Wait, didn’t we surrender?

Still glad that Andy’s back:

Paris never wanted to be involved, but the notion that even a chief appeaser of Islamist terror can escape its fury is getting less and less persuasive. French journalists have been kidnapped in Iraq in protest of France’s admirable secularism in its education system. France refuses to give up its head-scarf ban in schools. More innocents are likely to be murdered. One can only hope that Paris gets the message. There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.

It never ceases to amaze how he can follow up a set of reasonably coherent arguments and insightful observation with something like this. In Andy’s mind, France did not support the invasion of Iraq because it wanted to appease the Islamists, and shrink from the War of Terror. Never mind that anti-islamic sentiment is much higher in France than in the United States, or that French forces have been in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda for the last three years. No Iraq war= appeasement of terrorists. You’re either with George W. Bush, or with the terrorists. No escaping this fight, apparently. And debating tactics apparently means discussing different variants of occupation strategy, because it certainly doesn’t mean questioning the wisdom of invading a secular Islamic state that has the fewest connections with international terrorism of anyone in the neighborhood.

Other appeasers? Russia, which has been too busy slaughtering Muslims in Chechnya to bother with Iraq, and China, which has taken advantage of the War on Terror to violently consolidate authority over the Islamic population of Xinjiang. They don’t understand that there are only two sides in this war, and that they can’t escape the fight by cowardly appeasing the Islamic terror state of Iraq.

Andy does seem genuinely concerned about the hate mail he’s getting from his conservative readers over his unwillingness to swallow the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Maybe bashing the French will keep them satisfied for awhile. Here at LGM, we solve the problem of conservative hate mail by not pandering to the Right. When you don’t loudly blare their opinions back at them, they tend to wander off. Of course, we don’t depend on pledge drives for a living, either.