Gilder's "The Israel Test" - A Must Read!

Just returned from Pittsburgh and while on the plane coming back read George Gilder's:"The Israel Test" which had been brought to my attention by a dear friend and fellow memo reader.

In the last chapter of the book Gilder identifies his family and blood line and acknowledges he/they are pure WASPS, Tiffany roots etc.. That said, Gilder also acknowledges most of his family admired achievers, associated with them and thus had many ties to the Jewish community.

In his book, Gilder points out the real test today is between those who see capitalism as a zero sum gain where winners take from losers, ie success comes at the expense of the poor as well as ecology and those who see genius and good fortune of others as an opportunity that benefits all.

Do you admire those who create wealth or do you seethe at it?

In terms of Israel, Gilder points our when freedom and capitalism are present, Jews have prospered and their creativity benefits all. Gilder sees Israel as the West's first bastion of defense and should Israel be thrown to the wolves then the West and, most specifically America, will probably also be doomed.

He enumerates instance after instance where Israeli technology has specifically benefited America. Freedom, capitalism and creativity go hand in hand. Economically speaking, Gilder takes you through Israel's early period when it labored under socialism's burdens imposed by Histadrut ("Histadrut" is the Israeli labor federation,) was mostly an agronomic economy and thus, was behind in virtually every world statistical measurement, ie GDP, per capita income, etc. He assigns credit to Netanyahu and others for turning the country into a technological giant and praises GW and former Sec. of The Treasury, John Snow, for assisting Israel to become more capitalistic after yhey laid down strong benchmarks as a precedent to securing loan guarantees.

In terms of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Gilder makes the same point I have been making for years, ie. if Palestinians truly want peace it is there for them. He discusses various Israeli success stories and how the Israelis could and do benefit the Arabs. Meanwhile, the West has continued dispensing billions to the Palestinians, including Hamas, and in so doing have sent the wrong message, ie. terrorism pays.

Gilder takes on the re-distributionists and those who believe capitalism comes at the expense of others and who believe behind every great fortune is a great crime. He writes nothing is more destructive to opportunity than diverting resources from entrepreneurs, who know how to use them, and giving them to government to spend politically.

He also refutes the apartheid argument by Carter and his disciples and points to the hypocrisy of Arab Judenreinism. The real racists, Gilder writes, are those who accuse Israel of being racist. He highlights the folly of The Peace Now crowd and suggests their message simply nourishes Israel's enemies.

Gilder may overreach at time in his praise of Israel and what Jews have accomplished but his arguments are factually solid, based on evidence hard to refute and defies the illogical appeasers. Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried. It is ironic that as Israel moves towards a freer capitalistic system and prospers our own nation is retrogressing and embracing failed philosophy and economic policies.

"The Israel Test" is a must read and most emphatically should be read by those who disagree with Gilder. (See 1 and 1a below.)

What I find most disconcerting is the fact that there may be no current answers to some of the intractable problems the West faces with respect to dealing with terrorism and fanatical Islamists yet, that does not mean we should embrace positions and programs that will not work, have proven they do not work and, in fact, are counterproductive.

Terrorists are willing to die for their warped causes. Less and less in the West have such commitment. In fact, our current president is an apologist for what we have achieved, does not believe in the entrepreneurial spirit because it produces uneven wealth. He is uncomfortable allowing the private sector to solve problems because he believes the private sector is the root of our problems. He believes an ever expanding government holds the answer. Obama's attacks on the country he represents is perhaps purposeful and is meant to weaken the national resolve and is designed to play well with the appeasers.

If that is the case, Obama is succeeding because the public seems willing to experiment out of frustration, lack of resolve and faith in what has proven works. Recessions always provide opportunity for those with the false siren song message that all we need is change.

If the Nobel Prize was given to Obama as a down payment because he has rhetorically turned away from GW there is little in his actions to indicate he has rejected them.(See 1b below.) Guantanamo remains open, most surveillance laws remain on the books, he is most likely going to send more troops to fight in Afghanistan and I doubt we will unilaterally disarm.

Though I am sure Obama and many of his followers would prefer that approach believing peace would descend thereafter. Reality suggests you prevent confrontations by being prepared, making sure your adversary knows you will do what it takes to defend yourself and you will not flinch when, and if, a challenge should come. Appeasement never produced anything but more of what you wished to avoid.

The liberals in Congress talked about what they would do to fight the 'right' war in Afghanistan while complaining that GW was engaged in the wrong war in Iraq. Now they have the chance to fight their 'right' war so why are their their knees buckling? (See 2 below.) Dick

1)Why Palestinian Incitement Matters So Much

By Jonathan Rosenblum



Ever wonder where the report featured that Israeli soldiers kidnap and kill Palestinians in order to harvest their vital organs for transplants originated. Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer. It was lifted in toto from the December 24, 2001 edition of Al Hayat Al Jadida, the official Palestinian Authority newspaper.

Daniel Bostrum, the intrepid reporter for Sweden's largest circulation paper Aftonblandet who plagiarized this fabrication, has said of his handiwork, "Whether it's true or not, I have no idea. I have no clue." Given his indifference to truth of his journalistic offerings, what further "scoops" can we anticipate from Bostrum? Again, Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer.

Here are just some of the charges one could have read in the official Palestinian press or heard from leading Palestinian Authority officials in recent years. Israel will pay 4,500 shekels to any Palestinian who can prove he is a drug addict. Israel produced and distributed to Palestinians two hundred tons of drug-laced bubble-gum designed to destroy the genetic systems of Palestinian youth. It also distributes carcinogenic food and fruits for Palestinian consumption and children's games that beam radioactive x-rays. And don't forget the HIV-infected Jewish prostitutes whom Israel has loosed among Palestinian youth. Or Suha Arafat's accusation to Hilary Clinton that Israel poisons Palestinian wells.

So Bostrum and Aftonbladet have a potentially endless stream of sensational stories ahead of them. But the point is not to predict Bostrum's journalistic future. It is far more serious.

As the above accusations make clear, demonization of Israel is alive and well in the Palestinian Authority. In every agreement since the onset of Oslo, the Palestinians have solemnly pledged to end the incitement against Jews and Israel in the Palestinian media and to purge it from Palestinian textbooks. And each such undertaking has been promptly ignored.



THE FAILURE TO CURB INCITEMENT has been so constant, so long-standing that it barely elicits a yawn today. But that apathy reflects a profound misunderstanding of the significance of that incitement.

Shimon Peres once remarked, "I don't care what the Palestinians say, only what's written in the agreements." But what the Palestinians say to one another, and particularly what they teach their children, is far more important that what's written in peace agreements.

Incitement and demonization are not just one more treaty violation. They reflect the failure of the Palestinians since the beginning of Oslo to create a constituency for peace with Israel, to educate the Palestinian population to the idea of living side-by-side with a Jewish state. Such an education would have included Palestinian leaders telling their people that they too would have to make painful concessions for peace, that all the so-called refugees and their descendants will not return to Israel, that the clock cannot be turned back entirely to 1947 or even 1966. That has never happened. Even worse, there has been no education to accept the existence of Israel in any borders or to renounce once and for all the dream of throwing all the Jews into the sea.

The Palestinian Authority has gone out of its way to make heroes of the most vicious terrorists - not exactly the way to encourage thoughts of reconciliation and peace. Mahmoud Abbas sent his warmest congratulations to child-murderer Samir Kuntar, upon his release from an Israeli jail, and commissioned festive celebrations in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, the mastermind of the 1973 Coastal Road Massacre in which 37 Israelis were murdered.

At the first Fatah Conference in two decades last month, the young and old guard competed as to who could be more intransigent with regard to peace negotiations with Israel, as described by the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh. The resolutions passed included demands that Israel accept the "right of return" for all 1948 refugees and their descendants and hand over to the Palestinians all Jewish neighborhoods built in Jerusalem since 1967.

Other resolutions passed by the conference accused Israel of having murdered Yasir Arafat, urged exploration of a strategic alliance with Iran, and called for the upgrading of the status of the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, the Fatah militia most involved in anti-Israel terror. For good measure, Muhammad al-Ghuneim, an extreme hardliner, who opposed the Oslo Accords, was the top vote-getter for the Fatah Central Committee and is now Abbas's heir apparent.

The effect of decades of incitement to destroy Israel is fully reflected in Palestinian polls. A June 5-7 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that three-quarters of Palestinians reject any possibility of reconciliation with Israel in this generation, even if a final peace agreement were signed and an independent Palestinian state created.



YET LARRY DERFNER ("The Mother of All Missed Opportunities," The Jerusalem Post, September 10) professes to find in the decreasing rates of terrorism from the West Bank and the round-up of thousands of Hamas activists, indications of a new peaceful intent among West Bank Palestinians. But the round-up Hamas activists reflects only Fatah's desire to secure its control of the West Bank, not a new attitude towards Israel.

And the main reason for the reduced terrorism from the West Bank remains the daily and persistent IDF operations and clampdowns on suspected terrorists.To the extent that reduced terrorist attempts are a function of Palestinian Authority efforts, they result from the determination not to provide Prime Minister Netanyahu with ammunition to fend off pressure from U.S. President Obama.

In a recent article for the Hudson Institute, Abu-Toameh argues that no matter how much the Palestinian economy improves, it "won't change Palestinians' negative attitude towards Israel, especially not when anti-Israel incitement and fiery rhetoric continue." The conflict, he writes, is "political, national and religious" in nature, and its resolution depends on "accepting Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people."

Such acceptance cannot take place without creation of a Palestinian peace curriculum to replace the current incitement and demonization. That is why an end to incitement is not another meaningless and unenforceable promise to be included in a final peace agreement, but rather a necessary pre-condition for peace, without which all negotiations about boundaries and the like, are besides the point.

1a)How to take down a great power
By J.R. Dunn

Unlike Augustus or Caligula, Lucius Aurelius Commodus was not an emperor who made a strong impression on modern consciousness. Until the release of the film Gladiator, a heavily fictionalized version of his reign, most Americans had never heard of him. In the film he comes across as quite a compelling figure thanks to a first-rate portrayal by Joaquin Phoenix.


But, as is true of much of the film, the character of Commodus was altered for dramatic purposes. Unlike Caligula and Nero, Commodus was not a psychopath. Though he killed plenty (12,000 by his own reckoning), he was no thrill-killer as such, but very likely what we today would call a malignant narcissist, somebody who believes himself to be the center of the universe and everyone else merely a walk-on. Combine this personality disorder with the power imbued in a national leader and you've set the fuse blazing for sure.


Commodus was not actually in conflict with his father, Marcus Aurelius, last of the four great emperors. Far from it -- Marcus Aurelius idolized his son, steadily raising him through the imperial ranks to the level of co-emperor. Blinded by paternal affection, Aurelius unleashed a monster on Rome, proving that not even a man trained to the highest levels of philosophy (Aurelius was also a leading Stoic philosopher) is immune to human error.


Commodus' failings became evident soon after he ascended to the imperial purple. Having no background in foreign policy, he effectively set it aside, allowing his father's achievements to unravel. Marcus Aurelius had spent much of his reign on the Danubean frontier, subduing menacing barbarian tribes threatening the peace of the ancient world. Commodus simply abandoned the province. If the Romans had possessed Special Forces and remote-controlled drones, things might have turned out differently.


The same was true at home. Commodus allowed important policy decisions to fall into the hands of underlings, providing little in the way of guidance. Chief among these was Tigiduis Perrenis, a corrupt prefect whom today we'd call chief of staff. Commodus did nothing to control Perrenis or end his corrupt practices. Eventually the prefect was caught in a conspiracy against the throne and executed. But Commodus repeated his mistake, promoting yet another corrupt official. The same was true on all levels of government. It was as if Commodus had no competent, honest individuals to choose from.


But the emperor's most serious problems were personal. Commodus was an egomaniac of a type difficult for a normal person to understand. No matter what the situation, Commodus came first. All honors, awards, and decorations were reserved for the emperor. It made no difference whether he'd earned them or not. Religious, political, military -- all went to Commodus. If the Nobel had been awarded in Rome, he'd have gotten the Nobel.


Roman emperors had long been raised to divine status on their deaths (Vespasian mocked this practice on his deathbed), but Commodus didn't want to wait. He began demanding the obeisance due to a god, specifically adapting the persona of Hercules. He took to wearing a leopard skin as he walked the streets of Rome. Going a step further, he attempted to outdo the mythical exploits of Hercules by appearing in the Coliseum to slaughter masses of animals and gladiators. The wild beasts were tethered, and the fighters equipped with wooden swords, but that didn't matter to Commodus, by this time utterly lost in his private dream world.


It became dangerous to outdo Commodus in any athletic or gladiatorial endeavor. When noted champion Julius Alexander killed a lion by spear while on horseback, a stunt Commodus had not mastered, the emperor ordered him executed.


Such excesses created their own reaction. Commodus was plagued with plots to overthrow him. The first was masterminded by his sister Annia Lucilla, whom he had strangled while in exile. A decade later his favorite concubine Marcia (talk about bad luck with your female relations) kicked off another plot featuring an attempt at poison which Commodus threw up. Not to be denied, the conspirators arranged for the wrestler Narcissus to strangle Commodus in his bedroom, the same treatment he had meted out to his sister.


Whatever the conspirators were hoping, Rome itself was by then inevitably in decline. Within a short time the Severans, a dynasty of full-fledged military dictators, were in control. Rome's golden age was ended, and there was no going back.


We look back at the Roman epoch with a sense of relief. We've learned so much since then. No longer do we consider our leaders to be gods among men. No longer do we hand them unearned and meretricious awards and prizes. We don't turn on and destroy members of previous administrations. We don't tolerate incompetent and corrupt sycophants in high office. We've learned to recognize disorders such as pathological narcissism and assure that the victims do not gain high office. Any president who placed his prestige on the line with an athletic contest would be laughed to scorn.


And as for political bloodshed, that kind of savagery has no place in a modern democracy. Any party that called for the assassination of an opposing leader -- say, George W. Bush -- would simply be run out of the public sphere. Unlike the Romans, we all understand the concept of consequences, that what goes around comes around. Don't we?

1b)Why President Obama Was Awarded the Nobel Prize
By Dennis Prager

The Nobel Peace Prize, already devalued, has sunk to a new low. This assessment has nothing to do with one's estimation of this year's recipient, President Barack Obama. Most of those on the left, with a few predictable exceptions such as the New York Times, regard giving the president the award as belittling him and the prize.

How did this happen? What was the Oslo Committee's motive?

They may be moral idiots, but they are not stupid: I believe that they had two clear aims.

One is to undercut American exceptionalism -- the notion that America has a superior moral value system to that of the "world" (specifically the United Nations and the European Union) and America's willing to use its unique power, alone when necessary, in accordance with that value system. The other is to promote an essentially pacifist agenda.

Here is the entire announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize committee:

1. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Meaning: No more Lone Ranger America.

2. "The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

Meaning: The Nobel Committee wants no country to possess nuclear weapons. That an American president shares this dream and is working to achieve it excites the Nobel Committee -- and the world's left generally -- beyond words.

Many people around the world -- not just Americans -- would characterize a world in which America and all other decent countries had no nuclear weapons not as a dream, but as a nightmare. But for the naive left-wing (a redundant phrase: If one is not naive about evil, one is not on the left) members of the Nobel Committee, the prospect of encouraging an American president to dismantle his country's nuclear arsenal was too tempting to allow to pass -- even at the price of appearing foolish.

3. "Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play."

Meaning: To the international left, as embodied by the five members of the Nobel Prize Committee, the United Nations is the beacon of hope for mankind.

To many Americans and others, however, the United Nations is regarded as a moral wasteland that rewards some of world's cruelest regimes with seats on its Human Rights Committee, does nothing to prevent genocides (some would way say the U.N. actually abets them), honoring tyrants, and mired in corruption.

4. "Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts."

Meaning: As the pacifist bumper sticker puts it: "War is not the answer."

Oslo's approach echoes what the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed vis a vis Adolf Hitler. But had Hitler been confronted instead of "dialogued" with, perhaps tens of millions of innocent men and women's lives would have been spared and the Holocaust averted. Europeans tend to believe that evil regimes will act responsibly because of dialogue, not threats of force.

5. "The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations."

Meaning: We believe that a world in which no country possesses nuclear weapons will be a safer world. We believe that even though the technology to make nuclear weapons will still exist, no terrorist organization, nor any other bad people, will make such weapons.

The existence and deterrent power of nuclear weapons have probably saved as many lives as have antibiotics. As David Von Drehle writes in this week's Time Magazine, "If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb."

6. "Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting."

Meaning: To our delight, unlike the previous president, this one believes in global warming and in changing the American economy to combat it.

The "climate change" scare has become the most effective vehicle for compelling a transformation of Western economies along the lines that left-wing environmentalists have urged for decades.

7. "Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

This, unfortunately, has no meaning; it is nonsense. Under Barack Obama, the United States has not been the friend of democrats around the world. America has responded weakly to the democratic movement in Iran, ended the funding of the largest pro-Iranian human rights groups in America, pressured democratic Israel, made overtures to Hugo Chavez while denying American ally and pro-democratic Colombia a free trade agreement, abandoned Honduran anti-Chavez democrats, and has obsequiously deferred to Vladimir Putin.

8. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

Meaning: Only very rarely does the European left have such a kindred spirit in the American presidency.

9. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

Meaning: With Barack Obama, we in Europe finally have an opportunity to end American exceptionalism.

The Oslo committee's view is, tragically, true. Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time is aligning its values with those of "the majority of the world's population." If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that it has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that it has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.



2)Get Nasty or Go Home:The go-light strategy in Afghanistan is a joke. If Obama's serious about victory, it's time to start making unpleasant choices.
BY MICHAEL SCHEUER

One has to admire the ingenuity of the policymakers, journalists, and generals who are desperately seeking to avoid hard decisions on what to do about America's lost war in Afghanistan. Last spring, the Barack Obama administration, Republican leaders, and senior U.S. generals signed on to the fairy-tale prescription spun by David Kilcullen in his book The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen argued that only limited numbers of Afghans were dedicated insurgents and that the great bulk of the United States' enemies in Afghanistan were either hired by the Taliban or intimidated by Takfiri Islamists. Based on this comprehensive surmise -- for which there is scant evidence -- this April's strategy was to "protect" Afghans from bad guys and give jobs to those waging war for wages. Having attained these goals, the strategy held, cleaning up the unpopular Takfiris would be -- like Iraq -- a cakewalk.


Guess what? No cakewalk. Now, Americans are watching a shellshocked Obama administration trying to decide what to do about Gen. Stanley McChrystal's urgent request for 40,000-45,000 additional U.S. troops. The general's request, of course, is an emergency SOS indicating that the U.S.-NATO coalition is close to losing the Afghan war; a four-star U.S. general does not ask for a near doubling of his force to smooth out minor problems.

Thus, not only did the April strategy utterly fail, but the Taliban-led insurgency's trend line is steadily climbing upward, an ascent that began in 2007 and would not be possible without widespread and increasing popular support. Rather than popular support for the Taliban being based on intimidation and money, what we are seeing in Afghanistan is popular opinion catching up with Islamist determination. Until roughly late 2006, the war against the U.S.-NATO coalition was largely fought by the Taliban, other Islamists groups like that led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and al Qaeda. Since then, however, the Islamists have been joined by Afghans who simply do not want Muslim Afghanistan occupied by all sorts of infidels from all sorts of Christian and polytheist countries. In short, an Islamist insurgency has evolved into an Islamist-nationalist freedom struggle not unlike that which beat the Red Army. The best way to see the growth of the Afghan enemy facing the United States and NATO is to track the proliferating number of insurgent attacks in the heretofore quiet and supposedly "friendly" arc of provinces from Herat in the west clockwise to Badakhshan in the far northeast.

Team Obama faces quite a dilemma. McChrystal's plan to stave off defeat by asking for substantial immediate reinforcements -- a request that is still far short of what is needed to "win" in Afghanistan -- is a sure sign that long-term intense fighting and high casualties lie ahead. The United States' latest Nobel Prize winner now has a choice: He must act quickly on the advice of McChrystal and the U.S. intelligence community to save a marooned U.S. Army, or dither behind the harebrained split-al-Qaeda-from-the-Taliban strategizing and let more overmatched U.S. soldiers and Marines die amid the ego-building praise of effete Americans, pacifist NGOs, and the Nobelistas.

For now, dithering seems to be on tap. Last week unnamed administration officials and some commentators began floating a new "strategy" based on the formulation that: (a) the Taliban and al Qaeda are separable; (b) the Taliban does not pose a direct threat to the United States; and, therefore, (c) U.S. forces should fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Well, simply put, this strategy makes Kilcullen look like Clausewitz and surely could not have been vetted by the U.S. intelligence community. On point "a," it is no news at all that the Taliban and al Qaeda are separate entities; they always have been and will be. What is important is that they are working in tandem toward the same clear and simple primary goal -- to drive out the United States and NATO, destroy Karzai's corrupt and incompetent regime, and re-establish their Islamist emirate. In working toward this goal, al Qaeda's combat role in Afghanistan has decreased as mujahideen forces -- Afghans, Iraq veterans, and other foreign volunteers -- have grown and become better armed, trained, and funded. This should have been apparent to U.S. officials several years ago when Osama bin Laden named Mustafa Abu al-Yazid as al Qaeda's Afghan commander. Yazid's long-practiced fortes are logistics and finance, and he is now running the main components of al Qaeda's changed but still essential Afghan effort: logistics and training, intelligence collection, and media operations. (Nota bene: This is nowhere near a full commitment of al Qaeda's resources, and its remaining assets are assisting other insurgencies -- such as in Somalia, Algeria, and Yemen -- and preparing coming attacks in the United States and Europe.)

On point "b," one has to wonder what can be meant by arguing that the Taliban does not pose a "direct threat" to the United States. Did the drafters of the new strategy bother to ask the intelligence community whom the United States is fighting in Afghanistan? The Taliban and its allies are unquestionably a direct threat to deployed U.S. military forces -- ask the commander of the U.S. post at Kamdesh, Nuristan, mauled on Oct. 4 -- and they intend to prevent everything Washington cites as a goal in Afghanistan: democracy, secularism, the rule of (Western) law, elections, constitutions, central government institutions, women's rights, coeducational schools, and the annihilation of al Qaeda. By protecting al Qaeda, incidentally, Taliban leader Mullah Omar's outfit is also facilitating a "direct threat" to the continental United States.



It is time to face the facts. The Taliban and its allies have waged an eight-year insurgency against the United States, NATO, and the Afghan government that is growing in geographical reach, battlefield success, and popularity in the Muslim world. As long as U.S. forces are in Afghanistan, this reality will remain the same. The only way to create a less threatening Taliban is for the Obama administration to admit defeat and turn over Afghanistan to Mullah Omar, knowing that he will allow bin Laden and al Qaeda to stay in place and that U.S. defeat will have an enormous galvanizing impact on the Islamist movement around the world.

Point "c" is another mystifier and one that the intelligence community was forced to unsuccessfully pursue by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. One must assume Obama and his advisors will not abjectly surrender in Afghanistan, at least not before the 2010 midterm elections. Based on this assumption, the idea of focusing U.S. forces on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan raises the question of who will fight the still raging Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan while the United States shoots in the dark at al Qaeda targets it cannot locate? The Brits and the Canadians? Massively reinforced NATO contingents? The Afghan National Army and police? India? Not bloody likely. Unless the United States is going to do its al Qaeda hunting Clinton-style from U.S. Navy carriers and submarines and/or Saudi, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti bases -- and thereby be even less successful than it is now -- U.S. forces are unavoidably going to do the bulk of the fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan while simultaneously hunting al Qaeda.

For the sake of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, let us hope this new strategic formulation is quickly dropped and forgotten and that Washington's focus is refixed on the hard but simple Afghan choice it faces: Because the U.S.-NATO occupation powers the Afghan insurgency and international Muslim support for it, we must either destroy it root and branch or leave. This issue merits debate, but that must wait until McChrystal gets the troops needed to delay defeat. Afterward, only the all-out use of large, conventional U.S. military forces can be expected to have a shot at winning in Afghanistan. Since 1996, the United States has definitively proven that clandestine operations, covert action, Special Forces actions, and aerial drone attacks cannot defeat al Qaeda. It has likewise proven beyond doubt that nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool's errand.

That said, military victory would require 400,000 to 500,000 additional troops, the wide use of land mines (even if Princess Diana spins in her grave), and the killing of the enemy and its civilian supporters in the numbers needed to make them admit the game is not worth the candle. This clearly is not a viable option. We do not have enough troops, and U.S. political leaders, many U.S. generals, and the anti-American academy and media do not think "military victory" is an appropriate or moral goal; their mantra is: "Better dead Americans at home and abroad than criticism from Europe, the media, and the academy."

Overall, then, we are well along the road to self-imposed defeat in Afghanistan, and about the best we can do is give McChrystal the troops he needs to slow defeat. After doing that, we can figure out how to get out of Afghanistan in an orderly manner, while preparing to absorb more al Qaeda attacks in North America.