WHY GOOD IRAQI NEWS DOES NOT GET REPORTED

Information about Iraq obtained at the Miramar Marine Corp air station in San Diego.

Writer is a retired Navy fighter pilot who flew out of Miramar.

I can't remember if I told you, but for about a year now and at the request of the Planning Board in Rancho Bernardo, I have been a member of the Miramar Community Leaders Forum. What a difference it is from 10 years ago.

The base is very open and provides us detailed statistics on air operations as well as informative briefings on what is going on in IRAQ and AFGANISTAN.

Last month, the guest speaker was a female 1st Lt who worked in public affairs. The military public affairs offices are the ones that handle the imbedded reporters from the national media.

According to her, 98% of the imbedded reporters are fair and do not have a liberal bias. They call it like they see it, but it can get edited back home (and does). She said that 2% of the imbedded reporters are jerks and really twist the reporting, but it is worth it to put up with these clowns in order to also have the other 98% who are fair.

So why am I telling you all of this? Well, to me, there was some shocking information included in her briefing. It seems that the good news that we complain is never reported on is, in fact, censored by our very own military.

If a new school is opened and it is reported on in the press, the insurgents blow it up.

If a power plant comes back on line and it is reported, the insurgents blow it up.

If a local Sunni Sheik sits down with the Shiite leaders and precipitates an agreement between the parties
to try to get along (and it is reported), he is assassinated.

Every single news worthy event is pored over by the military public affairs people and fully 90% of the good news about IRAQ is never reported at the request of our military press or the local population.

They just don't want things blown up and people killed. We would much rather quietly bring a power plant back on line and tell no one. Even the locals realize it is in their best interest to just not mention it.

To me, this is an element of the war that few people (if any) are aware of. Just thought you might be interested.

ISLAMIC STATE OF NORTH AMERICA BY 2050

GLOBAL JIHAD



D.C. Imam declares Muslim takeover-plan



Washington-based cleric working toward 'Islamic State of North America' by2050



By Art Moore



A Washington, D.C., imam states explicitly on the website for hisorganization that he is part of a movement working toward replacement of theU.S. Government with "the Islamic State of North America" by 2050.



With branches in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento andPhiladelphia, the group As-Sabiqun – or the Vanguard – is under theleadership of Abdul Alim Musa in the nation's capital. Musa's declaration of his intention to help lead a takeover of America washighlighted by noted Islam observer Robert Spencer on his website JihadWatch.



Spencer told WND that figures such as Musa should not be ignored, "Notbecause they have the power to succeed, but because they may commit acts ofviolence to achieve their purpose."



Musa's website declares: "Those who engage in this great effort require ahigh level of commitment and determination. We are sending out a call to thebelievers: Join with us in this great struggle to change the world!"



Musa launched the group in the early 1990s at the Al-Islam mosque inPhiladelphia. His group says it is influenced by the writings and life workof Muslim thinkers and leaders such as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasanal-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Khomenei.



The writings of Al-Banna and Qutb figured prominently in al-Qaida'sformation. Musa's organization says its leadership "has delivered numerous speeches inthe United States and abroad, contributing their analyses and efforts tosolve contemporary problems in the Muslim world and in urban America."



Abdul Alim Musa "The paramount goal of the movement is the establishment of Islam as acomplete way of life in America," the group declares. "This ultimate goal ispredicated on the belief – shared by many Muslims worldwide – that Islam isfully capable of producing a working and just social, political, economicorder."



The groups says it does not "advocate participation in the Americanpolitical process as an ideal method for advancing Islamic issues in the U.S; instead, it believes in a strong and active outreach to the people of theU.S." Spencer told WND he does not know of any direct influence Musa has onprominent Muslim leaders or on U.S.



Policymakers, but he says it's "unclearhow much 'mainstream' Muslim leaders harbor similar hopes – because no onedares question them about it." As WND reported, the founder of the leading Islamic lobby group CAIR, on Islamic-American Relations, reportedly told a group of Muslims in California they are in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam'srule over the country. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper also has said, in a newspaper interview, he hopes to see an Islamic government over the U.S.Some day, brought about not by violence but through "education."



In London last summer, as WND reported, Muslims gathered in front of theLondon Central Mosque to applaud fiery preachers prophesying the overthrowof the British government – a future vision that encompasses an Islamictakeover of the White House and the rule of the Quran over America.



Musa says he wants to avoid what he calls an "absolutist" outlook on "theadvancement of Muslims." His group's philosophy is to stress unity between the various streams ofIslam "in the attainment of common goals." Although As-Sabiqun is a Sunni movement, it has publicly voiced support forShia movements and organizations such as the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iranand the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, which waged war on Israel in the summer of 2006.



Musa, the group says, repeatedly has "stressed that the tendency by someMuslims to focus on the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam at thisjuncture in history is counterproductive to the goals of the Islamicmovement as a whole." The group says it encourages social-political advancement concurrent with aprogram of spiritual and moral development according to the Quran and Sunnah compilations of stories from the life of Islam's prophet Muhammad.



The group says it has a six-point plan of action which is implemented ateach location where a branch of the movement is established. Establishing a mosque "as a place to worship Allah in congregation and as acenter of spiritual and moral training."



"Calling the general society" to embrace Islam.



Establishing a full-time school "that raises children with a strong Islamicidentity so they can, as future Islamic leaders, effectively meet and dealwith the challenges of growing up in the West."



Establishing businesses to "make the movement financially stable andindependent."



Establishing "geographical integrity by encouraging Muslims of the communityto live in close proximity" to the mosque.



Establishing "social welfare institutions to respond to the need forspiritual and material assistance within the community as well as thegeneral society." In addition to daily classes, each mosque in the movement "also providesyouth mentorship, marriage counseling, a prison outreach program, and employment assistance for ex-convicts."



As-Sabiqun says its branch in Los Angeles "was instrumental in creating afree health clinic in cooperation with other Islamic groups. The headquarters branch in D.C. has developed scout programs for young membersof the community."



The group says the inspiration for its name comes from Quran, 9:100:"The vanguard (as-Sabiqun) of Islam – the first of those who forsook their homes, and of those who gave them aid, and also those who follow them in all good deeds – well-pleased is Allah with them, as are they with Him:



For them hath He prepared Gardens under which rivers flow, to dwell therein forever: that is the supreme Felicity."

OUR SCHOOLS A TARGET

On Sept. 1, 2004, Chechens affiliated with al Qaeda seized a middle school in Beslan, Russia. In the three day siege, 334 people --most of them children -- were killed. Could something like that happen here?

U.S. forces seized in 2002 an al Qaeda training tape of a practice assault on an abandoned school in Mir Bach Kot in Afghanistan. The terrorists were barking commands in English.

U.S. forces in Iraq found on a captured al Qaeda computer building plans for schools in six states.

In May of 2006, two Saudi students at the University of South Florida boarded a school bus. They were "cagey and evasive" in explaining why they boarded the bus, said a spokesman for the Hillsborough County sheriff.

In March of 2007, the FBI issued a bulletin to law enforcement warning that Moslems "with ties to extremist groups" were signing up to be school bus drivers.

A Houston television station reported in August of this year that 17 large yellow school buses have been stolen.Al Qaeda prefers middle schools because the girls are old enough to rape, but the boys aren't big enough to fight back, says retired Army LtCol. Dave Grossman, who runs a private security firm.

Why would al Qaeda contemplate something so monstrous?Al Qaeda may lack the strength to attack a heavily defended target such as a military base or a nuclear power plant. But attacking a school would be child's play. Lt Col. Grossman thinks schools in rural areas are the most likely targets, because response time from law enforcement would be slower.

"The terrorists' primary objective is to instill fear in every one of us," former FBI agent Don Clark said on the Glenn Beck program last month. "What better way to attack our schools and murder our children?"Don't they realize that such an attack would make Americans very, very mad?

They're counting on that, says Brad Thor, a former Homeland Security official who's written a book about al Qaeda's threat to children. "They want to create something so horrible that we will lose control in our reaction, we will be lynching Moslem people in the streets and burning mosques," Mr. Thor told Glenn Beck.

"They want to reduce us to animals like them to get the Islamic world behind them and finally get the holy war that they want kicked off and ignited."The vast majority of Moslems in the U.S. would be as horrified as you or I by an attack on schoolchildren. But it only takes a few.

Simultaneous attacks on three or four schools could be conducted by as few as 100 Islamists who are willing to die in order to kill. Such attacks would garner enormous publicity and cause widespread panic. Attacking schools here would be a desperate move. But depending on how things go in Pakistan over the next few weeks, al Qaeda may be in need of the Islamist version of the "Hail Mary" pass.

It's gotten its clock cleaned in Iraq. The ambushes the Taliban has sprung recently in Afghanistan have resulted in casualties chiefly among the ambushers. Al Qaeda's street credo in the Moslem world is at an all time low.

I doubt Americans would respond as al Qaeda hopes to an attack on our schools. But if such an outrage were to occur, Democrats need to think more about how voters will react to a political party that's been trying to cripple the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to identify suspected terrorists, and to obtain useful information from them if they are captured.

Democrats attempted to block the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to be attorney general because he would not declare the interrogation technique of waterboarding as "torture," something Congress itself was unwilling to do last year.

Waterboarding simulates drowning. It's very unpleasant, but causes no permanent damage. Only a handful of al Qaeda suspects have been subjected to the procedure, which is routinely applied to American pilots and special forces soldiers in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training.

It is ludicrous to say we may not do to terrorists what we routinely put our own people through, but Democrats tend to define as "torture" anything terrorists find unpleasant.

This attitude plays well with moonbats such as Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, who has written that trimming the beards of detainees at Guantanamo constitutes "torture." But how well will it play after an American Beslan?

AL QAEDA'S NEW DISGUISE

1. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), the militant wing of the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), is emerging as the new Trojan Horse of Al Qaeda to carry out operations on behalf of Al Qaeda in areas where Al Qaeda faces difficulty in operating directly or in those cases where it does not want to operate directly.

2. In the past, this role was being performed by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Both the LET and the LEJ are members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Both are strongly Wahabi organisations, but whereas the LEJ is strongly anti-US, anti-Israel, anti-India, anti-Iran and anti-Shia, the LET is only anti-US, anti-Israel and anti-India, but not anti-Iran or anti-Shia.

3. There is no confirmed instance of the LET indulging in planned anti-Shia violence in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but the LEJ has been responsible for most of the targeted attacks on Shias and their places of worship in Pakistan and on the Hazaras---who are Shias---in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

4.The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which are also members of the IIF, strongly share the anti-Shia feelings of the LEJ, but they do not indulge in targeted attacks on Shias and their places of worship.

Many of the leaders of these organisations, including Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the JEM, started their jihadi career in the SSP, but later drifted away from it since they felt uncomfortable with its targeted attacks on Shias and their places of worship.

Despite being separate now, they do co-operate with the LEJ in its operations directed against US interests and the Pakistani armed forces. The LET prefers to operate independently without getting involved with the SSP or the LEJ. The LET avoids attacks on Pakistani security forces.

5. The strong action taken by the international community against known and suspected Arab members of Al Qaeda created difficulties for them in travelling freely and in carrying out operations in non-Muslim countries. Consequently, it startred depending increasingly on the Pakistani members of the LET for its operations.

Post-9/11, the LET emerged as the clone of Al Qaeda. It opened its sleeper cells in countries such as Australia, Singapore, the UK, France and the US to help Al Qaeda in its operations by collecting information, motivating the members of the Pakistani diaspora and other means.

6. In 2002-03, Western intelligence agencies did not pay much attention to LET activities in the Pakistani diaspora. They tended to disregard Indian evidence about the new role of the LET as the operational facilitator of Al Qaeda since they suspected that Indian officials and non-governmental analysts tended to over-project the LET's role in the West because of its activities in Indian territory.

However, the discovery of LET sleeper cells in the Western countries post-2002 changed this attitude and Indian evidence on the LET was treated with greater seriousness. Next to the Arab members of Al Qaeda, suspected Pakistani members of the LET were placed under close surveillance in many countries. This created difficulties in the movement and activities of the LET. The LET is no longer able to operate outside the Indian sub-continnt as freely as it used to do in the past.

7. Moreover, the LET is feeling uncomfortable over the anti-Shia violence unleashed by Al Qaeda and its surrogates in Iraq. While continuing to be a member of the IIF, it is trying to avoid being associated with Al Qaeda's anti-Shia and anti-Saudi policies.

Saudi charity organisations have been one of the main funders of the LET, which has an active branch in Saudi Arabia to recruit members from the Indian Muslim diaspora in the Gulf countries.

8.In view of these developments, Al Qaeda has started increasingly using the the SSP and the LEJ for its operations in Pakistan itself as well as in the non-Muslim countries. The LEJ was actively involved in supporting the students of the two madrasas of the Lal Masjid of Islamabad before they were raided by Pakistani military commandoes in July,2007.

Many of the women, who were targeted by the girl students for allegedly running a call girl racket, were reportedly Shias. It has been actively backing the tribals, who have taken to arms against the Pakistani security forces in North and South Waziristan and in the Swat Valley in the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) of the North-West Frontier Province.

Under the influence of the LEJ, the tribals have been beheading or otherwise killing only the Shias among the security forces personnel captured by them. Well-informed Police sources say that all the para-military personnel beheaded so far by the tribals were Shias.

According to them, there has not been a single instance of the beheading of a Sunni member of the security forces though many Sunnis have been killed in explosions.

9. The JEM is also actively involved in supporting the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in its fight against the security forces in the Swat Valley.There have been targeted attacks on members of the local Shia community.

The anti-Shia dimension of the current violence in the tribal areas has also been corroborated by the well-informed "Daily Times" of Lahore in an editorial titled "Two Oppressions" carried by it on November 10, 2007.

The editorial says: ' The latest news from Waziristan is that a well-known Shia personality has been gunned down. This is a part of the sectarian violence that Al Qaeda commits in the territories it captures.

Earlier, Shias among the captured Pakistani troops were casually beheaded while the Sunnis were returned. In the Shia-majority Parachinar in the Kurram Agency, suicide-bombers have been killing indiscriminately."

10. Thus, a new anti-Shia front has emerged inside the IIF consisting of Al Qaeda, the LEJ, the TNSM and the JEM. Al Qaeda's use of the LEJ is not confined to Pakistani territory.

The Police sources mentioned above say that in view of the difficulties now faced by suspected LET members in Western countries and in South-east Asia, Al Qaeda is encouraging the SSP and the LEJ to gradually take over the role of the LET as the motivators and mobilisers of members of the overseas Pakistani diaspora for assisting Al Qaeda in its operations.

They claim that some sleeper cells of the SSP and the LEJ have already come up in the US, the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Singapore and Australia. Since the foreign intelligence agencies do not have much information about the SSP and the LEJ, they are able to operate without creating suspicions about them.

11. The SSP and the LEJ have not come to notice till now for any activities in the Indian territory---either in Jammu & Kashmir or outside. In view of the recurring explosions targeting Muslims and Muslim places of worship in Delhi, Malegaon, Hyderabad and Ajmer since last year, one has to look into the possibility of the involvement of the SSP and the LEJ in terrorism in Indian territory.

None of the Muslim places of worship targeted in India so far belonged to the Shias, but one must note that in Pakistan, the LEJ targets not only Shias and their places of worship, but also the Barelvi Sunnis and their places of worship.

The Barelvis are a more tolerant Sunni sect and have rejected Wahabism so far.

Despite the progress made by Wahabism and Deobandi sects, the Barelvis are still in a majority in the Indian sub-continent. Hence, the LEJ's attacks on the Barelvis, many of whom are descendents of converts from Hinduism.

The Wahabis/Deobandis are mainly descendents of Muslim migrants into the sub-continent from West and Central Asia.Indian investigators should not keep their focus exclusively on the LET and the HUJI. They should keep their mind open and look into the possibility of the involvement of other jihadi terrorist organisations too.

(This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of July 1,2002, titled SIPAH-E-SAHABA PAKISTAN, LASHKAR-E-JHANGVI, BIN LADEN & RAMZI YOUSEF at http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper484.html

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com

AMARIYAH, BAGHDAD RETURNS TO NORMAL

BAGHDAD - Twilight brings traffic jams to the main shopping district of this once-affluent corner of Baghdad and hundreds of people stroll past well-stocked vegetable stands, bakeries and butcher shops.

To many in Amariyah, it seems little short of a miracle.

Just six months ago, this mostly Sunni neighborhood was one of the centers of al-Qaida in Iraq operations. The district in western Baghdad was hit by more than a dozen bombings and shootings some days. Few people dared to venture onto the streets.

On Tuesday, women shopped and men drank tea in sidewalk cafes. Occasionally, U.S. soldiers walking the streets were greeted with salaams and smiles.

What is happening here reflects similar trends across Baghdad and parts of Iraq, where civilian and U.S. military casualties have dropped sharply in the past two months. But the speed of the turnaround in places such as Amariyah has taken almost everyone — including U.S. military forces in the area — by surprise.

"The progress that we made is almost unbelievable," said Capt. Brendan Gallagher, 29, of Columbia, Md., who serves with the Army's 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division.

The neighborhood is still nowhere near its former gloss at the Beverly Hills of Baghdad, as it was called before the 2003 U.S. invasion. A six-foot-high concrete wall rings the two-square-mile neighborhood, many villas stand empty with broken windows and the streets are littered with trash. There is 70 percent unemployment, U.S. military officials say.

But residents are making the first small steps toward trying to rebuild.

Ismail Hussein mixed cement across the street from a line of shops blown up by the U.S. military after a huge cache of arms, ammunition and explosives were discovered there in late summer.
Hussein greeted a passing U.S. military patrol as he rebuilt a curb in front of a relative's home, shaping the fresh concrete with a trowel. A few months ago, he might have been shot by insurgents for this modest effort, as they tried to discourage anything that smacked of reconstruction.

Now the violence has ebbed to the point that U.S. forces — in the absence of much help from Iraq's Shiite-dominated central government — have begun planning to rebuild.

Water mains have been ruptured or cracked by bombs and the passing U.S. tanks and 25-ton Bradley armored vehicles. Sewers are clogged with refuse and, Capt. Gallagher said, some human remains.

Sunni residents are afraid still to go to the area hospital, run by Shiites, complaining of poor treatment and the fear of Shiite death squads. So the U.S. military authorities plan to build a health center using a building designated for dental offices by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials say it's impossible to understand how far the situation improved in Amariyah without explaining how far it deteriorated.

"Amariyah was one of the first places where things got real bad," said 1st Lt. Schulyer Williamson, 24, of Pensacola, Fla., part of Gallagher's unit. "My platoon sergeant and I would pick up six dead bodies a day."

Once, Williamson said, he was ambushed by snipers stationed in 12 positions along a stretch of road, trying to force the column to a choke point where insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades lurked.

"It rained," he said, describing the intensity of the shooting. "I grabbed my gunner out of the gunner's hole because he was taking too much fire." They managed to escape.

The violence peaked in May, U.S. officials said, as al-Qaida in Iraq fighters killed 14 U.S. military troops in a series of bombings. Six soldiers and their interpreter died May 19 when a massive bomb detonated in the road under their Bradley, flipping it over.

Several U.S. military officials here said the most important factor in reducing the violence in Amariyah was the U.S. troop increase, which quadrupled the number of U.S. military forces patrolling the neighborhood in mid-June.

Another key to progress, they say, was the formation in late May of a local anti-insurgent alliance, the Farsan al-Rafidayn, which in Arabic means "Knights of the Land of the Two Rivers."

The organization, called the FAR by the U.S. military, has recruited hundreds of Amariyah residents to fight against al-Qaida in Iraq — which takes inspiration from Osama bin Laden, though its direct links to his terror network are unclear. Similar groups have been formed across former insurgent strongholds in other parts of Iraq.

The FAR "Knights" are led by Abu Abed, the nom de guerre of a 40-year-old Amariyah resident who says he served as an officer in the Iraqi Army for 17 years before 2003, but otherwise is reluctant to talk about his background.

He has told friends in the U.S. military that he is the sole survivor of seven brothers, four of them victims of the sectarian violence in Baghdad in recent years.

Abu Abed started the revolt in Amariyah, he and U.S. military officials say, by confronting an al-Qaida in Iraq leader in one of Amariyah's main shopping districts. Abed told The Associated Press that the leader — known by the nickname "the white lion" — pointed a pistol at Abed and pulled the trigger, twice. Twice, the gun misfired.

The cigar-smoking commander said he wrestled the gun away from his adversary and shot him dead.

FAR has been so successful in disrupting operations of the terror group that al-Qaida in Iraq has put a $500,000 bounty on Abed's head, U.S. military officials say.

U.S. military leaders are currently paying FAR the equivalent of a $300 monthly salary for about 260 of its members to provide security. FAR has received permission to distribute the total grant among more than double that number of its members, the military says.

American officials and Abed, a Sunni, are also pushing to get FAR integrated into the Iraqi security services. But Abed said he was discouraged by recent conversations with a representative of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"She asked me how many Sunnis you have, how many Shiites," he said. "That's close to sectarianism."

Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, has said that at least two members of FAR were former allies of al-Qaida. Others, he has said, were part of the Islamic Army in Iraq, the 1920s Revolution Brigades and Tawhid and Jihad — all Sunni insurgent groups responsible for past attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

Asked about this, Abed said that "not all" members of his group were former insurgents.

But Kuehl, 41, from Huntsville, Ala., and other military officials here argued that any successful counterinsurgency requires recruiting supporters from the ranks of former adversaries. Several U.S. military officers here said there had been no suspected insurgent attacks on U.S. troops in Amariyah since early August.

"I can live with that, I think," Williamson said.

At least in part, the FAR rebellion came in reaction to the brutal punishment the al-Qaida fighters meted out for violations of their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Militants cut off the thumb and forefingers of people who smoked, Abed and U.S. military officials said, allegedly raped and killed two women for wearing short skirts and slaughtered hairdressers who gave their clients Western-style haircuts.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil told reporters Tuesday that violence in many parts of Iraq began to decline in June and has "continued to come down steadily since then."

He offered several factors for the reduction in bloodshed. "Perhaps even most significantly, the Iraqi people have just decided they've had it up to here with violence," he said.

He said all but 12 to 13 percent of Baghdad is under control by the U.S. military and other security forces, and that there is no part of the city where the U.S. can't operate.

"But I also will say, Baghdad's a dangerous place," he said. "And al-Qaida, while on the ropes, is not finished by any means. And they could come back swinging if they're allowed to."

WHO'S AFRAID OF IRAN'S NUKES?

Who's Afraid of an Iranian Bomb?

Victor Davis Hanson (Addendum from Chas. Krauthammer) Israel Commentary

At first glance, it would seem a straightforward thing to stop a relatively weak but volatile Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. It would also seem to be something a concerned world community would be actively working to do.After all, the Sunni Arab states surrounding Iran don't want a Shiite nuclear power on their borders.

Europe, which isn't all that far from Tehran and lacks a missile-defense shield, certainly doesn't want to be in range of Iran's missiles.Israel can't tolerate an Iranian theocracy both promising to wipe it off the map and then brazenly obtaining the means to do so.

The Russians and the Chinese, both already concerned about India, Pakistan and North Korea, don't need another rival Asian nuclear power on their borders.And the United States, already worried about Iranian threats to Israel and involved in daily military battles in Iraq with pro-Iranian agents and terrorists armed with Iranian-imported weapons, doesn't want a nuclear Iran expanding its Persian Gulf influence.

But in truth, most players don't care enough to stop Iran from getting the bomb, or apparently don't think it's worth the effort and cost. Some may even see some advantages to a nuclear Iran.The Arab Gulf monarchies, for example, know that their enormous dollar reserves would likely buy them some reprieve from a nuclear Iran, or at least bring in the U.S. Navy to offer them deterrence from attack.

Meanwhile, the current tension and ongoing fear of disruption in the Persian Gulf sends billions in windfall oil profits the Gulf States' way.

Leaders of Arab states also have to fear their own populations' reactions to any action taken against Islamic Iran. Despite his religious Shiite background, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is far more popular among Sunni populations in the Gulf than George Bush -- and even perhaps more popular than the autocratic Arab thugs and dictators who run most of the Middle East.

The European Union, like the Arab states, believes as a last resort that its economic clout and deft diplomats can always work out some sort of arrangement with Tehran's clerics, who, after all, need customers to buy their high-priced oil.

So, most in Europe bristle at French President Nicolas Sarkozy's warnings about an impending war to stop an Iranian bomb. Instead, they feel it's an American problem to organize global containment of Iran.Israel also has reason to fear a war with Iran.

If Israel were to attack Tehran, it could find itself in three instantaneous wars -- and be hit with thousands of missiles from the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. That shower would make last year's Hezbollah barrage seem like child's play.In Russia, Vladimir Putin's foreign policy is nursed on grievances about a lost empire, America as the sole superpower and the independence of cocky former Soviet republics.

In the thinking of oil-exporting Russia, anything that causes America to squirm and world oil prices to soar is a win/win situation. That's why Russia supplies Iran with its reactor technology and stirs the nuclear pot.

China, like Russia, is a large nuclear power and doesn't fear all that much Iranian missiles that it thinks are more likely to be pointed westward anyway.

True, it would like calm in the Gulf to ensure safe oil supplies, but thinks it still could do business with a nuclear Iran.In addition, as in the case of Russia, anything that bothers the United States can't be all that bad for Beijing. While Ahmadinejad ties the U.S. down in the Middle East, China thinks it will have more of a free hand to expand its influence in the Pacific.

Then there's the complacent situation here at home. After Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans don't feel we're up to a third war. Some point to nuclear Pakistan and believe we could likewise live with Iran having the bomb.

A few on the left even feel that a nuclear Iran would remind us of our own limitations in imposing our will and influence abroad. They belittle the current warnings of George Bush and Dick Cheney about Iran's nuclear program, shrugging that the two used to say similar things about Saddam and his nonexistent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world, represented in the U.N.'s General Assembly, feels that a nuclear Iran offers comeuppance to a haughty United States, Israel and Europe without threatening anyone else. Ahmadinejad may be viewed across the globe as a dangerous religious nut.

However, to many, he, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, also represents an anti-capitalist, anti-globalization popular front against America and therefore shouldn't be ostracized.So, who wants a nuclear Iran?

No one and everyone. (And, how very sad and terrifying)

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other:

How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com .

Chas. Krauthammer October 25, 2007 on Fox News All-Star Panel said "I don't think that this administration will choose to leave office with the Iranian nuclear threat in place."