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Some history to keep in mind for those times our resolve may
become weak or we question our leadership. Long but definitely
worth the read.
Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of
Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and
defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in
their convoys between England and America for food and war
materials.
At that time the U.S. was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and
most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the
Asian war.
Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage
Congress unanimously declared war on Japan , and the following
day on Germany , which had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey
thing. We had few allies.
France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France
quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was
certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a
Thousand Year Reich in Europe . Japan was not an ally, as it was
well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia .
Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading
Canada and Mexico , as launching pads to get into the United
States over our northern and southern borders, after they
finished gaining control of Asia and Europe . America 's only
allies then were England , Ireland , Scotland , Canada ,
Australia , and Russia . That was about it. All of Europe, from
Norway to Italy , except Russia in the east, was already under
the Nazi heel.
America was certainly not prepared for war. America had
drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WW-I
and throughout the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW-2,
army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't
have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because
they didn't have real tanks. And a huge chunk of our navy had
just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor .
Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of
$600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England, that was
actually the property of Belgium , given by Belgium to England
to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little
known fact). Actually, Belgium surrendered on one day, because
it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans
bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they
could. Britain had already been holding out for two years in
the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of
its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being
overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of
thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be
dealt with later, and first turning his attention to Russia, at
a time when England was on the verge of collapse, in the late
summer of 1940.
Ironically, Russia saved America 's butt by putting up a
desperate fight for two years, until the U.S. got geared up to
begin hammering away at Germany .
Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of
Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them from cold and
starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a MILLION
soldiers.
Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his
entire war effort against the Brits, then America . And the
Nazis could possibly have won the war.
All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are
often dicey things. And now, we find ourselves at another one
of those key moments in history.
There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or
wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.
The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in
Kaffiyahs -- they believe that Islam, a radically conservative
form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East
first, then Europe, then the world. And that all who do not bow
to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or
subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel ,
and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra.
There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the
most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having
its Inquisition and it's Reformation, but it is not known yet
which will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.
If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will
control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US , European,
and Asian economies. The techno-industrial economies will be at
the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated,
rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.
You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter?
You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the
Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic
Reformation wins.
If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims
who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions,
and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of
the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle
East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous
Middle East will emerge.
We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to
fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al
Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it
somewhere. And we can't do it everywhere at once. We have
created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our
choosing........in Iraq .
Not in New York , not in London , or Paris or Berlin , but in
Iraq , where we are doing two important things.
(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was
directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam
has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for
decades. Saddam is a terrorist.
Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is
responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million
Iraqis and two million Iranians.
(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with
Islamic terrorism in Iraq . We have focused the battle. We are
killing bad people, and the ones we get there we won't have to
get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic,
peaceful Iraq , which will be a catalyst for democratic change
in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing
American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it
is needed.
World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really
began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl
Harbor . It began with the Japanese invasion of China . It was
a war for fourteen years before America joined it. It
officially ended in 1945 -- a 17 year war -- and was followed by
another decade of U.S. occupation in Germany and Japan to get
those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ...
a 27 year war.
World War II cost the United States an amount equal to
approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal
to about $12 trillion dollars. WW-II cost America more than
400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in
action.
The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which
is roughly what 9/11 cost New York . It has also cost about
2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives
that the Jihad snuffed on
9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WW-II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.
Americans have a short attention span, conditioned by 30 second
sound bites,
60 minute TV shows, and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay.
The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and
sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always
will be.
The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic
terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go
away if we ignore it.
If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq ,
then we have an " England " in the Middle East, a platform, from
which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East
. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of
relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring
at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this
ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever,
the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless
somebody prevents them.
We have four options:
1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons
(which may be as early as next year, if Iran 's progress on
nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).
3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in
the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or
decades, and ultimately in America .
4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when
the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the
Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the
rest of Europe . It will, of course, be more dangerous, more
expensive, and much bloodier.
If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your
children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under
the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran
today.
The history of the world is the history of civilizational
clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas
about what society and civilization should be like, and the most
determined always win.
Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The
pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.
.. Remember, perspective is everything, and America 's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.
The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin
Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the
first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870
to 1945 fighting Germany .
World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year
occupation, and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan
. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million
people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which
estimates you accept.
The U.S. has taken more than 2,500 KIA in Iraq . The U.S. took
more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944,
the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi
Imperialism. In WW-II the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for
four years. Most of the individual battles of WW-II lost more
Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.
But the stakes are at least as high ... A world dominated by
representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and
personal freedoms ... or a world dominated by a radical Islamic
Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia
(Islamic law).
It's difficult to understand why the American left does not
grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and
freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.
"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America ,
where it's safe.
Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran , Syria ,
Iraq , Sudan , North Korea , in the places that really need
peace activism the most?
The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil
rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the
Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil
rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity,
etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming
down on the side of their own worst enemy.
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Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California |