Back of the Envelope

Steven Vincent has some discouraging words from Iraqis. For example:

She was a Sunni Muslim, an attractive, thirty-something writer, one of the few women I met who eschewed a scarf in public. And she was overjoyed at the demise of Saddam. "I am so happy! Freedom at last! The world is open to me now!" she exclaimed during a small social function at an art gallery in Karada. "Can you recommend some American magazines I might send my writing to?"

I promised I'd draw up a list of suitable periodicals, then added — carelessly, for this was my first trip to Iraq — "You must not mind seeing American soldiers on the streets."

The woman's smile vanished. Her brow darkened and she shook her head. "Oh, no. I hate the soldiers. I hate them so much I fantasize about taking a gun and shooting one dead."

Stunned by her vehemence, "But American soldiers are responsible for your freedom!" I replied.

"I know," the woman snarled. "And you can't imagine how humiliated that makes me feel."

As Vincent observes, this attitude is much more common among the Sunnis than the Shi'ites or the Kurds:

After more than eighteen months of fighting in Iraq, there seems to be no means of dealing with this insurrection. The Kurds and the Shia (renegade cleric Moqtada al-Sadr notwithstanding) have shown a willingness to negotiate over the future of Iraq — why not the Sunnis? What do they hope to gain from their "guerrilla" war against the U.S. and against the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi? More important, what factors in the Arab Iraqi character lie behind Sunni opposition to a democratic Iraq, and why can't American politicians, military personnel and members of the media seem to understand them?

This is discouraging, but there's one thing to remember. We don't need the Sunnis to rebuild Iraq, and they know this. If they don't participate in the reconstruction, they run the risk of being sidelined, and being forever the powerless fringe of Iraqi politics. And they don't want that any more than we do. I think once it becomes clear that they can't beat us, they will, for the most part, join us.

Doc Rampage has some thoughts on the British approach to home burglary and terrorism:

Perhaps this tendency toward actively passive behavior (also known as "cowardice") is partly genetic. If so, there have been powerful environmental influences to make it a common trait and such a genetic trait would help to explain the European/leftist approach to terrorism. They are in many ways mimicking a helpless homeowner confronted by a cruel and brutal foe. They speak bravely when they think the foe cannot hear. They cower in silence when the foe is threatening them. They give the foe whatever he wants and avoid even criticizing him. They tell themselves they deserve the abuse to make it easier to take and to excuse themselves from self defense. They take the part of the foe against their neighbors, terrified that if the neighbors are not passive enough, the foe will be angry at all of them. They make cowardice a virtue and courage a vice. No matter what successes their neighbors have in attacking the foe, they only fear that it will make the foe more angry.

It seems not to matter whether you are a householder in a small village or a nation on the world stage. Some of your neighbors will want to band together for self defense, and other neighbors will want to submissively give up their wealth and women (as in allowing Muslim immigrants to abuse women) to appease the attacker. And when the courageous men of the village actually fight back, the cowards will hate them for it.

This is not an encouraging way of looking at things, but it may be accurate. Read the whole thing.

Since I'm a (mostly) Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, I don't belong to a Designated Victim Group. Usually I find the victim culture so popular in America amusing, but when it becomes a deterrent to preventing terrorist attacks, it is literally a menace to society. Heather MacDonald takes a close look at those Muslims who have suffered the depradations of the federal government:

So who are the victims of this "heightened climate of suspicion" that Swiss-born director Rossier offers his viewers? Well, there's Ali, a young man in the computer business whom the FBI interviewed after 9/11 on the basis of a tip. Like all of the men featured in the film, we don't learn why the FBI was interested in Ali. Ali does acknowledge, however, eclectic web-surfing habits. Does he frequent jihadist websites? Rossier doesn't bother to ask.

Four months after the Bureau interview, Ali lost his job — a common occurrence in the computer industry, all the more so in the post-9/11 downturn. We are to suspect, however, that his employer retaliated against him for the FBI's brief interest, even though Brothers and Others provides nothing to back up that innuendo.

The FBI quickly cleared Ali, and he has not heard from them again. That's it. End of story. But on the basis of such minimal government action, Ali dons full victim status. "I don't have any rights," he whines, though nothing the government did to him came even close to infringing on his civil liberties (since it may ask an individual for a non-custodial interview without crossing any constitutional tripwires). Ali also claims that he has been censored, and the filmmaker obligingly poses him skimming a book about censorship.

Of course, there are those who have a more legitimate grievance, including illegal aliens who were detained while being investigated, to which MacDonald responds:

The Iranian Ali and the Pakistani store owner [discussed earlier in the article] can qualify as targets of racist government power only if one posits that immigration enforcement is per se racist. And that isexactly what the film posits. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group, tells the camera: "It is wrong to arrest people for visa violations; it violates the Constitution."

The only thing remarkable about this statement is its clarity; the sentiment, however, animates most attacks on the government's post-9/11 terrorism investigations. Behind much criticism of the domestic war on terror lies the unstated premise that the government has no right to enforce immigration laws, and that any effort to do so is discriminatory.

These are all very telling observations. My favorite statement of the article is "Given the fact that Osama bin Laden has yet to invite Jews or Christians to join his jihad against America, however, it is unavoidable that an investigation of Islamic terrorism will have Muslims for its subject." As they say, read the whole thing.