Why we Fight

Here is the full essay, well written and meaningful.

A POWERFUL EDITORIAL
by Raymond S Kraft

SOMBER WORDS!

Some of you are not old enough to remember that nearly every
family in America was grossly affected by WW II. Most of your don’t
remember the rationing of meat, shoes, gasoline, and sugar, no tires for
our automobiles, and a speed limit of 35 miles an hour on the road, not
to mention, no new automobiles, read this and think about how we would
react to being taken over by foreigners in 2008.

This is an EXCELLENT essay. Well thought out and presented.
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Historical Significance

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of
Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The
Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between
England and America taking food and war materials.

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and
most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European 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, who had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We
had few allies.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France
quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly
not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in
Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and
controlling all of Asia.


Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading
Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over
our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control
of Asia and Europe.

America’s only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland,
Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from
Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was already under the Nazi
heel.

The US was certainly not prepared for war. The US had
drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WW I because of
the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW II, Army units were
training with broomsticks, because they didn’t have guns, and cars with
“tank” painted on the doors, because they didn’t have real tanks. A
huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or 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
actually the property of Belgium ) given by Belgium to England to carry
on the war, when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was
unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels
into rubble the next day just to prove they could .



Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face
of staggering losses and the near decimation of its Royal 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. Hitler, first turned his
attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940, at a time when England
was on the verge of collapse.

Ironically, 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 24,000,000 people in the sieges of
Stalingrad and Moscow alone . . . 90% of them from cold and starvation,
mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus
his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. If that had
happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning
points in history are often dicey things. Now, we find ourselves at
another one of those key moments in history.

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 .

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in
Kaffiyahs — they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of
Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then
Europe, then the world. To them, all who do not bow to their will of
thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated . They want to finish
the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews . This is
their mantra. (goal)

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, but it is not yet known which side will
win — the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will
control the Middle East, 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 educated, rational Saudis of
today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. Do you want gas in your
car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be
worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition,
loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

OPEC

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate
Muslims, who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other
religions, 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. 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
and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We
can’t do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the
battle at a time and place of our choosing . . . in Iraq. Not in New
York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing
two important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was
directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed
that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for
decades. Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass
destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a
1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 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 people, and the ones we get there, we won’t have to get here. 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.

WW II, the war with the Japanese and German 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 the US 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.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately
a full year’s GDP — adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion
dollars. WW II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in
action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about
$160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost
New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American lives, which is roughly
equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in
the 9/11 terrorist attack .

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been
unimaginably greater — a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and
German Nazism .

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which
everything comes out okay . The real world is not like that. It is
messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been,
and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic
terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if
we ignore it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq,
then we have an ally, like 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 to
conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and
never ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are
about to get nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them from
getting them.

Iran NukesWe 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.

OR

4 . 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 possibly most of the rest of
Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much
bloodier.

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.

The history of the world is the history of civilization
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 .

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 50,000,000 people, maybe more
than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action 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 WW II, the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week — for four years.
Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans than the
entire Iraq war has done so far.

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).

It’s difficult to understand why the average American does not
grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom,
but evidently not for Iraqis.

“Peace Activists” always seem to demonstrate here in America,
where it’s safe.


Why don’t we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria,
Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism
the most? I’ll tell you why! They would be killed!

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!
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Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and an attorney living in
Northern California that has studied the Middle Eastern culture and
religion.