[Clearly, things are NOT better in Iraq, or these people would be able to stay in or return to Iraq.]
Thanks for telling it like it is, Deb. McCain wants to pound Obama about the surge but Obama has been absolutely right about how wrong Bush’s policies in Iraq are.

Norman Blitzer on July 25, 2008 at 10:37 am

I think that should be a question on the visa application, “Do you show your private parts on the internet?”
As for the Iraqis accepting him back, it probably depends on how good the pictures from his web cam came out.

code7 on July 25, 2008 at 10:41 am

The only reason we went into Iraq was to stop Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction. The American people would never have supported a war for regime change. And rightly so because we have no business rearranging other countries to our liking. Sure, America likes to export its love of freedom but the way its received by others usually turns out to be more trouble than its worth.

NormanF on July 25, 2008 at 10:43 am

The very least we can do is weed out applicants who have an extremist or criminal background. To be fair, our open borders pathology doesn’t just let in Muslims who hate America. It lets any one in and if no questions are asked we don’t know what such immigrants will do once they are here. It takes only a very few as we found out on 9/11, to wreak mass murder on a large scale. Seven later, we still haven’t secured the borders or decided we’re going to finally be a sovereign nation. There are powerful interests on both sides of the political divide who for their own reasons, don’t want America to be made more secure. And because of them, I think the only question is when – not if – another 9/11 time bomb is waiting to go off in this country.

NormanF on July 25, 2008 at 10:50 am

But nobody wants to talk about actually solving the problem of Islam in America – BAN IT!
see my proposal at http://pedestrianinfidel.blogspot.com/2007/02/proposed-constitutional-amendment.html
Here’s a taste –
Article III
Immediately upon passage of this Amendment all Mosques, schools and Muslim places of worship and religious training are to be closed, converted to other uses, or destroyed. Proceeds from sales of such properties may be distributed to congregations of said places but full disclosure of all proceeds shall be made to an appropriate agency as determined by Congress. No compensation is to be offered by Federal or State agencies for losses on such properties however Federal funding is to be available for the demolishing of said structures if other disposition cannot be made.
The preaching of Islam in Mosques, Schools, and other venues is prohibited. The subject of Islam may be taught in a post high school academic environment provided that instruction include discussion of Islamís history of violence, conquest, and its ongoing war on democratic and other non-Islamic values.
The preaching or advocating of Islamic ideals of world domination, destruction of America and democratic institutions, jihad against Judaism, Christianity and other religions, and advocating the implementation of Sharia law shall in all cases be punishable by fines, imprisonment, deportation, and death as prescribed by Congress. Violent expressions of these and other Muslim goals, or the material support of those both in the United States and around the world who seek to advance these Islamic goals shall be punishable by death.
Muslims will be denied the opportunity to immigrate to the United States
————–
Until somebody starts mainstreaming ideas like this nothings going to change.

robscottw on July 25, 2008 at 11:35 am

The entire Iraq adventure was ill conceived.
I am a conservative and agree that we should fight our enemies in any way necessary. I also feel that President Bush does not understand the Islamic threat.
Democracy for Muslims doesn’t work. Hamas is a good example of a democratically elected terrorist regime. We needed to go into Iraq to destroy any WMDs (and yes there WERE WMDs found there). However, all this regime change is going to accomplish is that it going to yield another radical anti American Islamic regime. Since the majority are Shiites, they may even join forces with Iran.
I originally didn’t understand Bush 1 when he left Saddam Hussein alive. However, I realize that Saddam kept the Muslims under control and now unfortunately they are unleashed.
Saddam was a brutal leader to his own people but that doesn’t sanction creating an extreme danger for ourselves.
May G-d have mercy on us.

Facts of Life on July 25, 2008 at 11:38 am

Wait until one of the raped minor delivers a baby, now a legal US citizen.
Jihad 1 Kaffur 0.
The lesson is, with president/commander-in-chief in Saudi pockets, America just can’t win.

Alert on July 25, 2008 at 12:57 pm

originally didn’t understand Bush 1 when he left Saddam Hussein alive. …
May G-d have mercy on us.
Posted by: Facts of Life at July 25, 2008 11:38 AM
That is because Bush Sr. did not tell you and you did not see that the Gulf war was faught ONLY to save Bush extended family in Riyadh. As soon as Saudi Arabia was secure, Bush lost interest in Iraq. Bush Jr. went one step ahead and covered for his extended family (including Bin Ladins and Saudi terrorists) on 9/11.
Bet you don’t understand that either.

Alert on July 25, 2008 at 1:03 pm

I have a different interpretation of what’s going on. I think things are better in Iraq. Maliki has said he wants the refugees to come back, and talked to Angela Merkel about supporting him in that aim. But there are lots of people who don’t want the refugees to return. The refugee resettlement agencies get paid for the refugees they resettle, so if the Iraqis go home then there goes the agencies’ big meal ticket. The UN overcounts the Iraqi refugees because it wants the Bush administration to look bad. (It also never mentions that a million of these refugees fled Saddam’s regime before we overthrew him.) The State Department and other parts of the Bush administration are either liberals who want Bush to look bad, or are sleepwalking in their jobs.
No account of the Iraqi refugees ever mentions the changed circumstances — not because they have not changed but because journalists are dead lazy, and also have their motives for wanting to hype the refugee crisis and make the Bush administration look bad.
At Refugee Resettlement Watch (http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/) we agree with you that the refugees should return to Iraq, not come here, with exceptions that number in the double digits. Even if they are friendly to us, the cultural differences are too large. And as the head of Iraq’s Red Crescent said, if their refugees — often from the educated and skilled classes — move to other countries, who will rebuild Iraq?

Judy W. on July 25, 2008 at 2:24 pm

I think it was legitimate to go into Iraq, as NF says because of the danger of weapons of mass destruction (which either were transported to Syria shortly before the US intervention), or could have been manufactured on short notice. I have no doubt Hussein I could have used them. I also think we need perspective on the situation in Iraq; there isn’t the mass imprisonment & murder there was under Hussein I. Also, Iraq has become a key battleground against the Muslim terrorists, so we really need to win.
Having said this, Iraq does not occur in a vacuum. Fighting in Iraq doesn’t excuse capitulating to terrorists & despots everywhere else, e.g. Iran, No. Korea, etc. While I believe things are better than pre-2003 in Iraq, they are not good, and probably not improving. The Bush soundbytes about hospitals and schools being built, soundbytes that are regurgitated by nitwit pseudo-conservatives on Murdoch’s payroll, are sickening. Are these ‘schools’ any better than the fanatical schools in Pakistan & Saudi Arabia? I’d be surprised. Who knows what the hospitals are like? Government personnel in that country who are not military are confined to very close quarters, obviously because of the political instability and pervasive and continuing hostility to the US and its values.
If the cultural differences re the refugees are too great, what is this saying about where that country is at? Schools & hospitals, even if they were legitimate, are not necesarily correlated with political progress, or a country that is not a security threat to the US, which is really the basic reason why we presumably intervened.

c f on July 25, 2008 at 3:54 pm

I guess this guy assimilated too quickly and picked up the bad stuff from our sex infested society. Most immigrants pick the good stuff and toss out the bad stuff as they assimilate in their new home America.
[NY: YOU DON’T PICK UP PEDOPHILIA FROM AMERICA. IT’S AN INHERENT CONDITION–AND SOMETHING THAT IS ACCEPTED IN THE MID-EAST, PARTICULARLY IN ISLAM. DS]

Neal Yousif on July 26, 2008 at 5:51 pm

Do a little background research on the Oklahoma City bombings and you’ll find out that it was masterminded by islamic terrorists from Iraq, using Timothy McVeigh as their ‘lily-white puppet.’
Read “The Third Terrorist” by Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis.
Legitimate refugees or not, we do not need any more muslims in our country, adding to the cultural jihad.

ConnectTheDots2006 on July 27, 2008 at 8:39 am

Doug Feith who has been demonized as a neo-con was Undersecretary of the Defense Department for Policy. His book “War and DecisionÔø? was recently published.
Two points in the book were particularly illuminating. One was that the motive for invading Iraq was NOT to take revenge, but rather to prevent further attacks — possibly but not necessarily from al Qaeda but from any one of the many groups in the network of Islamo Fascists that had since 1973 demonstrated their enmity to the United States and the West. For example, the truck bombing of the US marines at Beirut that killed 241 of them was not by al Qaeda, but by the Hezbollah. The invasion of the US Embassy grounds in Teheran was not by Sunni al Qaeda, but by Iranian Shi-ites under Khomenei.
The mainstream media has fostered the view and it is widely believed that the Bush motive was solely to “spread democracy in the Middle East”. Feith explains this was perhaps an ancillary benefit but would not have, by itself, justified the invasion. Feith shows that what was of great concern following 9/11 was the development of WMD by a state terrorist and the use of one of the many non-state terrorist groups to carry out its use against the United States. Three or more states, e.g. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, might have filled that role but Iraq was the only one where diplomacy had been fully tried and had failed.
While no stockpiles of WMD were found, there is a lot of evidence that the programs to obtain WMD were ongoing and such weapons could have been obtained in a period as short as 3 to 5 weeks after surveillance had been discontinued.
His second major point: Feith believed that if the US had quickly turned over governance of Iraq to Iraqis in a matter of two or three weeks following the fall of Baghdad, a policy that he had advised and Rumsfeld and President Bush had accepted, the problem of insurgency would not have developed in the strength that did occur. His policy had been followed in Afghanistan where little or no insurgency occurred until recently and that is principally by foreign Arabs not Afghanis. But because of the Department of State and the CIA’s antagonism toward Chalabi, and because of Bremer’s own predilections that externals such as Chalabi would not be accepted as legitimate by internal Iraqi leaders, US governance continued for some 14 months.
Feith also shows that Defense also demonstrated to the CIA that the CIA discounted many contacts between Iraq and terrorist groups the CIA had itself reported because of the CIA preconception that a secular state such as Iraq would not cooperate with religious radicals even against a common enemy. Feith suggested to the CIA that this displayed poor professionalism. This was played up in the mainstream media as an effort by Defense to get the CIA to change its Ôø?official viewsÔø?.
Finally Feith suggests that the President’s speechwriters failed to inform the public of the motive for invasion and did not even attempt to correct the wildly erroneous contentions raised by the left. His book is the first attempt to do so.
To date no major newspaper has published a review of the book. It is clear that his points diverge greatly from what has been printed in the mainstream media. He supports his points with contemporaneous notes and memoranda. The royalties from his book have been assigned to charities for wounded veterans of the Iraq war.
Feith has been driven from teaching at Georgetown by a faculty of left wing professors who objected to his views. Georgetown, however, gratefully received a check for $20 million from Saudi Prince Talal for its Middle Eastern center headed by John Esposito, a long time apologist for the Islamic radicals.
Read Feith’s “War and Decision”. You may like it.

salubrius on July 28, 2008 at 9:43 am