“The number of “urban violence incidents” committed in 2007 in France has been discreetly publicized by the Interior Ministry. It amounts to 93,016, of which 37,359 car torchings, or 102 per day!”

I thought not.
Considering that America is about 4x the size of France, what do you think the reaction here in the states would be if Muslims were burning over 400 cars per day?
Being a good American, I would start a business manufacturing plastic Allahs to put on the dashboard. Maybe the ‘rioters” would go burn the car with the Plastic Jesus instead. After I got my start-up out, I would expand to make bubble-head Allahs. Wouldn’t that be the cats whiskers?
Then there would be the Full Monte ALLAH, who instead of bobbing his head is humping a goat.
Lots of sales there. Might even replace the “Kill ‘em all, Allah will know his own.” bumper sticker.

And what is the Anbar Awakening, except a preponderance of Iraqis finally grasping…”oh, the major target of the AQ slaughterers is ourselves !”

Praise be to Allah for General Petraeus (the military guy) and Ryan Crocker for, finally, getting the Iraq war going in the right direction.

Were Bill Clinton’s refusals (via Sandy Burglar) to let our guys in Pakistan nail bin laden when they had him in their sights a “military” or a “police” debacle ? I think a police debacle.

Anyway, the newly reconstituted Al Qaeda is entrenching itself more and more deeply in NW Pakistan and even infusing itself into the functioning of several cities, with the goal of taking over the entire country. They live, like all terrorist cowards, closely intermingled with the tribes they have infested.

Hardly anybody ever mentions that the Waziristan tribes themselves are suffocating under Taliban-like oppression.

Somebody, military or police, better get on top of those “terrorist” jokers soon.

Faster, indeed.

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2008/07/31/another-disappointing-rand-counterinsurgency-study/

As for the notion that the Awakening was exclusively an Iraq phenomenon, I have also argued against this. You and I have the same views on the mission of the Marines in Anbar, as you know. They were the stronger horse, and without them, Anbar would have been lost.

ML:

Yes, everyone has made mistakes and we will all continue to make mistakes. God put man on earth to screw up and provide entertainment. But I don’t think we advance the cause of understanding the world by saying that “think tanks” aren’t useful, or that too many people have political bias. The important thing is not bias but the truth, and biased people can get to the truth; that they are on one side or the other regarding the war doesn’t automatically discredit their analyses. In graduate school we were taught to avoid trying to identify other historians’ motives, or for that matter to identify leaders’ motives, on the grounds that a) we couldn’t reliably know the motives (sometimes the people themselves didn’t know them), and b) that what matters is how well they understood their real options and how wisely they chose among them.

Hard indeed, nowadays, when a good deal of the commentary to this blog gets rejected because it’s just a personal attack against various politicians or writers. But it’s worth the effort.

Remember their groundbreaking treatise on the errors of our “War” against the Germans in the 1940s? They showed quite conclusively that we achieved little through military means until we began rounding up and arresting the German forces in ’45. That’s 5 years if you count the British failures to initiate legal action. Before then it was just all running around shooting at each other. It wasn’t until the minds of the Germans decided to seek the path of peace and International Law that our wasteful military tactics were changed to the proper tactic of policing and prosecuting.

Later, the wonderful Nuremberg, erroneously named military, tribunals culminated our proper and successful Legal activities.