Posted by
Old Bill on Saturday, September 13, 2008 6:57:20 PM
After the vicious attacks on America that were carried out on 9-11, 2001, Americans of all types---all races, all regions, all ages, all genders, all classes and occupations and even all political parties, were united in the determination to find the evildoers who had come here to murder us, and destroy them. This was a good thing, and it would be a good thing if this same determination existed today; in fact, it actually does, but unfortunately the passage of time and the refusal of our nation's professional memory--our news commentators, journalists, academics, artists of all types and political leaders (at least those of the Democrat party)--to remind us of what happened, and inform us accurately as to who our enemies are, and what we must do to defeat them, have sapped our national will of the passion it possessed in, say, December 1941 which drove us to defeat Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Vichy France and fascists all over Europe and the Middle East in the next 45 months.
It's true that we had powerful allies: the British Empire, the Soviet Union, Natonalist China--but it's equally true that without America participating to the very limit of our strength, as a united people, the Axis would have won the war, and most of the Allied peoples would not have survived to give birth to us, their descendents. In the aftermath of 9-11, many governments around the world expressed their sympathy for us, and many people all over the world were shocked and outraged at the cruel nature of the terrorists who had launched their war on America. It is also true that many people around the world, and many governments privately, were delighted to see Americans leaping to their death from the flaming wrecks of the World Trade Center, and to see the American economy in ruins as uncertainty gripped th world about the future of America. The wealthy elites of the world sold America short--literally.
When we moved against our enemies only a few months later, overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which was one of the main backers of Al Quaeda and its principle training base, we surprised not only Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, but the world as well. Our enemies, and even our friends, had thought that distance and proximity of powerful hostile nations such as Russia, Iran, Communist China and Pakistan would prevent any meaningful American retaliation. As so often in the history of foreign elites dismissing the American People, they were wrong.
However, even the overthrow of the Taliban and the eviction of Al Quaeda from Afghanistan were not sufficient to impress all of America's enemies with their own vulnerability to American power, and hence forestall their schemes to unleash more vicious, murderous attacks on the American People.
We must remember that the wellspring of anti-American terror since the end of World War Two has been double in nature, coming from both the Marxist/Communist world, and from the world of the Islamo-Fascists, both the religious-fanatic terrorist side of Islamic Society, and also from the largely secular Arab governments willing--no, eager--to make common cause with the Communist world and with the Islamist religious fanatics in order to gain the support of both for their own despotic and brutal regimes. Thus, e.g., the socialist Baath regimes in Syria and Iraq have supported various terrorist groups of all political and ideological stripes ever since coming to power in the 1960s, in order to deflect the murderous activities of these groups away from themselves and toward a hated foreign scapegoat--first the British Empire, then Israel and the Jews, and more lately us--the Americans.
Thus, whatever happened to Al Quaeda and the Taliban, it did not seem to threaten the main homeland of anti-American Islamo-fascist terrorism: the middle east heartland of the Arabs and the Persians. Accustomed to think of themsleves as infinitely superior to the backward and poverty-stricken Agfghanis, the regimes in these countries supported the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic Brotherhood, Al Fatah, the PFLP, Abu Nidal and Ansar Al Islam---the latter two the special guests and creations of the Iraqi Baath Regime right up until 2003. They also supported a hundred other alphabet-soup terrorist fronts created by Arab and Iranian government largesse and patronage, based in their territories, and acting as de facto agents of these regimes with the advantage that they could claim to be autonomous, and hence serve as classic cut-outs for the terrorist war they waged.
This war was directed against the United States and Israel in particular, but also against the West and Infidels in general--remember the attacks in Europe in the 1960s and '70s?--and satisfied not only the ideological and pathological hatreds of the murderers themselves, but also the need of the terror-sponsoring regimes to portray themselves as fighting against the foreign, infidel scapegoat who they could then blame for every domestic ill of their sick societies, from endemic poverty to brutal police-state repression. It was all justified, so the argument went--and still goes--to protect the Arab/Moslem homeland against such evil Western Cultural Imperialism as sexy Hollywood movies and the Idea of Democracy. And it kept the young fanatic Islamists on the payroll killing Americans and Israelis instead of leaving them loose to attack the apostate local elites.
This strategy still obtains in places like Syria and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya, with only one modification: since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and our subsequent overthrow of an anti-American warmonger tyranny waging war against the USA since 1991, the other Arab regimes, and even the hyper-terrorist state of Ayatollah Iran, have been careful not to sponsor terrorist attacks on the USA and our embassies and tourists abroad, out of fear of the consequences; no one wants to bet his life that Pres. Geroge Bush Jr. will not retaliate effectively against such direct attacks on America and Americans.
What they have done instead is to go to Iraq to wage Jihad against the Americans--and Americas allies--there; a war they are losing, and one which we MUST win. Only when the last anti-American, anti-democratic jihadi in Iraq is dead, and there are no more recruits to replace the 'martyrs', and a democratically elected Iraqi government is in place and destined to remain so for the forseeable future--only then will the USA be clearly the victor in this phase of the war against our enemies in the Islamo-Fascist Movement.
With this victory we will advance one giant step closer to defeating this threat for the next century, and securing our lives and our homeland for that length of time. Will this step alone be sufficient to declare victory and bring the boys home? No. There are many more campaigns to be fought and won. And we, the American People, will fight them and win them--the alternative is the destruction of the United States. Think I exaggerate? Think again, and remember: One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day.
Historically, ruling elites and the regimes they control have looked upon war as something of a game--Clausewitz observed that war was merely the continuation of diplomacy by other means. And in the monarchical Europe of which he was a part, war had been long characterized as the 'sport of kings'. Diplomacy, indeed, was undertaken not in the interest of the masses--what was their interest but peace, freedom and prosperity?--but in the interest of their sovereign lords, the kings and princes who not only ruled, but owned them. How many wars, someone once mused, ahd been fought merely to provide some petty German princeling with a better view, from his palace window, of the Rhine? In such a culture, war was resorted to whenever the ruling elite--King and his court--found it politically advantageous to distract the people from their poverty and lack of freedom, and concntrate their attention on a supposed foreign threat.
It is precisely this sick and cynical frame of mind and political culture which prevail today in most of the Arab and Middle-Eastern world, including Iran, and it was in keeping with such a mind-frame that these rotten regimes have waged their proxy-wars by terrorist cut-outs against the western peoples, against Israel, and lately against the United States and the American People. In their sick worldview, no ruling elite should mind much if another ruling elite finds it expedient to murder a few thousand of their neighbors citizens with a terrorist bombing or twenty, in order to make himself and his entourage of thieves more politically secure in their own state; after all, what are peasants for, but to provide the cannon fodder for a ruling elite to secure itself in power?
It was this kind of world which our ancestors, even as recently as WWII or last week, sought out this country to escape--the huddled masses of foreign shores, yearning to breathe free, and be not cannon fodder, but cirtizens of a democratic republic, choosing their own leaders, forcing the government to defend them, all of them, because they know that the life of even the least of them is just as precious as the life of any son of any dictator. It is because the American People are such people, and have such a concsious determination that they will defend themselves and their children and their country against any attack, that they demand victory over our enemies who come to murder us, and it is for this reason, fundamentally, that we will win this war, as we have won all others that threatened us, no matter how long the struggle, or how convoluted the path to victory and safety. We Are Americans, and we will not tolerate defeat!