1. Since the moratorium was instituted, we‘ve had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

2. June ' 2005 03÷00 On the bullet–pocked walls of Baghdad‘s Haifa Street, graffiti reading "Long live the Resistance" has beenscribbled out and replaced with "Long live the National Guard". Surrounded by his men, Major Fouad, a company commander of the 302nd battalion, the Iraqi National Guard unit charged with garrisoning this former insurgent stronghold, summons citizens to attest to how safe their neighbourhood has become.

3. They set out at 8.15pm at the end of the first week in November choosing a place where they knew the nearest German guard was at least 100 yards away (there were some 13,000 German troops garrisoning 26,000 islanders). The danger was that if they failed to get far enough out to sea they would simply be carried round the island by the tide and spotted at daylight.

4. When Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war against America in 1''8, his two principal justifications for the jihad that exploded upon us on Sept. 11, 2001, centered on Iraq: America‘s alleged killing of more than 1 million Iraqis through the post–Gulf War sanctions and, even worse, the desecration of Islam‘s holiest cities of Mecca and Medina by the garrisoning of infidel U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia (as post–Gulf War protection from the continuing threat of invasion by Hussein). The irony is that the overthrow of Hussein eliminated these two rallying cries: Iraqi sanctions were lifted and U.S. troops were withdrawn from the no–longer–threatened Saudi Arabia.