Yes, there’s a non-zero chance that Cordoba House is front for something nefarious (though not a terribly clever one I’d add).  Equally obvious is the fact that the center has so far achieved the exact opposite of its stated goals of fostering religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue; this shouldn’t have come as a terrible surprise.

Neither of those can excuse the sheer stupidity and offensiveness of most of the opposition to it.  Never in my life have I heard so many conservatives so eagerly demand state intervention of any kind, let alone intervention to stop religious practice on private property.  Not only has due process gone completely out the door, none of the mosque’s opponents — to my knowledge — have even proposed offering to buy-out Cordoba.

By far, though, the most amazing argument is not only that Cordoba is part of some Grand Jihad, but that its construction would be a major victory for that cause.  Here’s the usually-sensible Newt Gingrich channeling Andrew McCarthy:

The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks – is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites.  For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term.  It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Today, some of the Mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to “symbolize interfaith cooperation” when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.  It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.

Really?

When Mohammad Atta piloted AA 11 into the WTC, he found solace in the fact that a Sufi would one day run an interfaith center a few blocks from the site of his wickedness?  Really? When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded for the 182nd time, did he find solace in the hope that a mosque that makes a big stink over its swimming pool would soon reach completion?  Really? This is what losing to the terrorists looks like?

If Jihadis wish to believe that Cordoba’s construction outweighs the routing the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein I, for one, do not think we should try to convince them otherwise.

Anyhow, reading the now-released details that are supposedly the most revealing, I have the exact same reaction that I had back when I worked on such matters: 1. It’s hard to think of a concrete way how someone could use specific details of screening techniques to defeat the screening process; but 2. the most important information in the book is how un thorough the screening actually is.

One of our great advantages in battling terrorists is that terrorists aren’t very bright and don’t seem capable of solid analytical reasoning. Anyone who flies a half dozen times a year knows exactly how spotty the screening can be. Immediately after I quit my job working on airport security issues, the wife and I went to France for a month. When we got to Paris I got to looking for something in the backpack I’d used as a carryon, and I found but a box cutter we’d used while packing. Ask anyone who flies regularly, and they’ll have a half dozen of those stories. I was disappointed that I’d made it onto an international flight with a box cutter, but I wasn’t surprised (well, I was surprised that it was in my backpack, but I wasn’t surprised I made it through security).

I’m not saying the screening process is a completely wasted effort. Nor am I saying that we need a significantly more complete screening process – a nation of frequent fliers like America would not tolerate El Al levels of scrutiny on every Des Moines to Chicago flight. But I am saying that a big part of why we’ve spent eight years without an act of air terrorism is because the baddies aren’t very good at calculating their odds of success. To the degree that releasing the SOP allows them to precisely calculate those odds, we’re less safe today than we were last week. However, I just don’t think many terrorists are smart enough to figure that out. Three cheers for ignorance and irrationality in the Muslim world!

However, 53% of voters believe the president places higher importance on ending the war. Just 28% say Obama thinks winning the war is more important. Another 19% are not sure.

Certainly the speech the president gave last week was not meant to communicate his desire to win. I think most of that 28% is composed of people giving the president a presumption of good faith – that surely he would not escalate a war, sending tens of thousands more Americans into combat, simply to provide political cover for when he cuts and runs. Given the content of his speech, I’m not sure it’s fair to make that presumption. He had an opportunity to lay out the ingenious plan for victory that he’s spent months crafting, but instead he mostly just groused about how much it sucks that we’re having to spend money fighting one of those war thingies.

War is, everywhere and always, a competition of wills. The American people don’t think our commander-in-chief has the will to win this war. Let’s hope our enemies in Afghanistan come to a different conclusion.

Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.

I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander-in-chief committed to success. And this commander-in-chief defended his exit date (versus the straw-man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.

Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?

I confess I feel conflicted about Afghanistan myself: given its history, I’m ambivalent about whether establishing a reasonably competent government with a manageable level of corruption is either possible or worth it.  Unfortunately, it’s too late for second guessing on this and — as Krauthammer says elsewhere in the article — if Petraeus and McChrystal believe it’s doable, I’ll for it.

I do have one retrospective question: given the extraordinarily complicated nature of the GWOT — from defining victory to detainee status — would we have been better served in 2001 by acknowledging the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and then declaring war on them (the declaration could have defined al Qaeda as an irregular co-combatant, or something) ?

It seems to me that this was have solved the tremendous legal and strategic ambiguities that have been so troubling over the past eight years.

Certainly, Cheney has been attacking Obama strongly and I frankly find it rather unseemly.  But, as NRO’s Peter Wehner points out, Cheney’s attacks are surpassed only by President Obama’s relentless blaming of the prior administration for all his problems.  Obama is the aggressor here and — though I wish Cheney would remain stoically quiet as President Bush has been this last year, as does Fallows — I can’t fault him.

Fallows also made a different and very dangerous mistake that that, to my knowledge, no one else has pointed out.  He wrote:

I am not aware of another former President or Vice President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan. (Aaron Burr might win the title, for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but Burr was a sitting Vice President at the time.) [emphasis added]

Let the historical record show that Colonel Burr does not take kindly being called “despicable” in print.  Were I Mr. Fallows, I should avoid Princeton Cemetery at all costs, lest a spry zombie accost him and demand satisfaction.

Obama’s critics to his right should remember the president’s critics to his left. The poor gentle souls must be gobsmacked. Obama is the first Democratic president in forty years to call for a significant deployment of American troops in the national security interest of his country. This is very big news. His predecessor, President Clinton, could give a stirring address dispatching bombers over Bosnia and be confident of the support of his fellow Democrats, because the show of power was purely humanitarian and had nothing to do with keeping us safe from our enemies. With great courage, Obama is trying something that hasn’t been tried within the living memory of most of the members of his party. He may even recall the era when liberal Democratic presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson — could lead a fight because it was in the interest of the country to fight.

This is a historical moment, and one we should be grateful for.

Republicans seem to be lining up to support Obama’s surge, which means that they’re behaving as the loyal opposition ought to.  They might be bitterly opposed to the president on many domestic matters, but they’re with him when he’s trying to do right.   It will be interesting to see how this plays out in Congress.

But exactly like McCain, there are moments when he stands taller than all the rest, calling down lightning bolts from a conservative god, and raining destruction and common sense on his enemies. Here he is, ensuring that Eric Holder has a backup anus in case his first one fails:

Althouse:

Holder imagines that he can hide inside that “thoughtful” routine that Obama so often relies on, but it is utterly pathetic here. Either he knows damned well what he’s doing and he’s lying or he’s outrageously unqualified for his job. His evasive style is so similar to Obama’s that he makes Obama look worse.

I’ll add that Graham is correct about the perverse incentive structure set up by our current Justice Department. If you kill American soldiers overseas, you get a military court; if you kill civilians in America, you get a civilian trial.

I’ll rephrase that, as a terrorist might see it: If you do combat with the greatest military force in the history of the world and happen to temporarily come out on top, your reward when captured will be a military tribunal held out of the public eye, followed by execution or an extended stay in a military facility; if you spend a while living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and kill a few unsuspecting and unarmed civilians, your reward when caught will be a media circus trial with worldwide publicity, followed by decades of appeal and a lifetime spent in the world’s cushiest prison system where you are free to convert others to your murderous religion.

Graham is correct and Holder is wrong, but unfortunately Holder is the one who gets to make the policy that gives jihadists an incentive to come and kill American civilians. To every Republican who couldn’t hold his nose and vote for McCain, to every independent who fell for the hope and change shtick: Thanks!

Yes, it is, and it’s even worse when conservatives do it:

I’m not quite certain if Napolitano is entirely correct, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that the decision to not declare war after 9/11 (as well as before the Iraq War) was a tremendous mistake and the progenitor of all the legal/detainee problems we’ve been dealing with so badly these past eight years.  Certainly, the circumstances presented a extra few difficulties — one would have to word the declaration carefully — but it would be quite doable.

But to return where this post started, did O’Reily seriously just say “I don’t care about the Constitution”?  Yes.  Indeed, he did.

Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the man convicted of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing, has left the Tripoli hospital where he was receiving treatment for cancer.

Officials in Libya on Monday reported that Megrahi had been discharged from Tripoli Medical Centre, the country’s most advanced public clinic, where he had received treatment since late August.

In August, doctors gave Megrahi just three months to live in a judgement that secured his release from a Glasgow prison. But he entered the Tripoli hospital to undergo an aggressive chemotherapy programme just days after Libyans celebrated his triumphal return.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime publicly declared its hope that “a miracle from God” would preserve his life.