Here is a useful discussion that drives home a couple points I like to make whenever we discuss what "our options" are in Iraq, and in dealing with emerging Islamic powers around the world. Here is a sample, I encourge you to read the whole thing:

It is a familiar situation: News of an exciting military victory for our side against the dangerous Islamists, touted by the readily-available NYT, and a less-exciting account, often not circulated at all in America, having to do with the actual alignment of political forces, which you really have to hunt for. Only if you put the two accounts together can you grasp the way in which the Bush administration is confirming and strengthening the anti-American, pan-Arab view, which is that Somalia is being added as the fifth Arab nation to be attacked in this way, after Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan, just for being Arab and Islamic. Ali Muhammed Fakhro, writing on the Al-Quds al-Arabi opinion page yesterday, warned people in other Arab states not to be complacent in 2007: this could happen to your country too. Read more…

Somalia. Now, I know they don't have oil or anything like that, but let's face it: this is a classic case of how Bush's war has sowed the seeds of future conflict, all because our leaders are too trapped in their own mythology about "Islamofascism." There was a chance for diplomacy and international aid to quell the Islamacist rise to power, and we blew it. Just as we're failing to properly understand what the actual Islamacist threat really is, around the globe, challenging the old orders of corrupt dictators and Western puppet governments. Think on what it means, as the article points out, how the Islamacists are more popular than the once-powerful warlords, and how similar power shifts are occuring in Muslim nations the globe over. By losing in Iraq, Bush has taught the fundamentalists an important lesson: the West can't stop them. Thanks, Chimpy. Read more…

It's just a bunch of Africans, so no one really cares, but I found this passage interesting:

The Islamists are making rapid gains - yesterday they took Baladwayne, 20 miles from the Ethiopian border. The Ethiopians have moved troops to the frontier backed up by armour and Hind helicopter gunships. Somalis remember only too well that the Ethiopian invasion of the 1990s began with attacks by such gunships. Read more…