THE PROBLEM WITH PEACE: My Scripps column this week argues

for more than half a century, Western politicians and diplomats have built upon a mirage: the belief that because we see peace as a benefit, everyone in the Middle East must see it that way, too.

But they don’t. That doesn’t mean that other forms of progress are impossible. More here.

Tom Gross on the West Bank and why it’s flourishing without a peace treaty (even if few reporters care to acknowledge that). Tom notes:

[T]he Nablus stock market was the second best-performing in the world so far in 2009, after Shanghai …

Palestinian economic growth so far this year -- in a year dominated by economic crisis elsewhere -- has been an impressive 7% according to the IMF, though Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, himself a former World Bank and IMF employee, says it is in fact 11%, partly helped along by strong economic performances in neighboring Israel. …

[W]e had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all …

Nablus stock exchange head Ahmad Aweidah went further in explaining to me why there is no rush to declare statehood, saying ordinary Palestinians need the IDF to help protect them from Hamas, as their own security forces aren't ready to do so by themselves yet.

The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.

More here.

STEPHEN WALT’S GIFT TO OSAMA: Foreign Policy has given Stephen Walt space to write a piece headlined “Why They Hate Us” in which he asks: “[H]ow many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims?”

He calculates thusly: While “Muslims” may have killed 2,819 Americans on 9/11, Americans killed “at least 100,000” Muslims through the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq. While a Somali “militia” killed 18 U.S. military in Mogadishu, American military men killed 315 Somali militia members. While “Muslims” killed 300 U.S. Marines and diplomats in Beirut in 1983, Americans have killed up to 32,000 Afghan citizens.

He goes on and on like this. His bottom line: While “Muslims” have killed 10,325 Americans, Americans have killed 288,000 Muslims.

Walt concludes: “[T]he United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost. The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of ‘excess deaths’ in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.”

He quotes an unnamed "prominent English journalist" who, he says, has articulated his point “quite simply." "If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world," he said, "it should stop killing Muslims."

Moral relativism is hardly uncommon in today’s political discourse, but refusing to differentiate between American troops trying to feed starving Somalis and Somali terrorists trying to stop the feeding program really does take the cake, so to speak.

It’s also revealing that Walt neglects to ask how many Muslims have been killed by Saddam Hussein, by al-Qaeda, by Iranian proxy death squads in Iraq, by the Taliban, and by other radical Muslim groups.

There is no recognition by Walt that in recent years Americans have sacrificed lives and treasure to save Muslims from tyranny and carnage in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- and, yes, Muslims were killed in the process because in each of these cases, except Bosnia and Kosovo, Muslims communities were threatened by radical Muslim groups or regimes.

You think this sort of smarmy attack on America has no impact? I received the Walt piece on a Pakistani listserv in which I am included. It was posted to demonstrate, once again, how sinister and untrustworthy Americans are.

One can imagine al-Qaeda, the Taliban and various Islamist apologists using this as a rough guide as to how many Americans they would be justified to slaughter. This is a wonderful time for Walt to be offering such little propaganda gifts to America’s enemies, don’t you think?

Keep in mind that Walt not only publishes this pseudo-scholarship in respectable journals, he also teaches it on respectable campuses such as Harvard -- has for years.

John Vecchione on David Frum’s web site argues that Walt is talking nonsense and the proof is:

I have little doubt the approval of the United States in Germany and Japan was higher in 1960 than in 1939. In the interim we had killed hundreds of thousands of Germans and Japanese. The difference was regime change and a change in the population’s tolerance for tyranny. Mr. Walt might take a lesson.

More here.

WHAT’S IN A NAME: Three Muslim reformers have written a piece, “Please call us Islamic,” that I want to bring to your attention. Khairi Abaza, who is with FDD, Soner Çacaptay and Kayvan Chinichian, both with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argue that too many people and publications are using the terms “Islamic and Islamist interchangeably, not realizing that Islam is a religion and Islamism is an ideology. … In the name of political sanity, we ask you, please call us Islamic because Islamism is an ideology we do not share.” They add that Islamism is “a modern anti-Western political ideology rooted in Islam.”

I agree. One point on which I differ with the authors: I’m not convinced that most of those using the terms interchangeably are “confused,” and are doing so “unwittingly.”

For example,

a recent report published by the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, entitled “500 Most Influential Muslims” is the most recent publication that conflates Islamic and Islamist. Contrary to what its name suggests, the report lists not the 500 most influential Muslims, but rather the 500 most influential Islamists.

Right. But this Center has received millions of dollars from Saudi royals. It is in the interest of Saudi royals to mainstream Islamism, to confuse the public about the differences between Islamism and other readings of Islam, lest the public come to understand that Wahhabism -- the state religion/ideology of Saudi Arabia – is a form of Islamism and, indeed, the soil from which al-Qaedism has grown. The Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University is doing what they Saudis expected. They made an investment -- it was not a “gift” -- and they are getting good ROI.

This, however, strikes me as a very strong point:

The relationship between Islam and Islamism is akin to the relationship between the working class and communism in the Cold War. Just as communist ideology stood for and hoped to derive its legitimacy from the working class, the Islamist ideology hopes to derive its legitimacy from Muslims.

Yet, just as communism did not represent the working class since millions of working-class men and women did not identify themselves with communists, Islamism does not represent Muslims. A majority of Muslims are not Islamists and the violent crimes of Islamists would be enough for them to be considered un-Islamic.

Imagine what would have happened during the Cold War if pundits and policymakers suggested that all working-class people were communist. We can encounter al-Qaeda’s rhetoric of Muslims versus the West only by splitting Muslims from al-Qaeda’s Islamist Weltanschauung. This is why we have to differentiate Islamism from Islam.

THE SECOND SURGE: An opinion roundup.

The Wall Street Journal:

One of the media's least accurate tropes is that, with the President's speech last night, Afghanistan is now "Obama's war." No, it isn't. Nations go to war, not merely Administrations, and President Obama's commitment of 30,000 more troops to that Southwest Asian theater is a national investment in blood and treasure on behalf of vital U.S. security interests.

We support Mr. Obama's decision, and this national effort, notwithstanding our concerns about the determination of the President and his party to see it through. Now that he's committed, so is the country, and one of our abiding principles is that nations should never start (much less escalate) wars they don't intend to win. …

[W]orrisome is Mr. Obama's decision to scale back plans for training and equipping Afghan security forces. General McChrystal and his staff thought the U.S. and its allies could stand up a force of 400,000, or twice the current target. The Administration vetoed him. Retention problems and cost factored into the decision. …

[A]s a war President, Mr. Obama will have to spend more of his own political capital persuading the American public that the Afghan campaign is worth the price. One speech at storied West Point isn't enough. The President needs his own political surge.

The Washington Post observes that Obama’s

months of deliberation appear to have given him a very specific -- and perhaps overly narrow -- vision of what the United States will and will not seek to accomplish. Defeating al-Qaeda was the only goal to which Mr. Obama expressed an unambiguous commitment. …

In Pakistan, generals and civilian leaders will hesitate to join the fight against the Afghan Taliban if they believe the United States itself may give it up in two or three years. Mr. Obama stressed that his administration was committed to a long-term strategic partnership with Pakistan; in fact, the success of his strategy will probably hinge on whether he can strengthen what is now a shaky partnership to the point that Pakistan, the United States and Afghanistan fully unite against the Islamic extremist groups on both sides of the border.

The New York Times:

“This is no idle danger,” Mr. Obama said, “no hypothetical threat.” He warned that new attacks were being plotted in the region, and raised the terrifying prospect of an unchecked Al Qaeda taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan. …

[He] forcefully argued that Pakistan’s survival also depends on defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban but gave the Pakistani government more credit than we would have for seeing that.

Pakistani officials insist they understand the threat but question Washington’s staying power. Mr. Obama said the United States will support Pakistan’s “security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent.” But it will take a lot more cajoling and pressure to finally persuade Islamabad to stop hedging its bets and fully take on the extremists.

Charles Krauthammer:

What a strange speech it was -- a call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive.

Which made his last-minute assertion of “resolve unwavering” so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” On Tuesday night, he defined “what’s at stake” as “the common security of the world.” The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

Does he think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban, by Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose, by Pakistani generals hedging their bets, by NATO allies already with one foot out of Afghanistan?

Rich Lowry:

In Obama’s long review, the fanciful suppositions of the war’s skeptics were systematically knocked down: No, the war couldn’t be waged from afar with drones and Special Forces; no, the Taliban couldn’t be considered a relatively harmless force; no, Afghanistan couldn’t slide into chaos without further destabilizing Pakistan.

The professionals, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, and Admiral Mullen, all lined up in favor of some form of the surge. Obama was left without any plausible reason to heed his deepest instincts.

Consequently, he finds himself in rough alignment with all the same hated people who conceived, executed, and supported the Iraq surge, and against the people who opposed it -- and elected him.

David Ignatius:

There has been much talk about how this war is Obama's Vietnam, but the president rejected the analogy. The Vietnamese never killed 3,000 people in America, as al-Qaeda did; we aren't fighting a nationalist movement in Afghanistan; and he isn't making an open-ended commitment. …

Afghanistan is vital to U.S. security interests. But I don't think he will convince many House Democrats. …

Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act together at last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a certain date, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That's the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision -- the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.

Eliot Cohen:

As the Bush administration built its case for war with Iraq excessively on Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, so Mr. Obama has made the case for the Afghan war rest almost entirely on defeating Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. So slender a pillar will not sustain the weight of this war.

The jargon of transition and exit ramps, and an 18-month target to begin withdrawal unfortunately tells our enemies to persevere through a couple of bad fighting seasons, because the Americans, or at least their leaders, do not have the determination to succeed. The president spoke of reconciling and integrating the Taliban. The Taliban are tough, and this sends the message that they only need hang on to win. Only when they conclude that the alternative is death, will they decide to abandon a war they otherwise seem likely to win.

Marty Peretz:

The conceit in Obama's speech is that we are fighting only Al Qaeda and the Taliban and fighting them only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. …

I suspect that the assembled men and a few women thought that Obama's definition of the adversary -- here, I myself trim; isn't it really "enemy?" -- was rather thin. "A group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world's great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents." If only the men of Al Qaeda were only a group of extremists. And the Taliban, the same.

In the last few days alone, these "extremists" have blown up a train (and maybe even a nightclub with over 100 dead) in Russia, massacred fifty-odd civilians in the Philippines, bombed a Somali medical school graduation and killed some 22 students with their instructors (this is the country's second medical school class in 20 years), executed a suicide attack on a mosque in Pakistan with at least 40 gone to the creator and, in the guise of a government, continued the persecution of democrats and moderate Muslims in Iran. …

The fact is, as Barack Obama refuses to grasp, Islam needs to shoulder responsibility for what is done in its name. For what is not rejected--in most cases, not at all rejected -- by the sages of present-day Islam. Since the president has taken to lecture Americans about "one of the world's great religions," which I believe it to be, he might also take to studying why so many of its elders in schools of theology and other authoritative men have embraced, publicly embraced, the gangsters in their midst.

Bill Kristol here.

Peter Wehner here.

WELCOME TO FORT HOOD: Louay Safi has come to Fort Hood as an instructor. Who is he? You won’t believe it. Andy McCarthy tells you here.

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES: Our good friend Miryam Lindberg in Europe has written about jihadism and counterterrorism strategies; also about American exceptionalism. Her essays are here and here.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER: The Jerusalem Post reports: