A mass self-gelding

Our friends at RealClearPolitics have assembled a terrific lineup of columns reflecting on the results of the post-massacre election in Spain. Mark Steyn takes a winding path to his conclusion in “The Spanish dishonored their dead,” but none of the columns better articulates the relevant concerns. Steyn concludes:

The only fighting that there is going to be in Europe in the foreseeable future is civil war, and when that happens American infantrymen will want to be somewhere safer. Like Iraq. There are strong horses and weak horses, but right now western Europe is looking like a dead horse.

Roger L. Simon — number 18 in the prestigious Blogrunner rankings of most influential reporters and bloggers — observes in “Doofus alert!” that “it seems Al Qaeda got double for its money–a new prime minister and a nitwit.”
Kenneth Timmerman adds a relevant note on French anti-American machinations in the New York Post column “The French war for oil.” Timmerman has obtained copies of Saddam Hussein’s production-sharing contracts for oil with French companies. Timmerman writes:

Many Americans are convinced even today that the war in Iraq was all about oil. And they’re right – but oil was the key for French President Jacques Chirac, not for the United States. In documents I obtained during an investigation of the French relationship to Saddam Hussein, the French interest in maintaining Saddam Hussein in power was spelled out in excruciating detail. The price tag: close to $100 billion. That was what French oil companies stood to profit in the first seven years of their exclusive oil arrangements – had Saddam remained in power.

Timmerman adds:

[O]il wasn’t the only reason France opposed the United States at the United Nations in the lead-up to the war. The megalomania of Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (who lied to Secretary of State Colin Powell repeatedly and later boasted about it to visiting U.S. congressional delegations) certainly entered into the mix. So did French pride, wounded at the realization that France is no longer the great power it once was. But the French did not merely disagree with the United States over Iraq, as did a certain number of our allies: They actively sought to rally world leaders and public opinion to treat the United States – not Saddam Hussein – as the enemy.

The column is based on Timmerman’s new book, The French Betrayal of America.
Finally, at Little Green Footballs Charles Johnson provides a whirlwind tour of leading Middle East mosques at prayer this past Friday reflecting on the Madrid massacre. Johnson finds in the sermons a “hellish torrent of hatred[.]” His roundup is “Peaceful religion watch.”
Johnson observes that the imams and sheikhs of even the most “moderate” Islamic countries have been emboldened by events to scream for Jewish and Crusader blood. He concludes with characteristically cautionary words: “[R]emember, the extremists are a tiny minority, following a perverted version of Islam. Don

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