This is a post from a California lawyer that seems to present the "Big
Picture" in just the right manner.. This is something all Americans should read!!
A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq War.
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.
Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as
slave labor.
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, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for themselves. 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 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 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
had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering
shipping loses 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 also
more than a million soldiers. More than a million! Had Russia surrendered,
then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against theBrits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war. Had Hitler not
made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941, instead, there would
have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to
prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been able to run
its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while
America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run
by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not
even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we
live in today would be very different and much worse. 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.
France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid
for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food"
program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son. 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 Jihadis, 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 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.
The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now
know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French, Germans,
and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a
million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat
to anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons? And Iraq was
paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the UN
Oil For Food Program (supervised by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his
son) that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education, for Iraqi children. 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 1,800 American lives, which
is roughly 1/2 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. If we do
this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the Reformation will
ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle East hope it will. We will be
there to support it. It has begun in some countries, Libya, for instance.
And Dubai. And Saudi Arabia. If we fail, the Inquisition will probably
prevail, and terrorism from Islam will be with us for all the foreseeable
future, because the Inquisition, or Jihad, believes they are called by
Allah to kill all the Infidels, and that death in Jihad is glorious.
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. The Iraq war is
expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting it and
winning it will be horrifically greater. 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 in to the Jihad.
Senator John Kerry, in the debates and almost daily, makes 3 scary claims:
1. We went to Iraq without enough troops. We went with the troops the
US military wanted. We went with the troop levels General Tommy Franks
asked for. We deposed Saddam in 30 days with light casualties, much
lighter
than we expected. The real problem in Iraq is that we are trying to be
nice - we are trying to fight minority of the population that is Jihadi,
and trying to avoid killing the large majority that is not. We could
flatten Fallujah in minutes with a flight of B52s, or seconds with one
nuclear cruise missile - but we don't. We're trying to do brain surgery,
not amputate the patient's head. The Jihadis amputate heads.
2. We went to Iraq with too little planning. This is a specious
argument. It supposes that if we had just had "the right plan" the war
would have been easy, cheap, quick, and clean. That is not an option.
It is a guerrilla war against a determined enemy, and no such war ever has been
or ever will be easy, cheap, quick, and clean. This is not TV.
3. We proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security.
This too is a specious argument. It was never our intention to govern and
provide security. It was our intention from the beginning to do just enough
to enable the Iraqis to develop a representative government and their own
military and police forces to provide their own security, and that is
happening. The US and the Brits and other countries there have trained over
100,000 Iraqi police and military, now, and will have trained more than
200,000 by the end of next year. We are in the process of transitioning
operational control for security back to Iraq. 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. 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 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 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, multi culturalism, 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.