"War in Iraq Not on Iraq"

Diana West's Op-Ed piece in The Washington Times is a must read. Some snippets:

We are at war in Iraq, not on Iraq, which we have liberated. We fight on to endow Iraqi Muslims, some Iraqi Christians and even a couple of Iraqi Jews with a little liberty and running water against ... terror? There's no war on "terror" any more than there's a war on car bombs. Neither term describes what animates the terrorists — drivers of car bombs, wearers of explosive vests, or wielders of butcher-blades. Invariably, it is Islam and the murderous, expansionist ideology of jihad that drives that extreme fringe you read about to the point of unspeakable violence. And by the way, that's some fringe; according to Daniel Pipes' famous estimate, it includes 10 percent of the Muslim world — 100 million-plus people.

Which takes me back to the original idea of what there is to achieve by writing about those central, retrograde aspects of Islam that clash with Western society — namely, the precepts of jihad and dhimmitude, and the dictates of sharia law. Clarity is the goal. We are unlikely to witness a security-lite inauguration four years — or eight or 12 years — hence if we remain confused about the ideology that animates our foes. And we are unlikely to ward off the spread of jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law the world over — including the U.S.A. — if we know nothing about it, or, worse, know only apologetics about it. Infinitely more pleasant, they are also misleading. (Read here)