I probably don't appreciate this as much as some of you will, but never the less it is an excellent essay.
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 Americafor 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 WWI and throughout the
depression, so that at the outbreak of WW2, 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
navyhad 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
threatthat 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
fortwo 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
andMoscow 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 inhistory.
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
chemicalweapons, 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
thatall 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
nota hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its
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
Islamicterrorist 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
theJapanese 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.
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 2,200 American lives,
whichis roughly 2/3 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 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
havean "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
inthis 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
Iranclaims 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 inAmerica.
4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad
ismore 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
downin 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 2,000 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 WWII the US
averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual
battlesof 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).
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.
Quite correct. I missed this thread the other day.
Slight correction, there was 1 vote, 8Dec, 1941, against declaring war on Japan, My a member of the House of Representatives. A pacifist by the name of Jeanette Rankin.
She was "fired" by her constituency the next election, the system worked.
What lessons in history we forget, we WILL have to learn again.
Some things are worth forgettting, some are not.
Nobody ever really wants to support war because too many people are afraid to pick a side and support it whole heartedly. It's okay to be fired up about something and I think that Americans on a whole have lost that fire, which in my opinion, means that they are already dead. Well, I am not already dead and I sure as hell am carrying the flame of life. Being a Gulf War veteran myself with my own friends and family members serving currently in extremely hostile war areas in the Middle East, I fear for their life. I know what they are there for and if they don't return home, sad I will be, but I will stand proud that they stood their ground to put an end to the militant Islamists who believe we are the wretched excess known as the infidels.
Somebody tell Bush to quit with the girl fight he is giving them and get fired up...
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