Re: OT: Did I stumble into alt.politics??

[Robert <Robert@xxxxxxx>]

Scott Hughes wrote:
> 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.

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