This wasn’t supposed to happen there. According to a “counterinsurgency” plan (COIN), anti-US, anti-infidel violence just wasn’t supposed to erupt in Garmsir, Afghanistan, of all places. But it did. And at least eight Afghans died in this Helmand Province district in rioting this week inspired by rumors that U.S. troops had roughed up a Koran.

Somewhere between “one thousand” (UPI) and “several thousand” (The New York Times) Afghans converged on the central bazaar in response to these rumors. “The Taliban were provoking the people,” an Afghan police official told the Times. “The Taliban were telling the people, ‘This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.’”

Jihad? What’s jihad? Among see-no-Islam Western policymakers, Islamic war doctrine is a cipher, a taboo, so policy is made in ignorance. But thousands of uneducated Afghans knew exactly what the Taliban meant. And what’s more, they acted on it.

It was “like watching the movie `Blackhawk Down,’” a Marine master sergeant told UPI, except “I was in it. My gunner kept yelling he had definite targets, people shooting at us but he couldn’t fire back because there were unarmed people around them.”

Ah, the Obama-McChrystal rules of non-engagement, a pillar of the see-no-Islam COIN strategy designed to eliminate civilian casualties from war — maybe all casualties, and maybe all war, if McChrystal’s latest interview is any guide.  ”It’s not about destroying the enemy’s cities,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel. “It’s not even about destroying their army, their fighters…. “It’s really about convincing the people that they want (the counterinsurgency) to stop and they ultimately will.”

Or so thinks the man drawing on the limited power of infidel persuasion in an Islamic land. All that his soldiers must do, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says, is “interact” across the language, cultural and religious barriers with “the people” to “build that relationship” — assisted by mega-sweeteners such as massive public works programs — and “the people” in effect, will jilt the “insurgency.” (Then what — onto Yemen?) But don’t shoot, please, because, as the general puts it, “you can’t bring a civilian who has been killed back to life.”

You can’t bring a soldier who has been killed back to life, either, but this general, who values Afghan “population protection” over U.S. “force protection,” didn’t mention that.

Fortunately, no Americans were killed during the Garmsir rioting, and fortunately (for their legal health) they didn’t shoot, either. Reports indicate only rioters and Afghan intelligence officers exchanged fire, with Americans targeting only a sniper aiming into their base. Of course, every window of the master sergeant’s mine-resistant vehicle was “spider-webbed from bullets.”

Just last week, NBC Nightly News dubbed Garmsir “a model of counterinsurgency success.” In November, the Marine Corps Web site said it was beginning to be “a model of economic progress.” In September, a Marine battalion commander took a visiting British general to the central bazaar for ice cream. And why not? Garmsir, first in U.S. hands, then British, and now U.S. hands again, was more than a Taliban battleground. It was a proving ground for the infidel-Islamic “interaction” strategy of giving away stuff.

British gifts to Garmsir include new roads, wells, ditches, pumps and a 70-ton bridge (built in body armor and helmets) across the main canal. If I’m not mistaken, this same bridge gave rioters easy access to the central bazaar — the same bazaar where last year, the New York Times Magazine reports, McChrystal asked every Afghan he met: “What do you need?”

His subordinates followed up — “unfailingly polite, even deferential” — at a district council meeting where the agenda “was to decide on a list of development projects, which the Americans would pay for.”

First choice (since they already had a bridge)? Repairs to the irrigation system “built by American aid workers in the 1950s (that) were badly in need of repair.” Yes, as readers of this column know, we are on our second prolonged stint of nation-building in Afghanistan, and no, the first one didn’t work, either.

They still like our stuff. But somehow it doesn’t fortify local yokels — even U.S.-secured ones — against a call to “jihad” over a simplistic lie about Koran abuse.

Why? You won’t get an answer from on high where Islam is verboten in formulating policy.

Maybe a new recreation center for Garmsir would do the trick — eh, General?

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WASHINGTON — Renewed terrorist penetration of homeland security and U.S. intelligence and military bases has thrown President Obama on the defensive — raising deeply disturbing questions about his policies to keep America safe.

Over the past week or more, in the wake of an attempted bombing of an American jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, the president and his advisers have responded with a raft of confusing and contradictory statements that has further shaken public confidence in the administration’s handling of the war on terrorism (a term that Obama hates to use).

It started, in the hours following the attempt to bring down a U.S.-bound airliner, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s statement that the nation’s counterterrorism “system worked,” only to scrap those naive words sometime later and admit the attack had exposed serious failings in our security system — an incredible contradiction by the woman in charge of our homeland defenses.

Obama’s initial statement, while on vacation in Hawaii, referred to the failed bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian trained in Yemen, as an “isolated” act. His erroneous description was scrapped, too, when the president told the nation what had already been widely reported, that this was a carefully planned Al Qaeda operation — an even more incredible contradiction.

Even more disturbing was the porous nature of the U.S. homeland’s security and counterterrorism systems that were unable to connect the dots on a long list of signals that numerous security agencies received over many months.

“We did have the information throughout the course of the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” John O. Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We had snippets of information, we had information about Umar Farouk, but we didn’t have any type of information that really allowed us to identify Mr. Abdulmutallab.”

“We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together,” he said.

In fact, the terror trail of information that various agencies received over the course of many months cried out to be connected and recognized by people whose job it is to do that. Brennan admitted as much when he said “clearly the system didn’t work,” but pointed to many “bits and pieces of information” but not enough to “map it and attach it to” the young Nigerian radical who had been trained for his bombing mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, where he was referred to as “Brother Umar Farouk the Nigerian.”

Intelligence intercepts were coming in last summer from Yemen that revealed an Al Qaeda plot built around “a Nigerian” being trained for a bombing attack, though Abdulmutallab’s name had not entered the database reports until his father notified embassy officials that his son was working with extremists. That report alone was the smoking gun that would have connected him to the earlier intercepts.

It is now clear that had this information been put together, Abdulmutallab would have been put on a watch list that would have prevented him from getting onboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

America came within milliseconds of another deadly terrorist attack, but the failed attempt has renewed bothersome questions about the Obama administration’s mishandling of homeland-security safeguards and the larger war on terrorism.

Among them: Why are we closing down Guantanamo Bay and moving terrorists to prison facilities here in the United States? Why are we sending many of them to terrorism breeding grounds where they have rejoined Al Qaeda training camps? Obama has released 42, including seven who were sent home to Yemen. Why are we giving terrorists the privileges and rights of our civilian-court system where their cases will likely go on for years through an unending legal process, followed by a string of appeals?

Brennan, using Obama’s arguments for closing Guantanamo, says it has become “a propaganda tool for Al Qaeda,” as if moving the terrorists there to U.S. prisons here would effectively prevent Al Qaeda from making this specious claim.

The administration’s botched handling of this latest bomb plot, revealing numerous counterterrorism agencies asleep at the switch, and its policy of giving terrorists the full benefits of our criminal-justice system has alarmed the American people — as it should. The president’s job-approval polls have fallen into the 40s this week.

Perhaps the last straw was Brennan’s claim Sunday that Abdulmutallab would be given the chance to win a plea agreement if he agrees to tell us what he knows about Al Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Yemen.

Abdulmutallab’s “lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, (and) we’re going to pursue that,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

So the man who almost snuffed out the lives of everyone aboard that airline on Christmas Day would be offered a chance to cop a plea. This is Obama’s war on terrorism.

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There’s at least one more aspect to consider when appraising the past six years in Iraq climaxed by the “surge.” This would be the indirect effect of “reflected glory,” if such a quaint term applies, and has to do with the sort of state the U.S. helped create in Iraq.

I don’t know how to candy-coat reality: Post-surge Iraq is a state of increasing repression, endemic corruption, religious and ethnic persecution and encroaching Sharia. Recent media reports flag just some of these glaring truths that American elites, civilian and military, seem to shy away from.

In October, from AsiaNews, came the latest news of, to quote the headline, “Sharia Slowly Advancing in Najaf and Basra, for Non-Muslims Too.” Here, the Sharia (Islamic law) is invoked to ban alcohol sales and consumption by non-Muslims — namely, Christians, given the eradication and dispersal of Iraq’s ancient Jewish population — “on the grounds that Iraq’s constitution,” as Ahmad al Sulaiti, deputy governor of Najaf, notes, “‘bans everything that violates the principles of Islam.”” More on that below.

In November, Reuters highlighted the government crackdown on the media via lawsuits against criticism, and laws enabling the government to close media outlets that “encourage terrorism, violence,” and — here’s a handy catch-all — “tensions.” There are new rules to license satellite trucks, censor books and control Internet cafes. “The measures evoke memories of … the laws used to muzzle (journalism) under Saddam Hussein,” Reuters writes.

In December, the British paper The Observer reported that hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers descended on Baghdad’s 300 nightclubs where they “slapped owners’ faces, scattered their patrons and dancing girls, ripped down posters advertising upcoming acts and ordered alcohol removed from the shelves.” The official reason? No licenses. But, the paper reports, “the reality is that a year-long renaissance in Baghdad’s nightlife may be over as this increasingly conservative city takes on a hard-line religious identity.” As one club owner said: “This is a political decision with a religious agenda. (Prime Minister Nouri al-) Maliki needs the votes of religious parties … They (the government) supported us and gave us incentives to reopen the clubs, then when it suited them, they sold us and themselves out to the fundamentalists.”

There’s a lot of that “selling out to the fundamentalists” going around post-surge Iraq, where, it must be faced, one particularly shocking, unintended consequence of U.S. involvement has been the religious “cleansing” of Iraq’s ancient Christian populations. In 2003, 1 million Christians lived in Iraq. Six years later, after successive waves of violence and intimidation largely unchecked by either Iraqi government action or U.S. intercession, more than 500,000 Christians have fled the country. It is a crisis that inspired Christian leaders to assemble in Baghdad in December for a conference piteously titled: “Do Christians Have a Future in Iraq?”

This anti-Christian persecution is a large part of why the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended in December 2008 that the State Department name Iraq a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) — its dread Saddam-era designation. (Recommendation denied.) In May, to strengthen human rights in Iraq, the commission’s Iraq report included suggested amendments to Iraq’s constitution, which, not incidentally, boil down to abolishing the constitutional supremacy of Islamic law. (And yes, U.S. legal advisers helped write this same Sharia-supreme governing document.)

For example, the commission suggested deleting the line in Article 2 that says no law may contradict “the established provisions of Islam.” It suggested revising the “guarantee of `the Islamic identity of the majority’ to make certain that this identity is not used to justify violations” of human rights. It also suggested that “the free and informed consent of both parties (be) required to move a personal status case to the religious law system,” and “that religious court rulings (be) subject to final review under Iraq’s civil law.” Another suggestion was to remove “the ability of making appointments to the Federal Supreme Court based on training in Islamic jurisprudence alone.”

Good ideas — if religious freedom is the objective. But it is not the objective in Iraq, or in other Islamic countries. Which should make the United States, founded and defined by such freedom, look before nation-building, and ask: Do we really want Americans to “surge” and risk death to build nations such as this to stand as monuments to “victory”?

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Here is my New Years cartoon.  First, I do a rough pencil sketch …

Then I do finished line art, also in pencil, but scanned as high contrast to look like I use ink.  This is the image most people will see in the newspaper.  My drawings are on 11″x17″ paper.  I work bigger than most editorial cartoonists.

And then I color it in Photoshop for the few newspapers that print cartoons in color, and for the Web.

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So much for the lack of post-surge U.S. business benefits in Iraq, as I wrote last week. Now, what kind of post-surge ally is Iraq?

No kind.

I write in wonder that the ultimate failures of the surge strategy — which include the failure of anything resembling a U.S. ally to emerge in post-Saddam Iraq — have never entered national discourse. Rather, the strategy that “won Iraq” has been mythologized as a “success” to be repeated in Afghanistan.

It’s not that there aren’t hints to the contrary — as when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill arrived at the Iraqi parliament this month and “some deputies,” the New York Times reported, “demanded he be barred from the building.” Or when 42 percent of Iraqis polled by the BBC in March 2008 still thought it “acceptable” to attack U.S. forces. Or when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, as U.S. forces transferred security responsibilities to Iraqi forces in June, obstreperously declared “victory” over those same U.S. forces! Such incidents convey hostility toward the United States inside Iraq, but there’s more. Of greater consequence are the positions against U.S. interests Iraq is taking in world affairs.

Take the foundational principle of freedom of speech, continuously under assault by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the international arena. The OIC includes the world’s 57 Muslim nations as represented by kings, heads of state and governments, with policies overseen by the foreign ministers of these same 57 nations. Describing itself as the “collective voice of the Islamic world,” the OIC strives to extend Islamic law throughout the world, and to that end, is the driving force at the United Nations to outlaw criticism of Islam (which includes Islamic law) through proposed bans on the “defamation of religions” — namely, Islam. This is a malignant thrust at the mechanism of Western liberty. Where does post-surge Iraq come down in this crucial ideological struggle?

An OIC nation, Iraq is, with other OIC nations, a signatory to the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. This declaration defines human rights according to Islamic law, which prohibits criticism of Islam. Indeed, Iraq’s U.S.-enabled 2004 constitution enshrines Islamic law above all. Little wonder Iraq consistently votes at the United Nations with the OIC and against the United States on this key ideological divide between Islam and the West, most recently in November.

Then there’s Iran.

Iran may be a menace to the West, but it is also Iraq’s largest trading partner. Heavily involved in Iraq’s reconstruction, Iran has masterminded extensive loan, tourism and energy programs in Iraq while maintaining close connections to Iraq’s dominant Shiite political parties. This disastrous fact should dampen — at least enter into — assessments of the surge strategy’s “success.”

But it doesn’t. Not even the fact that Bank Melli — the Iranian terror bank outlawed by the U.S. Treasury as a conduit for Iran’s nuclear and terrorist programs — operates a branch in Baghdad gives pause to one-surge-fits-all enthusiasts. The Bank Melli example is particularly egregious because the bank funds Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force, which is responsible for innumerable American casualties in Iraq — American sacrifices on behalf of Iraq. Guess we’re supposed to look the other way. But that’s like applauding the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and Iraq without noticing that the agreement prohibits the United States from attacking Iran (or any other country) from Iraq.

Iraq’s pattern of hostility to U.S. interests continues vis-a-vis Israel, a bona-fide U.S. ally against jihad terror. Whenever Israel strikes back at jihad — whether at Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon — post-Saddam Iraq is quick to condemn the Jewish state, which, not incidentally, it also continues to boycott with the rest of the Arab League.

Additionally, Maliki’s public refusal even to criticize Hezbollah in 2006 prompted Dan Senor, a former Bush administration advisor in Baghdad, to write in the Wall Street Journal: “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We had thought that a post-Saddam Iraqi government would be less susceptible to Arab League pressure. … This change of tone was to be a model for the region.”

And why did “we” ever think this? Such was — and is — the deceptive power of the see-no-Islam fantasy.

Onto Afghanistan.

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President Obama has sold his overhaul of the healthcare system to the American Congress. But selling it to the American people poses one of his biggest tests for 2010.

Last week, Senate Democrats voted yes on health care because they had no choice. They confronted the same irrefutable fact that House Democrats had faced in early November when they passed their own bill by an eyelash. Once Obama started down this road, there was no turning back. If Democrats had blocked this measure, they would have branded their president as ineffectual and their party as incompetent.

Tough bargaining lies ahead, as House and Senate negotiators try to reconcile their two bills. But the same basic dynamic is likely to hold. Winning is better than losing. The president will probably sign a compromise measure and proclaim victory.

But that victory could cause the Democrats a huge political headache. On the eve of the Senate vote, the ABC/Washington Post poll reported that only 44 percent favored changing the healthcare system and 51 percent opposed.

More dangerous for the president, the public has soured on his handling of the issue. Last April, 57 percent approved of his performance, and 29 percent disapproved; today, 53 percent are negative and 44 percent positive. That’s a swing of 37 points in just eight months.

Those numbers have Republicans salivating. By presenting a united front against health care, they are well placed to run hard on the issue and Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, is right when he said: “There will be a day of accounting. Perhaps the first day of accounting will be Election Day, 2010.”

Why has the political prognosis swung so sharply against the Democrats? And do they have any hope for a recovery?

After all, these bills would do many good things. Thirty million more Americans would be eligible for health coverage. Insurance companies would be barred from denying or dumping sick clients. New technologies could start flushing waste out of the system.

The first answer lies in the numbers. Thirty million is a lot of people, but that amounts to only 11 percent of the population. When this debate started, 83 percent of Americans already had insurance, and most were happy with their coverage.

As a campaign slogan, change was an enormous asset. But as a guide for governing, that same idea became a threat, not a promise, for a lot of voters.

Obama has tried repeatedly to explain his point: If the system is not revised, premiums will go up, real wages will go down, folks could lose their policies if they get sick or change jobs. Those are good arguments, but they’re too abstract — and they haven’t worked. Voters fear their costs will rise while their care declines.

Moreover, the larger political context is undermining Obama’s persuasiveness. For one thing, Americans don’t trust Washington. The Republican drumfire that these bills amount to a “government takeover” of health care distorts the facts, but works politically. In a recent Pew poll, “too much government involvement in health care” was the No. 1 reason cited by opponents.

A second issue is the budget deficit, which hit $1.4 trillion last year. When Democrats insist their bills are “paid for,” many voters simply don’t believe them and with good reason. The numbers might add up on paper, but Congress has repeatedly shown it won’t make the unpopular choices necessary to finance a measure that could cost $1 trillion.

A third problem for the Democrats is the economy. Ten percent are out of work, and in the Pew poll, nine of 10 called the economy “fair” or “poor.” That leaves little room for generosity. If the bill is “paid for,” that money has to come from somewhere. Taxpayers know that and don’t like it.

Fourth, the Democrats made matters worse, not better. Instead of promoting their cause to the public, they spent much of their time squabbling with one another. Liberal hardliners led by former party chairman Howard Dean squealed about surrendering to moderate heretics. And those moderates, especially Sen. Ben Nelson, went too far in squeezing out concessions.

When party leaders caved in and exempted Nelson’s home state of Nebraska from increased Medicaid payments, they aggravated public cynicism and handed the Republicans a potent political weapon.

So Happy New Year, Mr. President! You won the battle, but it will take every last ounce of your persuasive powers to win the war.

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