This is an extremely important letter. I encourage you all to read it even though it is lengthy . We all have our opinions about the Iraq war.
Reading the following history may provide a clearer picture of why we are there, why we should be there, and what the results of a failure in Iraq may mean to not only us individually, but more importantly our kids, grandkids and future generations. Please read the following and consider your position. If you think the writer makes a valid argument, then please pass this on to all the people you know. In light of daily events in the mideast, these are important issues we must consider, in relation to coming mid-term elections.
WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ .
(a post from Raymond S. Kraft, a California
lawyer, that sheds 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 ab out 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.
