Saturday, October 11, 2008

Photos and an Article explaining why we are fighting the war Iraq













I received this in an email. It is written by Raymond S. Kraft. There is information about this writer at the end of this article. Three of his articles were sent to me and they were all very interesting.

THIS IS HISTORY THAT HAS BEEN AND / OR WILL BE LEFT
OUT OF OUR TEXTBOOKS.

"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. 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, which 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.

America was certainly not prepared for war. America had drastically
downgraded most of its military forces after W.W.I and throughout the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW2, 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. And 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 on 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 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 first turning his attention to Russia, at a time when
England was on the verge of collapse, in the late summer of 1940.

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 million 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. And the Nazis could possibly
have won the war.

All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey
things. And 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. And that 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.

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 known yet which 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. You want gas in your car?
You want heating oil next winter? 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 and the
Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere.
And 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 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
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.

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.
W.W.II 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 3,000 American lives, which
is roughly the same as the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But
the cost of not fighting and winning W.W.II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

This is not 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 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 "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 somebody
prevents them.

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, 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 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 batt le 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 every thing, 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 more than 2,000 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 W.W.II
the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual battles of W.W.II 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).

It's difficult to 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 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?

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 living in Northern California.
Please consider passing along copies of this article 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 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.
see: http://www.greatamericanjournal.com/writers.htm

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