Why I have lost confidence in this administration....

Nigeria, Iraq, Europe
by Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch


What does the attack on Kano, by fanatical Muslims against the local, Muslim-staffed symbol of the Nigerian state run mostly of, by, and for Muslim northerners, have to do with Iraq?

Everything. For the American government is monomaniacally fixated on Iraq, and the Executive branch, in its hallucinatory throes, tells Congress that it will leave "when the Iraqis tell us we can leave" but not when Congress tells Bush that it, as a representative of the American people, wishes to "tell us [that is, the Bush administration] when we can leave."

...

The Administration also does not look outside Iraq, at the larger local examples of Jihad or growing militancy that all contribute to one worldwide effort to keep Islam on the aggressive march. The belief that Iraq can serve as flypaper or as a "honeypot" to which all the "bad guys" -- as American soldiers are reduced to calling them, in an exhibition of the politically-correct infantilism of language that has been imposed -- will accommodatingly flock, there to be mowed down by the Americans and their "loyal" "Iraqi" "allies," (each of those three words deserves its own doubting quotation marks), has been proven wrong in every detail.

Read it all.