Two days later, the senator issued another statement - also in response to my article - denying that he had ever opposed "a redeployment and responsible drawdown" of US forces in Iraq. But I never said he had. I also never said that he opposed motherhood and apple pie. In any case, no one would oppose "redeployment and responsible drawdown", which is happening all the time. Redeployment means moving some units from one location to another. Drawdown means reducing the size of the expeditionary force in accordance with the task at hand. Currently, US troops are being redeployed from Anbar province to Salahuddin. There is also drawdown: the number of US troops has been drawn down to 136,000, the lowest since a peak of 170,000 in 2003.

When I quoted Obama's own words opposing the SOFA, a second tactic was deployed. This consisted of personal attacks on me, with the help of material circulated by my enemies over the years: the Khomeinists, those nostalgic for Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and its imitators, and Islamofascists who hate me for reasons of their own. The addition of Obamists to the list of my enemies is regrettable but does not change the facts. Obama militants attacked my email accounts and used the marshlands of the internet to unleash the deadly mosquitoes of rumour and innuendo against me. Some called me an Islamic militant who wished to harm Obama because the junior senator from Illinois had abandoned his father's Muslim faith while opting for Christianity. Others advanced the opposite claim: I was attacking Obama because he was the first Muslim-born politician to have a chance of winning the US presidency. I was threatened with having my US citizenship - which I don't have and have never applied for - withdrawn by a future Obama administration. Some Obamists, unaware that I do not live in the US, even threatened to reveal my address and expose me to physical violence. Desperate attempts were made to link me to the McCain-Palin campaign or even some cabal of Republican Party stalwarts. However, it soon became clear that I was not an American and had no relationship with either of the political parties there. I was also called a "neocon", a term apparently applied to a group of leftist Americans who had moved to the Right. The Obamists soon realised that I had always been a conservative and thus did not qualify for the adjective "neo". The message most often conveyed to me was: withdraw and all will be forgiven.