This morning we bring you good news and bad news.  Which would you like first?

Just kidding - you’re not getting that choice:

Evidence of al-Qaida’s problems in Iraq is weighty and convincing. It has been badly hit by the fightback from the American-backed Sunni “Sons of Iraq” and the US troop “surge”. Western intelligence agencies estimate that the number of foreign fighters is down to single figures each month. The border with Syria is now harder to cross.

Iraq-watchers point, too, to financial strain caused by the arrests of al-Qaida sympathisers in Saudi Arabia, mafia-like disputes over alcohol licences and difficulties recruiting the right calibre of people. Last month, a sympathetic website carried a study showing a 94% decline in operations over a year. The Islamic State of Iraq claimed 334 operations in November 2006 but just 25 a year later. Attacks dropped from 292 in May 2007 to 16 by mid-May this year.

Dia Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on radical Islamists, says recent al-Qaida propaganda footage from Iraq is old and cannot mask the crisis it is facing. “They have not got new things to say about Iraq though they are trying to give the impression that they are still alive. The material isn’t convincing.” Nigel Inkster, former deputy head of MI6, now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees: “Al-Qaida is starting to prepare their people for strategic failure in Iraq.”

Al-Qaida is also perceived as being “on the back foot” because of attacks by Muslim clerics on its takfiri ideology and revulsion at the killing of innocent Muslims. Participants in Zawahiri’s recent “open dialogue” on Islamist websites compared al-Qaida’s performance unfavourably with the successes of Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Challenges to the use of violence by Sayid Imam al-Sharif, founder of the Egyptian Jihad group, have rattled his old colleague Zawahiri, says Rashwan. Influential Saudi clerics have helped undercut al-Qaida’s theological arguments. How far such rarified debates affect radicalised Muslim youth in Bradford or Madrid is a different question.

What’s the key difference between the U.S. in Iraq and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon?  The regime of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, confronted with the opportunity to eradicate both Hamas and Hezbollah two years ago after both Iranian proxies helpfully provided the provocation by kidnapping several IDF soldiers, lost its nerve and let the “international community” intervene and impose a ceasefire that handed the Jewish state’s enemies a qualified military victory and a gargantuan propaganda/morale triumph.  For the first time since Israel was reborn as a nation in 1948, external Muslim enemies had attacked her and fought her to a standstill.  Not because the Hezbos and Hamastanis were better soldiers or had superior weapons or tactics, but because Israel’s political leadership, fearing a “world opinion” that will NEVER favor them whatever the circumstances, was afraid to fight.

President Bush, faced with a similar situation in Iraq six months later, a near-unanimous domestic and international demand for U.S. retreat, and a confident Iran-al Qaeda axis believing their conquest of Iraq was only a matter of time, tacked directly into that ferocious defeatist gale with the appointment of General David Petraeus and the implementation of the “Surge” strategy instead.

Today Israel is looking down the barrel of another war with a much better armed and trained Hezbollah, which now all but rules Lebanon, while a few hundred miles to the east, al Qaeda has been massacred, the mullahs have lost Sadr and the Madri Army, and democratic Iraq has stabilized.  Or, distilled further, Ehud Olmert was afraid to win, and so lost; George W. Bush chose to win, and did - a fact so incontrovertible that not even European leftist publications are bothering to deny it any longer.

The Guardian piece does fret about al Qaeda opening up “new” fronts in Algeria, Yemen, and Somalia, none of which, as Ensign Ed details, are truly new.

But that brings us to today’s bad news.  If al Qaeda is going to make a major move somewhere else, there are two likely candidates - Pakistan, and the United States of America:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush Administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court’s liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” …

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Well, that’s it, then.  After nibbling around the edges for almost seven years, the American Left, via its media, congressional, and finally its judicial strongholds, has finally turned the policy clock all the way back to September 10, 2001.  There is now nothing left of the steps taken in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks to defend our country from this enemy and its insidious mode of warfare.

Let’s tally it up: the ability to extract intelligence from captured jihadis in a war where the extraction of intelligence is maximally critical to the saving of American civilian lives was sacrificed on the alter of imaginary “torture” objections.  The ability to disrupt the financing of terrorist networks (the SWIFT program) was exposed and nullified by the New York Times.  The ability of the NSA to monitor jihadi communications worldwide was first exposed by the Times, then subjected to FISA oversight, and now is forbidden altogether, and has been for nearly six months.  And now the Supreme Court, by the usual 5-4 liberal majority, has decreed that the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism is no longer a war, but is a conventional, civilian “law enforcement” matter once more.

And here I thought it was going to be President Hussein who turned all those Gitmo bloodmisters loose to rejoin the Global Jihad against us.  Turns out it’ll be President Bush.  The rapturous, ecstatic orgasms of the fever swamps at such delectible irony must be seismic this morning.

If they wanted irony, they should have had the Supremes wait to issue this ruling until September 11th.  Maybe they figured that if they did, nobody would remember why that would be so ironic.

Here’s another irony: by deciding that “the Constitution applies worldwide rather than just to the US and its residents,” Justice Kennedy’s majority has issued what is literally an act of judicial imperialism in the most liberal sense imaginable: he has imposed NOT American power, NOT American rule, NOT American law on the entire planet, but only its civil liberties protections.  Just as congressional Dems have successfully ruled that U.S. intelligence cannot monitor ANY enemy communications ANYWHERE on the globe if, at some point, they flow through so much as a single American communications hub or server, now five robed oligarchs have decreed that all an enemy has to do to literally get away with mass murder on American soil is not wear a uniform and wage war from amongst our civilian population, then hide behind the very freedoms they are trying to destroy, get sprung by another dhimmized American judge, and continue the jihad.

The fact that we’ve never, in 232 years of national history, lavished captured enemy prisoners in time of war with full constitutional rights, or treated illegal combatants as legitimate POWs, or that the Geneva Convention defines illegal combatants with precisely the criteria that describe Islamic terrorists?  Non-functional.  Obsolete.  Superceded.

Olympus has spoken.  The American people are now officially on death row.  The only question is when and where the next mass attack in the homeland comes.  We can only hope and pray that our men and women in uniform (who are now going to have to rotate home to testify in civilian criminal trials, and who will presumeably have to read each captured jihadi his Miranda rights, and who will, in practice, be more likely to kill them in battle than capture them, cutting us off from a primary avenue of vital intelligence gathering) have bought us more time to come to our voting senses than the SCOTUS has gifted to bin Laden & Co. to get back on their feet and exploit the “get out of jail free” card they’ve been so foolishly handed.

UPDATE: Mark Levin provides a Jeremiac lament:

It has been the objective of the left-wing bar to fight aspects of this war in our courtrooms, where it knew it would have a decent chance at victory. So complete is the Court’s disregard for the Constitution and even its own precedent now that anything is possible. And what was once considered inconceivable is now compelled by the Constitution, or so five justices have ruled. I fear for my country. I really do. And AP, among others, reports this story as a defeat for “the Bush Administration.” Really? I see it as a defeat for the nation.

Well, remember, Mark - for liberals, America is only “their” nation when they get to rule it.  Otherwise, they see it as their enemy, which goes a long way in explaining this suicidal ruling and the Left’s - and, doubtless, al Qaeda’s - raucous celebration of it.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has tons and tons and tons more.  Though I’ve gotta differ with him on one point: where’s the bona fide indication that Senator McCain would appoint federal judges and SCOTUS Justices that would have dissented against this spectacularly unconstitutional, not to mention literally lethal, usurpation of Legislative and Executive power when he’s done everything in his power for years to block such appointments in the Senate and holds a Homeland Security stance that is far more in tune with the five-justice lib majority?

UPDATE II: The blistering dissents of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia.

[cross-posted at ]