Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung.

You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.”

That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.

What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war
Nothing like the flowery death
So precious to the gods who give us life
Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico this week, George Bush assured America: “I know what I’m doing” regarding winning the war against Moslem terrorists in Iraq and threatening our country. Although the Pogo Press is doing its best to prevent voters from figuring it out, GW is right. He is conducting a full court press right now, and rolling the terrorists up in a ball.

Let’s start with Afghanistan. The Taliban is breaking apart. About one-third of the Taliban remnants still fighting in Afghanistan have broken away from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, who has now lost control of a number of his senior commanders. The pressure of 18,000 American and NATO soldiers relentlessly hunting them down and killing them has precipitated the dissolution of the Taliban.

Then there are all the contract guys across the border in Pakistan.

To update you on the Freedom Research Foundation delegation to Croatia with Congressman George Radonovich, June 26-July 3:

The delegation,led by me and accompanied by Congressman George Radonovich, will be focusing on investment opportunities in real estate, tourism, construction companies, and investment banking.

As I mentioned last week (“The Pro-America VIP Investment European Vacation,” now posted in the Classics section), we’ll be meeting with Prime Minister Ivo Senader, government officials, business leaders and bankers.

The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:

The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.

For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head.

They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history.

A prediction we hear often regarding the War on Moslem Terrorism is that it is going to last a long, long time -- for so many years into the future that no one can see the end of it.

Maybe it will. Maybe it will be a war our grandchildren will be fighting when they’re our age. But no analysis of the war shows that it must be this way. It’s just a prediction, one which could turn out to be dramatically wrong. It’s entirely possible that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be won quickly.