War On Terror
Here is a post from a California lawyer that seems to present the "Big
Picture"" in just the right manner.. This is something all Americans
should read!!
A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq War:
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.
Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions
of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor.
The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress
wanted nothing to do with the European war, 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 attacked us.It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.
France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with its
German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and Hitler
intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not
an ally, it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan
and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then
the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled
control of Asia and Europe.
America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia,
and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of
any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute
much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and
prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions
of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the
Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce
all they needed for themselves.
All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already
under the Nazi heel.
America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its
military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII
there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because
they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because
they didn't have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been
sunk and 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 the property of Belgium
and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was
overrun by Hitler - actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was
unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into
rubble the next day anyway just to prove they could.Britain had been holding
out for two years already 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 turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge
of collapse in the late summer of 1940.
Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years
until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad
and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but
also more than a million soldiers. More than a million.
Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire
campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that
war.
Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941, instead,
there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging
ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been
able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off
Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably
be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies
(not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to
the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world
we live in today would be very different and much worse. I say this
to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things.
And we are at another one.
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, unless they are prevented from doing
so.
France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at
least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid
for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food"
program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his
son.
The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they
believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) 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 Allah should be killed, enslaved,
or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel,
purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.
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 its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the
Inquisition, or the Reformation.
If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the
Middle East, and 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 well-educated and 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 jobs? 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, the Islamic
terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do
it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have
created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing,
in Iraq.
Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where
we did and are doing two very 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 guys
there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else.
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.
The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We
now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French, Germans,
and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a million
tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat to
anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons?
And Iraq was paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed
from the UN Oil For Food Program (supervised by UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan and his son) that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education,
for Iraqi children.
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 US 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,
WWII 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 1,800 American lives,
which is roughly 1/2 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11.]
But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably
greater - a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.
Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 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.
If we do this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the Reformation
will ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle East hope it will.
We will be there to support it. It has begun in some countries, Libya,
for instance. And Dubai. And Saudi Arabia. If we fail,
the Inquisition will probably prevail, and terrorism from Islam will be
with us for all the foreseeable future, because the Inquisition, or Jihad,
believes they are called by Allah to kill all the Infidels, and that death
in Jihad is glorious.
The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism
until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own.
It will not go away if we ignore it.
If the US 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
we prevent them. Or somebody does.
The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences
of not fighting it and winning it will be horrifically greater. 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 be
more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.
Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America.
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.
We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede,
surrender, to the Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war
against them.
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.
In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before
that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy
vs. German Imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it
wasn't cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against
German Imperialism (WWI), Nazi Imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism
(the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called
the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost
the entire century.
The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western Judeo/Christian
Civilization and Wahhabi Islam. It may last a few more years, or most
of this century. It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades
away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad,
or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.
Senator John Kerry, in the debates and almost daily, makes 3 scary claims:
1. We went to Iraq without enough troops.
We went with the troops the US military wanted. We went with the troop
levels General Tommy Franks asked for. We deposed Saddam in 30 days
with light casualties, much lighter than we expected.
The real problem in Iraq is that we are trying to be nice - we are trying
to fight minority of the population that is Jihadi, and trying to avoid
killing the large majority that is not. We could flatten Fallujah
in minutes with a flight of B52s, or seconds with one nuclear cruise missile
- but we don't. We're trying to do brain surgery, not amputate the
patient's head. The Jihadis amputate heads.
2. We went to Iraq with too little planning.
This is a specious argument. It supposes that if we had just had "the
right plan" the war would have been easy, cheap, quick, and clean.
That is not an option. It is a guerrilla war against a determined
enemy, and no such war ever has been or ever will be easy, cheap, quick,
and clean. This is not TV.
3. We proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security.
This too is a specious argument. It was never our intention to govern
and provide security. It was our intention from the beginning to do
just enough to enable the Iraqis to develop a representative government
and their own military and police forces to provide their own security,
and that is happening. The US and the Brits and other countries there
have trained over 100,000 Iraqi police and military, now, and will have
trained more than 200,000 by the end of next year. We are in the process
of transitioning operational control for security back to Iraq.
It will take time. It will not go with no hitches. This is not
TV.
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 US 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 US has taken a little more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq. The US 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
WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the
individual battles of WWII 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).
I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. They
favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not
for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.
300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem. The
US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let's multiply 300,000
by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies
in mass graves in America because of George Bush? Would you hope for
another country to help liberate America?
"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate where it's safe, in America.
Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan,
North Korea, in the places in the world 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.
If the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. Everywhere the Jihad
wins, it is the death of Liberalism. And American Liberals just don't
get it.
Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California. Please consider passing along copies of this to students in high school, college and university as it contains information about the American past that is very meaningful TODAY - - history about America that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied the facts and truth of our history, they are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the issues of today. They are prime targets for misinformation campaigns beamed at enlisting them in causes and beliefs that are special interest agenda driven.