, I guess I'm a "chicken-merc" or some such nonsense.

I know the left has made a secular religion out of the proposition that the "personal is political" but this is stupid even by their addle-brained standards.

The proper mechanism to change government policy is to vote and to advocate one's point of view.  It is not to  raise a private army and enforce it at the point of a gun - that leads exactly to the sort of misery we see in Africa today.

I also can't help but notice that this flies in direct opposition with the sentiments expressed at the start of this comment.  Apparently Nurglitch believes that formal American intervention would make a bad situation worse and "pour lighter fluid" on the conflagration, but the addition of unaccountable private armies will make everything peachy.

It is an undeniable fact that increasing global integration in trade and communication mean that isolationism is no longer practical.   In international terms, it is no longer acceptable to have an orderly "core" and a disorderly "periphery."  As we saw in Afghanistan, even distant relatively small movements can create considerable mayhem in the very heart of the West.

Hopefully the creation of the United States African Command (AFRICOM) will be followed up with a similar diplomatic effort to finally bring some order to Africa.  And maybe, liberal politicians will move beyond simplistic "leave 'em alone" or "why don't YOU got fight" arguments and truly engage the issues at stake.

A different Clark's theorem

It looks like I may have been a bit premature in my hopes for a peaceful transition of power in Zimbabwe.  In many ways, it boils down to basic power politics: Robert Mugabe is more willing to use force to keep power than anyone else is to get rid of him.

It's been a few years, but I remember one of my professors jokingly referring to a "Clark's Theorem" for Africa.  It was developed by an American ambassador (named Clark, of course) who postulated simply:  There is no bottom in Africa.

No matter how bad things are, they can get worse.

Reader Nurglitch's response to my earlier post pretty much summarizes the current state of liberal thought, by the way:  The Zimbabweans are "sorting things out by themselves," which means starving in heaps and hoping for help from abroad that will never arrive.  Oh, and I need more degrees to truly understand the deep, scholarly reasons for the West's inactivity in the face of pure evil.

Could be.  Or maybe I should just have a stiff drink and watch "Firefly."  Either way, the end result is the same.

The limits of "soft power"

One of the consistent criticisms liberals have thrown at the Bush administration is that it is too reliant on “hard” power – meaning military action – and not at all good at using “soft” power – diplomacy and economic leverage. 

Barak Obama in particular has talked of using a soft power in his “dignity promotion.”  All well in good, but recent events have left me wondering what exactly this means.

For example, both Democrat candidates have now stated their opposition to the Columbia Free Trade agreement.  Now if this isn’t “soft” power, I don’t know what is.  International relations between nations is not game of sentiment and soft words.  At its core, statecraft is about the national interest.  By opposing this agreement, both Democrats are essentially telling Columbia that we value their alliance, but not enough to actually pay anything for it.

This is hugely important.  No state will retain world respect if its policy is to undercut or ignore its allies whenever domestic interest groups require it.  Making matters worse is the juvenile notion that we should be negotiating more with our enemies, which Obama has also said he would do.

How can this approach earn the United States anything but contempt on the world scene? 

Apparently Barak Obama wants to tell America’s closest Latin American ally that while we appreciate all the hard work they are doing to curb our drug trafficking problem and think that their efforts to check Hugo Chavez’s malignant influence is great, we won’t actually do anything to help them.  Instead he wants to meet with Chavez!

I guess that’s the other bizarre part of this misguided statecraft:  We will meet with any regime and negotiate, but once you’ve ruled out military force and embraced economic protectionism, what is there to talk about?

This post is a little different because I am actively soliciting liberal responses.  Please, tell me what “soft” power means if not trade agreements and other humanitarian assistance.  Because right now, all it looks like Obama and Hillary plan to do is talk nicely while smacking our friends in the face.

Quiet flows the Zambezi

Food for thought:  how will future generations evaluate George W. Bush’s policies in Africa?

Before you answer, consider that US forces have helped bring peace to Liberia, have coordinated with Ethiopia to deny Al Qaeda a sanctuary in Somalia and now Robert Mugabe’s reign of terror may finally be over in Zimbabwe.

What was it Bill Clinton accomplished? Oh yeah, Rwanda.

Years ago in my misspent college youth, I studied Africa – not only its history but its then-current politics.

One of my senior theses (I had two majors) was “The Security Problematic of Southern Africa.”

In it, I analyzed South Africa’s strategic situation and actions from the 1960s to the early 1990s (when I wrote the paper).  So I have to say I find current events in Zimbabwe very interesting.

One of the things a lot of commentators (particularly liberals) do not understand is how complex international politics really are – and Southern Africa is more complex than most.

This is part of the great irony of liberalism – though they claim to have far more nuance and understanding than conservatives, they generally do best in clear-cut examples of black and white – literally in the case of race relations.  Black = good, white = bad.

In Zimbabwe and South Africa, the moral high ground clearly belonged (they would argue) to blacks.  After all, whites had dispossessed the locals of their land, reaped the most rewards from it, and generally excluded blacks from political power.

The thing that stuck with me the most as I was doing my research was how many blacks not only sided with the whites, but actively fought for them.  This was not only the case in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, but also in South Africa.

I argued in my paper that part what undid apartheid was the superb performance of units such as the Selous Scouts and the 32^nd Battalion of the South African Defense Force.  The blacks who fought in these units proved every bit as brave and capable as their white counterparts and once you’ve fought and bled next to somebody, it is hard to deny them their rights.  The South African regime was ultimately sustained by military force and when the military itself lost confidence in apartheid, it could not be long before the system had to give way.

Another factor in all of this was the role of the Soviet Union in supporting the “liberation movements,” almost all of which advocated “Afro-Socialism” or some localized moniker that would basically centralize all power with an elite clique and drive the economy into the ground.  (Not that the Western dictators were much better – Joseph Mobuto, or “Mobuto-sese-seko-etc.” which translated into something like “Big Man Who Shakes Earth with His Potence etc. – was an absolute disaster.  Zaire/Congo still hasn’t recovered.)

Anyhow, the way Western liberals saw it, socialism was a good thing, and whites deserved to be literally punished for their sins – shot, goods stolen, farms expropriated, etc.   Of course, it was easy for Western liberals to say this, because it was happening comfortably far away.  I doubt if the intelligentsia in Ann Arbor or Berkeley would be as happy if the descendants of the Native American tribes who originally owned the land showed up and expropriated their trendy townhouses and Priuses – and hacked apart their friends and family for good measure.

The Cold War ended in 1989, but the wars in Africa lingered on.  At first, the liberal experts were mystified.

Why would the “client states” and factions keep fighting once Uncle Sam and the Soviets stopped paying them?

I don’t think most of them understood that the Cold War was really a veneer in a lot of areas to allow tribes that hated each other to fight it out.  For example, Angola’s bitter civil war continued to grind on even after the Cubans left.  A lot of those wars and rebellions had less to do with the superpower confrontation than with the simple desire to rule other people. Mugabe is proof of this: the Cold War is a fading memory – his “war veterans” are about keeping power, nothing else.

Mugabe also exemplifies the classic African liberator-turned-president for life.  When the African nations received their independence, they usually celebrated with free open elections.  The joke was “one man, one vote, one time,” since the winner usually ended up establishing a one-party state and rounding up the opposition.

When it comes to dictators, Mugabe is one of the most vicious and also one of the last to have a major role in the world stage.  He was also a convenient foil to the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy.  “Oh, well if you are going to invade Iraq for democracy, how about Zimbabwe?” was something I would hear from time to time. 

But now he may be on his way out, and none too soon.   My hope is that the Bush administration keeps up the pressure – not just on Zimbabwe, but on South Africa as well, which has basically abdicated its strategic role in favor of establishing an “old boy network” with the last of the old liberators.

Africa is a complex and fascinating place, yet liberals remain stunningly ignorant of it.  It will be hugely ironic if George W. Bush’s legacy is to have brought change to a continent that Bill “the first black president” Clinton basically ignored.

Meanwhile, back at the central front

I haven’t posted much on the war in Iraq lately.  I also have posted next to nothing on guns, though I intend to remedy that soon.

Anyhow, my first reaction to the Iraqi offensive in Basra was “excellent!  The government is finally standing up on its own.”  Subsequent events have shown that my confidence was not misplaced.

It goes without saying that the mainstream press put a negative slant on it, of course.  Why violence is escalating!  More people are dying!  I know I shouldn’t be surprised any more by what these people write, but sometimes I still am amazed at how committed they are to American defeat.

What is even more amazing to me is how many politicians seem to share that desire. 

Meanwhile, back on the central front, this showdown has enormous implications for Iraq.  If the Mahdi Army does disband, if Sadr’s power is decisively broken, what then?  Al Qaeda is on the ropes.  Hunted and cornered, it is running out of men and money.  Their last hope was to kick of a sectarian civil war and hope that the growing Iraqi security forces would be torn apart in the aftermath, but it looks like that isn’t happening.

One of the things people forget is how intense and dynamic wars can be.  Iraq had every possibility of disintegrating under the strain – certainly no shortage of experts predicted it.

Yet wars can also be a unifying experience.  The sense of common sacrifice and struggle can bring very diverse groups together.  Germany’s “War of Liberation” against France set the stage for the eventual unification barely a half-century later.  Similarly, the American Civil War and the subsequent World Wars had the effect of building a common culture for the US, forcing people from every walk of life to come together.  It is no exaggeration to say that without Blacks serving in the US Army during the Civil War, they could not have received full citizenship and that without their subsequent service in the World Wars, that citizenship would not have been redeemed.

Iraq’s ordeal has caused great pain and suffering to her people, but it has also created a desire that it be for a purpose; that the lives shattered have some meaning.  For a growing number of Iraqis, that meaning is a unified, powerful and democratic Iraq. 

People are tribal.  They divide themselves into groups.  There is always an “us” and by extension there has to be a “them” as well.  Hitherto, Iraq’s divisions were internal: Kurd vs Arab, Sunni vs Shiite, Ba’ath vs everybody else.

But now a new “us” is forming and it encompasses all Iraqis.  “Them” is coming to mean the Iranians, Syrians and even the Saudis.  As the central government continues to mature and as its military gains strength, these regimes will be increasingly threatened.  I have to say it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.