Dealing with the implications of the Muslim presence.

We don't fault Mr. Bush for going into Iraq. Anything that was done after 9/11 to put the hurt on someone east of Beirut and north of India was a demonstrably good thing. And what was done scared the pants off the usual suspects until they realized we weren't really serious about revenge.

The goal of a democratic Iraq seemed mostly an afterthought or ex post facto justification, with which we are now stuck, at least for now. Ceasing to spend our blood and treasure where it can be spent elsewhere may indeed be the most important thing we can do just now.

Fjordman provides his usual excellent analysis of a long-term strategy, from which we provide the following excerpt, and we provide our own thoughts on how to extricate ourselves from Iraq in the short term:

. . . [Mark Steyn, who advocates remaining in Iraq to spread democracy] doesn’t fully understand Islam. The entire project of "spreading democracy" was a mistake from the very beginning, because democracy cannot be exported to an Islamic country such as Iraq. It is stupidity to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on Muslims while Islamization continues apace in the West.

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According to Srdja Trifkovic, the author of Defeating Jihad, "The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable. (…) There is a direct, empirically verifiable correlation between the percentage of Muslims in a country and the increase of terrorist violence in that country (not to mention the general decline in the quality of life and civilized discourse)."

Sooner or later, we have to deal with the implications of this fact. The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should completely stop Muslim immigration.

We can act now (by implementing this and other policies advocated by Fjordman) while the problem in the U.S. is small, or later when it -- and the danger to our chosen way of life -- is enormous.

On the topic of foreign policy, note the clarity that would come to our foreign adventures if we were able to know and declare the incompatibility of Islamic theocracy and democracy, rather than to indulge in expensive self delusion. "Islam, a religion of peace" is an instance of USDA Grade A happy talk that needs to be jettisoned from the brains of intelligent people forthwith.

If were were to leave Iraq after declaring the objective basically flawed (if well intended), one way to obviate the problem of again being seen to cut and run when the going gets tough would be to inflict nightmarish damage on Syria and Iran as our Parthian shot. This approach would surely stimulate new and refreshing thinking along the lines of, "One more American departure like that and we are undone."

And if we solved the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions in the process, who would be sad except the certifiables?

"Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam." By Fjordman, posted at The Brussels Journal, 11/21/06 (links omitted, emphasis added).