Lost in translation
Gateway Pundit contrasts this, and this,

He clarified; the American forces would rather leave today than tomorrow. The sooner we are prepared the sooner they can leave. This should not take more than one or two years. After we complete the preparations of the Iraqi Army and security forces during the next two years there will be no need for the American forces and they will leave at once.

But then, Gateway Pundit actually had a Arab translator.

Mark Steyn (via Betsy’s Page) realizes that the “insurgency” is having a hard time meeting its recruitment targets, and says, Listen to the word on the ‘Arab street’

Sending a surviving member of your rapidly dwindling inner circle to blow up a Palestinian wedding is not a sign of strength.

True, he did manage to kill a couple of dozen Muslims. But what’s the strategic value of that? Presumably, it’s an old-fashioned mob heavy’s way of keeping the locals in line. And that worked out well, didn’t it? Hundreds of thousands of Zarqawi’s fellow Jordanians fill the streets to demand his death.

Did they show that on the BBC? Or are demonstrations only news when they’re anti-Bush and anti-Blair? And look at it this way: if the “occupation” is so unpopular in Iraq, where are the mass demonstrations against that? I’m not talking 200,000, or even 100 or 50,000. But, if there were just 1,500 folks shouting “Great Satan, go home!” in Baghdad or Mosul, it would be large enough for the media to do that little trick where they film the demo close up so it looks like the place is packed. Yet no such demonstrations take place.

Happily for Mr Zarqawi, no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He’s a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an “exit strategy”.

In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter’s easier. Just say, whoa, we’re the world’s pre-eminent power but we can’t handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don’t mind we’d just as soon get off at the next stop.

Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn’t such a smart move, but since the media can’t seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa’eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they’ll follow. And Americans will die – in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.

As 9/11 fades into the past, that’s an increasingly hard argument to make. Taking your ball and going home is a seductive argument in a paradoxical superpower whose inclinations on the Right have a strong isolationist streak and on the Left a strong transnational streak – which is isolationism with a sappy face and biennial black-tie banquets in EU capitals. Transnationalism means poseur solutions – the Kyotification of foreign policy.

So, just as things are looking up on the distant, eastern front, they’re wobbling badly on the home front. Anti-Bush Continentals who would welcome a perceived American defeat in Iraq ought to remember the third front in this war: Europe is both a home front and a foreign battleground – as the Dutch have learnt, watching the land of the bicycling Queen transformed into 24-hour armed security for even minor municipal officials. In this war, for Europeans the faraway country of which they know little turns out to be their own. Much as the Guardian and Le Monde would enjoy it, an America that turns its back on the world is the last thing you need.

As Ralph Peters knows, the surest way to lose a war is to quit.