IRAN & The Death of Liberalism

[R-MAN]

Here is an article from a California lawyer that seems to present the "Big
Picture"" in just the right manner. It is something all Americans should
read, particularly high school and college students and others who wonder
how we got to where we are.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

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.

[R-MAN]

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-percent 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 the Brits, 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,
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 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 no-where.
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 Europeans 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 one-half 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.

[R-MAN]

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 three 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 without any 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, 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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~`

Somewhere a "True Believer" is training to kill you. He is training with
minimal food or water, in austere conditions, training day and night. The
only thing clean on him is his weapon and he made his web gear. He doesn't
worry about what workout to do -- his ruck weighs what it weighs, his runs
end when the enemy stops chasing him. This True Believer is not concerned
about "how hard it is;" he knows either he wins or dies. He doesn't go home
at 17:00, he is home. He knows only "The Cause."

[Lux]

R-MAN

Your post on Raymond S. Kraft's article (The Death of Liberalism) is worthy of it's own thread so I copied it here. It is certainly pertainent today as Iran is now THE issue it is.

A great read and should be passed on to many for a better perspective of history and the world we actually live in.

JMO

:wave:

[panhead]

Hope everyone reads it......may broaden some peoples views on why we are there.

[louieknucks]

A great read. :happy64: I especially agree with the aspect of our government schools not teaching vital aspects of world history. These are things everyone needs to be taught to understand that history is repeating itself and we need to stand up and knock these extremists out now before they can strike us again. JMO.

[Kevmo]

thanks for the article R-Man. I hope it gets read by everyone on this forum. It is truly perplexing how some of our "best and brightest" in D.C. just dont seem to get it.....or worst yet, maybe they do.

[LongShot]

Great read thank you. ;)

[ksdunlap]

Great read with a lot of deep thought in the article, I never thought of it that way. Makes a fellow think. Everyone needs to read and understand whats at stake.