Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they've adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

As corrosive as the Saudis have been for our system, they're far worse for Moslems.

The crucial point you have to grasp is that the Saudis don't give a downtown damn about Moslems - flesh-and-blood men, women or children. They only care about Islam. They'd sacrifice tens of millions of Moslems to further their perversion of the faith.

I've visited over a dozen Moslem countries and many more that have significant Moslem minorities. In every case, I've found the Saudis funding evil.

From Thailand to the United States, the Saudi goal is to prevent Moslems from integrating into their host societies. In poor countries, such as Kenya, they pay families to pull their children out of state schools and send them to madrassahs - where they learn to recite the Koran, but no career skills.

The Saudis don't mind if Moslems live in poverty and squalor - as long as Moslems don't identify with the societies around them. They want strict religious and cultural apartheid.

This is a personal story of what it's like doing business in Europe - specifically a part of Europe called Wallonia, or French-speaking Belgium.

In 1976 Occidental Oil constructed the Claymore Alpha gas production platform for the North Sea.

The platform had a total steel component of more than 600,000 tons. The modus operandi was to construct the platforms with prefabricated modules of 500 tons weight max each and put them together module by module. Since the North Sea only allows a good weather gap of 1 to 2 months each year in summer time, the costs and time delays were staggering.

A Dutch maritime engineer-pioneer, Pieter Heerema, had the fantastic idea to start constructing with 5,000 ton modules, ten times as big as before. He was the first to use an old tanker, welding compartments in it, and with the help of sensors and computer steering pump with massive pumps seawater in or out of the different compartments to counterbalance  the heavy loads.

But he had a very big problem.  I made the mistake of trying to solve it in Belgium.

Speaking last February of the man she knows better than anyone else, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."

She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him.

As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect that their government will butt out of their souls.

I have recently returned to the United States from Egypt where I was on a fact-finding mission to see what life is like for non-Moslems who live under Islam.

What I saw was a dire situation of oppression and discrimination that many in America and the West have all but ignored. A place with rampant police brutality and corruption, where non-Moslems are second-class citizens at best, who are brutally victimized on a daily basis.

All this in a nation which is a popular U.S. tourist spot, and has been the recipient of American aid in excess of $28 billion in the last three decades. I wanted to learn what life would be like if our enemies and their allies got their way.

What I saw was an example of the harsh life in store for future American generations in Islamic-dominated regions of the U.S. if we do not work to bring attention to the issue of Islamic oppression now at this critical time in American history.

This is a story of how I learned to transform a workforce of 1,500 unionized zombies into participating human beings.  It was in a Belgian steel mill in 1963.

Since then I have been able to replicate this transformation of  zombies into thinking participants in different parts of the world.  The basic requirement is human contact beyond all barriers and education.

Given that, the possibility of such transformation is universal, for human beings are human beings.  The limiting factor is culture.  The transformation is far easier in some cultures, far harder in others.

I have found it to be the most difficult and frustrating with Arabs.  Close to the edge of impossibility.  In Asia, I found the best to be...

Adolf Hitler realized the importance of having a good press. In Nazi Germany with its press censorship, it was easy for Hitler to have a good press. However, during the 1930s the Nazis also tried to control the media in the neighboring European countries that Hitler was planning to invade.

The Nazis bullied the democratically elected governments in these countries to censor everything that resembled what today might be called "Naziophobia" - criticism of Nazism.  A number of bullied governments gave in to the Nazi intimidation rather than back the few courageous individuals who spoke out against totalitarianism. 

Today, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon. Islamist extremists want a good press. They do not tolerate criticism. Even cartoons are deemed offensive. They warn those who criticize them "to consider the possible consequences" of Islamophobia.

When Nicolas Sarkozy was running for president of France last May, I proclaimed him to be "Europe's best hope." Mr. Sarkozy won the votes of 53 percent of the record 85 percent of the French electorate that came out to vote in the presidential elections.

The French approved of his tough rhetoric against the Islamist "thugs" (his word, voyous) who control many no-go neighborhoods in the country, where more than 10 percent of the population already adheres to the Moslem faith.

During the presidential campaign his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, warned that a Sarkozy victory would lead to violence in the Moslem neighborhoods. The French refused to be intimidated into appeasement and rose to the occasion. French men and women who normally do not vote because they distrust politics turned out en masse to elect "Sarko."

The "thugs" have since begun to ambush police and no longer refrain from shooting at officers, but the Sarkozy government had not clamped down on them.  Yet that is only the beginning of the coming Sarkozy nightmare.