Subject: A Longer View of Current Events
This is a must read for every "Western" person, both young and old.
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The Big Picture
by Raymond S. Kraft
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 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America
for food and war materials.
The U.S. 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.
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
$600,000,000 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
that they could.
Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of
staggering shipping 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 that 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 U.S. got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad
and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but
also more than 1,000,000 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.
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 (assisted through
complacence by the majorityed.) 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.
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, and 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 U.S., 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 had 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 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000
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.
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 14 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
$12,000,000,000,000 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 U.S. about $160 billion, which is
roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American
lives, which is roughly 1/2 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed
out 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 two-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 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 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 we prevent them. Or somebody does.
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
Shar'ia, 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.
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 10-year occupation
and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II
resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than
100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.
The U.S. 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 Shar'ia (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.
Three hundred thousand Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our
problem?
The U.S. 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.]
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