Medary.com

Michael Totten:

So many Westerners, liberal and conservative alike, are only interested in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world at the points of inter-civilizational contact, when and where its problems intersect with us and become our problems. It's understandable, but it's blinkered. Islamism exists independently of the West, not merely in reaction to it, and it would continue to exist if America and the rest of the West did not. It's not all about us.

. . .

First of all, let's get one thing out of the way. "Terrorism," suicidal or otherwise, isn't the enemy. Totalitarian Islamists are the enemy. They won't go away just because Western troops go away. Terrorism is merely the tactic they use against Westerners because they're too militarily incompetent to use anything else.

The overwhelming majority of Islamist killers aren't terrorists. They are soldiers and members of state-sanctioned death squads. Most victims of Islamists violence aren't Westerners...they're the Islamists' fellow Muslims. It's easy to forget this -- or not even be aware of it -- if you aren't interested in what happens inside the Muslim world when George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and the rest in the West aren't involved.

The Islamist regime in Sudan has killed more than a million people all by itself in the Christian south and in the Muslim region of Darfur. It would take tens of thousands of terrorists to do worse than that.

But the Islamists in Algeria gave it a hell of shot. More than 100,000 were killed during the past ten years in that country's civil war between radical Salafi fundamentalists and literally everyone else.

Iran's Islamist regime killed its way into power and kills to remain in power. Afghanistan's former Taliban regime likewise killed its way into power and killed to remain in power.

If we can't agree on who the enemy is, how are we going to win? We have crazed momma Sheehan and her political allies screeching the "Leave Iraq Now" chorus.

No, Mrs. Sheehan, that way lies disaster. If we stay, we die by ones and twos, taking tens and hundreds of the thugs with us. If we leave, we die by the thousands, and they kill themselves by the tens of thousands. Leaving Iraq, disingaging from the war on terrorists, is an utterly immoral and indefensable policy. Those who advocate it should be ashamed.