Brian/thread ..
Received this in an e-mail today ..
Makes several valid points ..
Thought appropriate for this thread ..
..
..
..
..
Historical Significance
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 US 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 WWII, 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 losses 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 US 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 1,000,000 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 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
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 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 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 WWII would have been
unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.
This is not 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 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 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 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 more than 2,200 killed in action 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 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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California. Please
consider passing along copies of this article 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 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.
Triff .. |
