“Tortured screams ring out as Iraqis take over Abu Ghraib,” by Ali Saber and Gethin Chamberlain, Telegraph, 10 September 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/10/wirq10.xml.

“Mediators in Kosovo: ‘Serbs are guilty as nation’,” Regnum, 11 September 2006, http://www.regnum.ru/english/697678.html.

If George Walker Bush had meant “Mission Accomplished” when he said it, we would be living in a better world.

If George Walker Bush had meant “Democracy for Iraq” when he said it, we would be living in a better world.

Instead, George Walker Bush meant accomplishment and democracy in Clintonian terms. George Bush has a September 11th mindset. His foreign policy, a near-clone of Clinton’s, prepared for a Kosovarization of Iraq. The will of a majority would be postponed indefinitely, and a multinational force would indefinitely occupy the country to protect the remnants of the Master-Class of a once slave society.

Bush’s post-”Victory” goal in Iraq was the same as Clinton’s post-”Victory” goal in Kosovo: the prevention of a limited genocide Clinton and Bush pulled out the thorns that annoyed our nation since the dawning of a New World Order — the wolves of Milosevic and Hussein, who snarled at their cages and used their imprisoned claws to spread misery to their neighbors.

It didn’t work for Clinton

[The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Kosovo Marti Ahtisaari] said that a group of experts will visit Belgrade shortly and he hopes that they in Belgrade will show a positive attitude to these proposals. During the press conference, Ahtisaari dismissed the charges of the Serbian delegation that during his Aug 8 with them he told them that “the Serbs are guilty as a nation.” Particularly, Ahtisaari said that the Belgrade authorities should understand that the Milosevic policy (“historical legacy”) should be “taken into consideration” during the determination of Kosovo status and that “each nation in the world has its guilt and must pay for it.” The Serbian side responded to this by severe criticism of Ahtisaari’s mediation. They said that, in fact, this position predetermines the possible decision on Kosovo status and expressed indignation at the fact that the Serbian delegation’s Aug 10 official protest was left unanswered.

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It didn’t work for Bush

An independent witness who went into Abu Ghraib this week told The Sunday Telegraph that screams were coming from the cell blocks housing the terrorist suspects. Prisoners released from the jail this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and on Wednesday, 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Conditions in the rest of the jail were grim, with an overwhelming stench of excrement, prisoners crammed into cells for all but 20 minutes a day, food rations cut to just rice and water and no air conditioning.

Some of the small number of prisoners who remained in the jail after the Americans left said they had pleaded to go with their departing captors, rather than be left in the hands of Iraqi guards.

“The Americans were better than the Iraqis. They treated us better,” said Khalid Alaani, who was held on suspicion of involvement in Sunni terrorism.

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As Tom Barnett recently quipped, we will apply the “Yugoslav Solution Set” to Iraq. The Solution Set ends with the dismemberment of a State along ethnic lines, which is good. The Solution Set bogs down for years before this, however, pretending one can export a liberla society to an illiberal land.

If there is hope in this, it is that the world’s ears are deaf to the Orthodox Serb and Sunni Arab victims of their compatriots. We take so much grief to the criminal exuberance of a very few — think Abu Ghraib and Haditha — but the easy war for winning insurgencies against minorities — let the locals do it — happens anyway.

As American troops come home from Iraq — and our Qaedaist and Baathist enemies lose — we must not forget those who are our friends. Not because we, or they, pretend to be kind. But because we and they are going in the same direction. And we must think, as we plan if not as they act, of the wonders those locals can do.

Our enemies and the states who harbor them — the Baathists of Syria, the Qaedist-spawning despotisms of Egypt and Saudiyya — can be washed away by the Muslim Brothers and the Shia.

Islam, now more than ever, is the answer.

That’s the September 11th mindset.

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