OT: Did I stumble into alt.politics??

[Scott Hughes <ScottSZ@xxxxxxxxx>]

Appologies for contributing to the politics flood....


WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ.
-from Raymond S. Kraft, a California lawyer
-shedding light on the Big Picture

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.

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, 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 it's
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 in 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 has 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 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 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 the 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 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, -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 Jihads, 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 and
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.

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 (U.S. GDP in
2006 = 13.04 trillion dollars, which means that the IRAQ war has cost the
U.S. approximately 12.5% of a full years GDP), 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 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.

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.

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 into 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 ten year occupation,
and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. WWII 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 2,500 KIA in Iraq. The US took more
than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6th, 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.