Recent reports about Larry Franklin, AIPAC, Steve Rosen and Keith Wasserman remind me of the importance of the big picture.  When you find that allies are not angels, remember who is in the trench with you. 

In 2007, Ray Robison published one of the least heralded books of that year, Both In One Trench.  It was the first analysis of the captured Iraqi documents on the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. 

Bush, Tenant and Cheney said there had been a functioning relationship between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda.  Gore, Kerry and Senator Levin said there was not.  Any fair reading of the evidence shows that the Bush camp was right.  Although they were competing for leadership and bin Laden had no respect for Saddam as a Muslim, Iraq and al Qaeda were both in one trench. 

The later comprehensive report on these captured documents came to the same conclusion, but it was dismissed with the phrase “no smoking gun”.  If the smoking gun standard were applied to murder trials, very few murderers would be convicted.  This was a case decided by the preponderance of evidence. 

I believe Robison was correct to say “The documents reveal that the Saddam regime was complicit in supporting the global Islamic jihad movement as a whole and specifically the Taliban and al Qaeda.” 

It is almost impossible to tell who would be in our trench in a fight.  Certainly not all the nations that joined us to fight Saddam in 2003.  NATO’s performance in Afghanistan, with a few exceptions, is a study in schizophrenia. 

In no man's land we see Europe bargaining with the enemy for a separate peace, while losing their own territory by demographics.  In the enemy trench we see the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 57 countries bound together by the political goals of Islam.  On the sidelines, cheering for the OIC, are our Leftist enemies, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.  They leave the sidelines to vote the OIC line in the UN.    

Al Qaeda is the tip of the spear.  Most Americans still think there is no spearhead and shaft behind the tip.  Saddam was part of the spearhead, Islam is the shaft.   

This is a view of the world many have come to slowly and reluctantly, forced by events since 9/11 that reveal the nature of Islam.  Armed conflict between America and Islam is not inevitable.  Those who interpret Islam for its masses could ideologically disarm the jihad. 

Although the irreconcilable differences between traditional Islam and capitalistic liberal democracy will lead to one of those systems’ fundamental change, the world is not black and white.  We will continue to see strange bed partners such as we are seeing now.  The Saudis are more concerned right now about a nuclear Iran than with destroying Israel, and are likely to allow overflight for an attack on Iran.  

President Obama came into office believing that America had to find more friends.  Obama will  find that his friendly advances and apologies to the third world, Islamists and Leftists will not be returned in kind.  He cannot offer them what they want.  He cannot create an America that rejects Capitalism and Individualism in favor of Socialism and group identity politics.  He cannot create an America that is not a threat to its ideological enemies. 

I wonder if he is learning the meaning, for him and for America, of the phrase “It’s lonely at the top.”  Will he learn soon enough that it is not paranoid to recognize that the nation at the top is, and always has been, everyone’s target?  No amount of appeasement will change that. 

He has shown that he has loyalties that extend beyond America.  It is not yet clear what level of compromise to America’s traditional identity he will allow in service to his belief in cultural relativism and his desire to lead America to its place in a world  predicated on that belief.