Weaponizing Civilization: The New Way of War

This is another good article someone sent me.

Weaponizing Civilization: The New Way of War,
by Raymond Kraft

"War has morphed, indeed, in ways unimaginable fifty years ago.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (IRM), the Jihad, which includes Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and all other like-minded folk, is much smarter about it than we are. It has turned the civility of the United States and Europe, into a weapon and turned it against us. It has weaponized niceness, it has weaponized compassion, it has weaponized the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. It has weaponized our desire for peace. It has recognized that our goodness is no match for its savagery, and will continue to exploit that fact until we lose and they win. However long it takes. Centuries, generations, decades, years, months.

The soft underbelly of America in particular and Western Civilization in general is that it has become so excessively nice and decent and civilized that it is now loathe to rise to its own self-defense, loathe to kill civilians when necessary, loath to cause "collateral damages," loathe to fight and defeat other countries, even when its own survival is at stake. We have emasculated our will to rise to our own defense, to the defense of our interests, to the defense of our friends and allies, to the defense of our own civilization and its unique freedoms. We would rather die than kill. We are willing to martyr ourselves and our children and their children and our country to the conceit of our own goodness. We have spent sixty years obsessing (as a culture, as a nation) with whether we might have done the wrong thing by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if it did end World War II, even if it did save a million American casualties and maybe five or ten or twenty million Japanese casualties . . . the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might well have saved Japan from extinction, since if the Japanese had all fought to the death as they promised and threatened to do there wouldn't have been enough Japanese left to be Japan anymore, so that, in a perverse way, Japan may now owe its existence to America's willingness to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We can't imagine ourselves nuking Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or firebombing Dresden or Tokyo anymore, killing scores of thousands of civilians in the process, or laying waste to Beirut, or Damascus, or Tehran. We're way too nice for all that, now. We have become much more civilized.

So the Jihadis hide in plain sight among the civilians, and thumb their noses and say "Check!" And we are stuck harassing their pawns because we lack the will to topple their knights and bishops, kings and queens, with all the "collateral damage" that would happen in the process. We can't imagine ourselves nuking Beirut, or Damascus, or Tehran, not even to save the world from the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Jihad of puritanical Islamic Nazism. So far, we can't even imagine ourselves deconstructing the infrastructure and economies of Syria and Iran in the way Israel is presently deconstructing Lebanon to save ourselves from the Jihad.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, the Jihad of puritanical Islamic Nazism, is strategically very intelligent. It has calculated that although it lacks the massed military force to confront the United States directly in battle, by The Management of Savagery it can foment endless incidents of terrorism and theaters of seemingly inexhaustible savagery in many places all over the world, year after year, decade after decade, until the Americans, Aussies, and Brits, are worn down, exhausted, demoralized, and no longer have the political will to keep trying to defend Western Civilization from the savages. At that point the IRM can begin to take things over with little objection or resistance, since they will promise peace--PEACE--the peace America is psychologically and politically obsessive about. They will offer peace with the right hand, and an end to the savagery they have created with the left. And after years or decades of widespread savagery, peace will be welcomed. The price for peace, of course, will be an Islamic Empire, an empire in which the unique freedoms of Western Civilization, intellectual freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, will not exist, an empire in which one can be anything one wishes to be, as long as it is Muslim.

Today, we see this strategic philosophy at work in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Sudan, in Somalia, and its gestation in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is arming against an American threat that does not exist, in order to turn Venezuela into a hostile camp calculated to pull America into a military intervention to prevent the destabilization of South America, a strategic calculation intended to force America's military and economic overextension, and therefore America's weakening, with the assistance of Russia, China, and the Islamic Resistance Movement.

This Strategic Philosophy is very clearly articulated in The Management of Savagery, translated from the Arabic, which can be readily found on the Internet via any good search engine. While America wants peace, and recoils from the projection of deliberate savagery, the Islamic Resistance Movement embraces and adopts savagery, "managed savagery," as its primary militant tactic, calculating, correctly, so far, that America, which wants to be nice and doesn't really want to hurt anybody, will never respond with equal or greater force, or savagery. Thus, it calculates, Islam can easily withstand the pulled punches America is willing to throw, while America will eventually succumb to the never-ending managed savagery of militant Islam. Unfortunately, America does not appear to have a Strategic Philosophy, and therefore, the IRM accurately calculates, while America does not want to lose this war, America, blinded by the conceit of its own goodness to the ruthless malevolence of others, does not understand this war, and therefore lacks the will, the clear vision, and the decisiveness to win it.

The Chinese and the Russians do not want to fight a war with America, not openly and directly; they would get hurt too badly, no matter who "won," and they do not need to. They want a reasonably prosperous and productive America to sell stuff to, and buy stuff from, but they would be hugely pleased to see America cut down to size a bit, or a lot, an America that was a No. 3 Semi-Super Power, after China and Russia, or Russia and China, in either order, or maybe No. 4 after China, Russia, and the New Islamic Caliphate. They would like to see an America that is about as much a threat to anybody as the European Union is now, so the Chinese and Russians can run the global show as they see fit, ration the oil, and pocket the profits.

Thus, they are perfectly happy to sell weapons to Hezbollah, calculating that the Hezbos & Friends will do the dirty work for them, will maintain a generation of savagery all over the world (except in Russia and China), and that America will exhaust itself, its politics, its will and economy, trying to "control" and contain the savagery, but lacking the will and strategic vision to root out its roots, because that would cause way too many civilian casualties, and America cannot stomach the infliction of civilian casualties, or the destruction of nations, even if they are sponsors of terror. We're way too nice for all that. And so our "niceness" is turned and weaponized against us. We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive. The dagger of our decency stabs us in the back.

We've been sucker punched, but we set ourselves up for it, and we won't admit it. We actually think that Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Quaeda, the whole Islamic Resistance Movement, the whole Jihad, is a bunch of "non-state actors." Technically, but only theoretically, they are. In form, but not in substance. In real life they're rather conspicuously the agents and co-conspirators of nation states (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China, North Korea, at least) that want to deflate America without having an open war with America, and have figured out that as long as they can send in the street soldiers of the Muslim Mafia to do the dirty work we will do everything we can to avoid a real war with the real Godfathers. We love peace too much. And it's working. Perfectly.

In the law of agency, the Principle is liable for the acts and omissions of his Agent. The Employer (principle) is liable for the acts and omissions of his Employee (agent), at least within the course and scope of the employment, at least within the scope of the intended purposes and objectives of the agency. The Conspirator is liable for the acts of his Co-Conspirator, at least within the scope of the objectives of the conspiracy. Thus, applying this basic principle of agency and conspiracy to geopolitics, we should be holding Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China, and North Korea, who are providing weapons to the Jihad with which to attack Israel and America and the new Iraqi democracy, and providing safe havens and money and technical assistance for the Islamic Resistance Movement, responsible for the acts and omissions of their agents, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Quaeda, et al., but we lack the intellectual and strategic clarity, and the political will, to do so.

We insist on indulging our fine little fantasy that "nation states" are, ipso facto, somehow legitimate, and should not be attacked, much less destroyed, not even on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly by John Bolton, not even when they engage in a criminal conspiracy with the terrorists of the Islamic Resistance Movement to obliterate Israel and divide, demoralize, deplete, defeat, deflate, and dessicate America.

Israel is doing a little better than we are, at last, and we should follow the Israeli example, as far as it goes, and then go the rest of the way. We will have to, sooner or later, unless we intend to aquiesce to the vastly diminished role in the world our enemies have planned for us. We should do so sooner, before the Jihad gets nuclear weapons, rather than later, after it has them, when the price of defeating the Jihad, in dollars and blood, ours and theirs, will go up by several orders of magnitude.

A good start would be to give short notice to Iran and Syria that we expect the terrorism, in Iraq and everywhere else, to end, NOW. They've been hospitable to the Islamic Resistance Movement, the IRM, the Jihad, they support it, they arm it, they give it safe haven, and it's time to stop to it. Lob that ball back into THEIR court. So, they have, say, a week, two weeks, ten days, to shut it down. No more. After that, if there is an Islamic terrorist attack ANYWHERE ON EARTH we start rolling up the carpet on Iran and Syria (while Israel continues to dismantle Lebanon)--i.e., hold Iran and Syria hostage to American terror, just as they are now holding the United States hostage to Islamic terror.

Except we do not hold them hostage to random terror, as they do--WE GIVE THEM CONTROL--if they end Islamic terrorism, then they have nothing more to fear from us. If they do not end Islamic terrorism, then they have everything to fear. And if the terrorism does not stop on schedule, then we start taking apart the armed forces, infrastructure, and economies, of Syria and Iran, piece by piece, using all necessary and convenient force, until the terrorism stops and they surrender, unconditionally, as Germany and Japan once did. So far, because they understand that we do not yet fully understand this war, and will not do what is necessary to win it, they do not fear us.

Now, Russia and China want to be on the winning side of things in ten years when the dust settles, so they are selling weapons to the IRM, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Iran, betting that America will not wake up and smell the coffee, and will not develop the intellectual, strategic, or moral clarity to recognize that it is dying a death of a thousand cuts, until long after it's too late to save the patient, or the victim. So far, Russia and China are betting on the right horse.

And so as the political will of America to save itself slowly (or quickly) expires, we will see, in our lifetimes, maybe within the next few election cycles, or the next few years, a New World Order emerge, not the one American conspiracy theorists fear, but a far more deadly and malevolent one in which a new Islamic Caliphate, a new Islamic Empire, rises as a strutting puppet of the new superpowers, Russia, and China, with America relegated to geopolitical inconsequence, vying with the geopolitically inconsequential European Union for a distant fourth or fifth place in the pecking order.

Russia and China will not be overrun by the Islamic Resistance Movement, since they do not have our qualms about collateral damages, civilian casualties, nor our obsession with being "nice." They do not have our pathological desire to be liked by everyone. They do not fancy themselves quite so civilized, so "over-civilized," as do we, and so their civility cannot be weaponized and turned against them. They do not want "peace" as obsessively as we do, and so their passion for "peace" cannot stab them in the back. They will have no trouble ceding a large part of the world to the Islamic sphere of influence, the Arabian subcontinent, Africa, southern Europe, western Europe, with the message to Ahmadinejad, or whoever succeeds him, that "you can do whatever you like, as long as you cooperate with us, and as long as you don't threaten us, in which case your life expectancy will grow very short." Russia and China are not paralyzed by our pathological aversion to the use of savagery in self-defense, or in the pursuit of their national self-interests.

I.e., Russia and China are waiting in the wings to pick up the geopolitical spoils after the Islamic Resistance Movement deflates and defeats the will of America to defend itself and its interests, and exhausts and obliterates Israel. Russia and China will not threaten American sovereignty in North America, because they will be very happy to look to America as a source of technology exports, cheap labor, and cheap food.

The support of Russia and China for the Islamic Resistance Movement (via Iran) will, however, evaporate, when, or IF, the United States comes to its senses and begins to systematically deconstruct the ability and will of Iran, Syria, and the Islamic Resistance Movement, to project terrorism throughout the world. Russia and China, quite logically, want to be on the winning side of things when the dust settles. And if another horse starts to run faster, they'll change their bets.

It is not yet too late for America to wake up, smell the coffee, come to its senses, but with each day it gets later. The unsettling reality that America must recognize is that, if it is to survive in anything resembling its present form, dominance, influence, and prosperity, it must decide to subordinate its "niceness," its debilitating civility, its incapacitating decency, its sniveling obsession with being "liked" by the rest of the world, no matter how ineffectual or snobbish or opportunistic or barbaric the rest of the world may be, to the necessities of defending itself and others, its allies and friends, its Judeo-Christian civilization, and indeed the entire non-Islamic world, from the otherwise implacable advance of the Islamic Resistance Movement that intends to abolish Western Civilization as we have known it, and usher in a new world order of Islamic Empire, a thousand year reich of puritanical Islamic Nazism."

About the Writer: Raymond Kraft is a lawyer and writer living and working in Northern California. Raymond receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net. see: http://www.greatamericanjournal.com/writers.htm