2nd part of e-mail.
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. (The
rational mind of today says this).
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 minutes 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 w! e 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 have nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them.
We have four options:
- We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
- 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.
- 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 and accept the idea that your
children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the
Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law), 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 every thing, 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 2,000 killed in action in Iraq.
The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on ONE 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 cost 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).
