So Zawahiri says to Zarqawi...

Click on the title bar to follow the link. It's a letter from Ayman-al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi, you may recall, is now famous for beheading his captives and sending the gruesome videotapes to sympathetic "news" agencies. Zawahiri is an Egyptian doctor who professed allegiance to Bin Ladin in 1999 and recently has been one of the highest ranking Al Quaida members.

If this letter doesn't motivate us to stay the course in Iraq then I don't know what will. These guys are waging a holy war, fully convinced that God is on their side and that ultimately every non-Muslim in the world must die for them to be successful.

For all my readers who may have taken the stance that this is not their war, that they disagree with this war, that they believe Saddam was doing just fine and we should've left him alone... THESE JIHADISTS DON'T CARE. YOU ARE NOT MUSLIM. YOU MUST DIE.

Success in Iraq, largely unreported

If you'd like a more accurate picture of what's happening in Iraq than you are getting from CNN... check out the link above by clicking on the title bar. Michael Yon is on the ground in Iraq and has been riding in combat, life and death missions with the American military and with ISF.

If it bleeds, it leads. CNN has a financial motive for running the "bad" news. They are just paying the bills. For some reason, America seems to want the body count more than to hear anything about American success. I'll let someone else dig into the self-loathing that the world seems to want from America.

Read Michael Yon's work. It'll give you a truly human face to put onto those heroic men and women of the American military and it'll give you a respect for the Iraqis that are beginning to construct a country out of the ashes of a post-Saddam terror.

The poor and their terrible luck

There's much conversation these days about the injustice in New Orleans. On the far end (just past the line of lunacy) is the opinion that somehow, all conservatives and Republicans and primarily the Bush administration conspired to kill a few hundred black people by not letting them leave, blowing up the levee and controlling the weather. On the more rational end of the scale are the poeple who say that decades of injustice and racial discrimination led to the awful conditions that now face the primarily black and poor residents of New Orleans. Somewhere in the middle (as usual) is the truth.

I wonder what would happen if we found all those poor folks whose houses were destroyed and who have nothing and we gave them $100,000. I think that the lottery winners have taught us clearly that poor people have poor ways. Give a man a million dollars and he's no better equipped to deal with it than he was equipped to deal with his $15,000 annual income. Given 24 months, most lottery winners are right back where they started, richer only for the experience of having once owned a really expensive car or truck and maybe a nicer home.

My struggle is this: What is justice? What opportunities can we provide that we don't already provide? Throwing money at it has been the federal government's response for years and it's clearly not working. What would work? Or, are we to accept that there will always be Warren Buffets and there will always be folks who live day to day? Are the poor simple victims of fate? Are the rich subject to that same fate? Buffett accidentally got a fantastic education and in the luckiest mistake ever started up Berkshire Hathaway? (Ooops, I accidentally made $40 billion!) What opportunities did Lee Iaccoca have that the poor today don't have? What is the difference between the people who beat poverty and those who don't? Is it something that the government can provide?