Saddam Hussein is urging Iraqis to unite. No, he hasn't joined the Bush administration. He wants Iraqis to unite against the foreign invaders (that would be us, not Al Qaeda). The judge eventually shut off his microphone. More and more I wish that American soldier had just thrown a grenade down that spider hole.

The Bush Administration still backs its pre-emptive war to remove Hussein, and argues that Iran is now the greatest danger facing America.

David Ignatius is expressing some optimism about how things are shaping up in talks to form a new government in Iraq. James Hoagland thinks Prime Minister Al Jafari is still in the fight to retain his office. None of this makes any difference when it comes to public opinion here in the U.S., as David Broder points out in this column about the President's latest effort to bolster support for the Iraq War.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are conducting a terror campaign to prevent girls from going to school. I wonder if NATO, which is assuming responsibility for the southern part of the country where most of this activity is going on, will have the stones (and the capability) to put an end to it.

The ever controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci has a new book which posits the theory that there has been a conspiracy of European leftists and Islamists to help bring about the reality of Eurabia. Brendan Bernhard writes about it in LA Weekly. I especially like this passage:

Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. “One day Arabs were a remote people … camping out in tents with camels … the next, they were neighbors.” On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look “like hooded falcons.” Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks “like a crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.”

Writers far better acquainted with the Muslim world than Raban have been equally perplexed. In 1995, the late American novelist Paul Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, told me that he could not understand why the French had allowed millions of North African Muslims into their country. Bowles had chosen to live among Muslims for most of his life, yet he obviously considered it highly unlikely that so many of them could be successfully integrated into a modern, secular European state.

Perhaps Bowles would have been interested in this passage from Fallaci’s book: “In 1974 [Algerian President] Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’ ”

Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation’s president before an international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor’s A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, “We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers.” In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week, Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not the other way around. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” he said. “By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”

At what point, I wonder, will the Muslim population reach the critical mass that will allow them to take control of the organs of government in these countries? Will the native populations reach a point where they recognize their own extinction is on the horizon? If so, how will they react? Fallaci, by the way, now lives in New York.