Posted on 01/18/2007 7:50:55 AM PST by jveritas
The most lasting tragedy of the Vietnam War is that it has legitimized “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”. We are seeing the giving of aid and comfort to the enemy running wild in this war on terror and sadly not only among liberals and their media but also among some conservatives who some of them are right here on this great Free Republic.
When Al Qaeda terrorists, or the terrorist regimes in Iran and Syria, or the Iraqi insurgent terrorists whether they are Sunnis or Shia hear the speeches of defeatism coming from liberals and their media, or unfortunately coming from some conservatives who some of them are right here on Free Republic, will they feel comforted and aided by these speeches? Of course they will be comforted, and they will be embolden to fight more and more, kill more and more, destroy more and more, because they realize that many Americans do not have the will to fight a long and hard war.
Defeatism and providing aid and comfort to the enemy was something that we expected from liberals and their media because their hate to President Bush and the Republican Party is hundred of times more than their hate to the terrorists. However it is really sad that some conservatives and some members on this great forum are doing their share in providing aid and comfort to the enemy through their defeatist attitude.
Do the defeatists want to amend the Constitution so we will have the following? Stop the war and leave if we lose more than one thousand troops, or stop the war and leave if it lasts more than one year, or stop the war and leave if it costs more than 50 billions dollars, whichever comes first. Do they want to do this?
The defeatists who argue that Iraq is not part of the war on terror but rather it is just a civil war between Sunnis and Shia are wrong and naive beyond belief. Iraq is most definitely the central and most important front in the war on terror. It is in Iraq where Al Qaeda and their local Iraqi allies decided to fight the US. It is in Iraq where the islamic terrorists from all over the world are pouring in to fight the Americans. It is in Iraq where the terrorist regimes of Iran and Syria and their local Iraqi allies want to defeat the US so they can have total control of the Middle East. Since the terrorists are all over the world, then the best way to fight them is to attract them to one place to kill them. Whether it was planned or not, Iraq turned out to be the magnet that has been attracting the terrorists from all over the world, and that is the ultimate way to fight the war on terror and to kill as many terrorists as we can.
Every defeatist who is giving aid and comfort to the enemy should ask himself or herself this question: What will happen if we leave Iraq before we achieve complete victory? The First thing that will happen is that the enemy will be embolden beyond belief and the terrorists whether they are Sunnis or Shia, whether they are Al Qaeda, or Iran or Syria, will be given the ultimate victory that will embolden them thousands more time then when they were emboldened when the US left Beirut after the Marines barracks terrorist attack in 1983, or when the US left Somalia in 1993 after the terrorist killed 19 troops, or when no reprisal happened against the terrorists when they attacked many American targets through out the Clinton years. If our passiveness to the past terrorist attacks emboldened them in such a way to attack us on 9/11, think about what they can do to us if we give and leave Iraq and thus handle them the ultimate victory that they have been dreaming about for decades.
The defeatists must understand that if few terrorists sitting in a cave in Afghanistan with a small budget and few volunteers were able to do the 9/11 terrorist attacks, killed 3000 Americans, and caused over one trillion dollars in economic damages, then the terrorists control of Iraq and of the whole Middle East, and its vast oil resources will allow them to conduct terrorist attacks against us that we cannot imagine even in our worst nightmares. By controlling Iraq and the Middle East the terrorists will have hundreds of billions of dollars under their control that they will use it to attack us everywhere in the world and the US and cause unimaginable death, destruction and economic losses that will make 9/11 terrorist attacks look like a picnic in comparison. They will also use the oil weapon to bring the world economy to a disaster that will be many folds worse than that of the 1929 Depression.
Fellow Free Republic members, we are fighting the most important war since WW II. We are not fighting for the Iraqis in Iraq but we are fighting for ourselves, for our freedom and for our way of life. Let us all support our President and our brave troops because they need our support now more than ever.
You said -- "That is exactly the defeatism that I was talking about. You just gave aid and comfort to the enemy by saying the War on Terror is lost."
It is lost, because the WOT is a stupid war. It should be a war on Islam, the political idealogy that gives the support and nurturing to the terrorists who commit these actions. And it should be a war against all countries who substantially support this kind of "political idealogy" hiding in the form of a religion. Start with Iran -- right now, for example, then Syria next. Make Islam an illegal religion because of its false premises that lead to the rise of terrorists who say that Islam is destined to take over the world (and "we will prove it by terrorizing you all").
Scrap the constitution of Iraq, right now. Eliminate the function of Islam in the country's government. Eliminate all Imam's and clerics from any government function. Execute every last single cleric that opens their mouth about attacking or terrorism -- make it a summary execution -- on the spot -- immediately, and keep doing it until no one opens their mouth anymore.
Otherwise, the WOT is lost -- meaning, get ready for 100-years-war ("on terror") that will never be won, because you've got the *wrong war* going on.
Regards,
Star Traveler
Very, very good.
You said -- "We are not going to send waves of missionaries to try and convert Islam."
I'm not talking about sending missionaries..., I'm talking about sending bullets, right down the throats of any cleric or imam that supports Islam in taking over the government or having anything to do with the government. Summary executions for them all, the minute one of them opens their mouth about anything to do with the government. Shoot them on the spot. Pretty soon, there will be no more talking.
It's time to recognize *where* the ideas for terrorism comes from -- and that's from Islam, in that it's not a religion -- but a *political ideadlogy* that must be *crushed* just like Nazism was crushed during WWII.
Short of crushing the political idealogy of Islam (which means destroying Islam), we are in for a 100-years-war. Get ready for it...
Regards,
Star Traveler
Very True!
Very sharp counselor.
You said -- "There were certainly tactical blunders in WWII, but FDR never enabled Nazi sympathizers in the same way we do with the likes of CAIR."
You're right there. That organization should be shut down immediately and the officers kicked out of the country, regardless of their status here.
In addition to that, every Mosque in this country should be investigated and every piece of material that supports any kind of terrorist activity, or idealogy of taking over the world, or the U.S. or any of the Western countries should be removed. If it is found again, in any of the Mosques, then that Mosque should be shut down and the cleric jailed.
No outside funding (outside of this country -- by Saudia Arabia, or Iran or wherever) should be allowed for any of the Mosques in this country. If they want to fund it, then it should be solely by the money from the people in this country, alone. No money from outside this country should go into a mosque in this country. No clerics from outside this country, should be allowed to preach inside this country.
Anyone who preaches the political idealogy of taking over this country, under the guise of a religion (of Islam) should be jailed and/or deported. Every Muslim, if they want to stay here in this country, should be required to give full allegiance to this country -- or else, if not, then deport them (back to their historical lands, if necessary, or any other rabid Muslim enclave, elsewhere in the world).
Then, we might begin to make some progress for the safety of our country and eliminate the enemies from within our midst.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "Far too many people refuse to accept that the bottom line is that we are in a war for survival against an enemy that believes fully that God is on their side. Iraq is just a battlefield in that war."
Yeah, that's right. And too many do not want to treat Islam as the true enemy, and as the political idealogy that it is. Islam is their *government* -- and not their religion. We have to *destroy* their government, and make it into another kind of peaceful government -- just like we did with Japan and Germany, when we *destroyed* their governments and remade them over again.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "If Iran goes nuclear, these Islamic nutcases will drop one somewhere."
The political idealogy that wants to take over the world and destroy all the westerm powers -- is called Islam. This is what needs to be destroyed.
And with Iran, it's the U.S. who is the main target for their nuclear weapons. They've been practicing upper atmosphere blasts (over there) for the time when they can launch a missile (from a ship, presumably) and set off a nuclear warhead overhead on the United States and generate an EMP blast that destroys all electronics across this country. Then they go for Israel after that. That's what their plan is going to be.
But, apparently, the President thinks "Islam is a peaceful religion" -- when actually, it's a political idealogy which is more evil than even Hitler's Nazi regime (and we did destroy that; what about Islam?)
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "It is not that we generated more terrorism when we attacked Iraq, it is that the terrorists came from all over the world to fight us there."
I seriously doubt that. I think we are generating more terrorists, which to me means that we have to kill them faster and more efficiently. And that means striking at the evil political idealogy of Islam.
Here in this country all the mosques with those Wahhabi clerics are breeding more terrorists by the minute. They're getting ready for the fight over here, not in Iraq. That's coming around the corner, soon.
You said -- "we cannot simply go and invade every country that has terrorists so it is better to bring them all to one place and kill them, this place is Iraq. The defeat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and they have been already defeated there would not carry the same impact as defeating Al Qaeda, Iran, and Syria in Iraq. The defeat of terrorism in Iraq will have much more profound impact on the whole Middle East and much more damage on islamic terrorism than just their defeat in Afghanistan."
What would have a more profound effect would be to kill off all the major symbols of Islam, starting with *totally destroying* the top 10 Islam holy symbols in the world -- and then (after that is done) laughing our heads off and telling them that they were stupid for thinking that there was anything in that stupid black rock that could protect them -- when we blasted it to smithereens. And then we shoot every cleric, on the spot, who attempts to gather any adherents to the political idealogy that says that Islam will take over the governments of the world and will rule the world.
Once the symbols are gone and the clerics keep geting shot, on the spot. the clamor will die down rather quickly. Then they'll be ready for a *new form* of government -- just like Japan and Germany got.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- " It will take two more major attacks on American soil to put this country on the war footing that we should have been on for five years now."
I think you're right. We need to go on *full war footing* and turn this country into a military complex (like everyone was doing during WWII) -- and go over the evil political idealogy of Islam (just like the evil idealogy of Nazism of WWII) and eliminate it from the governments that are promoting it around the world. And then we need to rebuild the governments over there (the ones in which we've destroyed their political idealogies) just like we rebuilt the ones in Germany and Japan.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "Look to Malasyia and the rural Philipines, the damage and killings that have been going on since, at least 20/25 years by the muslims. We can expect nothing less, should we give up in Iraq."
And we're going to get it here for the next *100 years* -- if we don't destroy the evil political idealogy of Islam -- just like we destroyed the evil political idealogy of Nazism.
Regards,
Star Traveler
Yes, I have thought it through completely.
First, domestically, America does not lose a war. This is crucial, because the war is not over and can't be over. We have to have this victory to find the tensile strength in the people to carry on. That is failing fast. We need the win.
Second, over there, Iraq will not be united when this is over. The factions will hate each other. Every Sunni won't really be killed. At a certain point they will submit. Maybe they will ALL flee, into Syria, which will massively destabilize that regime through a massive human crisis. Destabilizing Syria is a good thing, because a stable Syria uses that tax base to pump out trouble for US. Having them scrambling to prevent food riots in their own land will throw them on the ropes and start them plummeting into poverty and instability. Wrecking the internal peace of enemy regimes makes them far less dangerous to us, because they have to turn inward and battle their own people. Take the war to them.
Third, within Iraq, the Arabist Iraqi nationalist Shi'a and pro-Iranian Shi'a won't get along. They will be tense. The pro-Iranian Shi'a will keep getting support, and that will make the Iraqi Arabist Shi'a dependent on us for survival. That dependency will keep them more docile.
Also, the Kurds in the North will have their own autonomous state, with quite a bit of oil. Kurdistan will be quite stable (already is) and will be a rock under the collar of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Turks, for their part, knifed us in the back in our war deployment, and are going ever more Islamist, so alarming them with a Kurdish entity is not a bad thing. Give them something regional and domestic to worry about, and in the process sharply divide Sunni Muslim (Turk) from Sunni Muslim (Kurd). The Sunni Kurds and the Shi'ite Iraqis are territorially distinct, but will be wary and distrustful of each other. This makes the Kurds dependent on us (which, again, renders them more malleable), and it keeps Muslim divided against Muslim.
The more nationalism and ethnic rivalry stirs up Muslim-on-Muslim rivalry and hatred, the easier it is to put in firewalls against the Pan-Islamist spread.
Meanwhile, please remember that my plan does not have us leaving Iran alone or respecting their territorial sovereignty. No indeed! We bomb camps and convoys that are near the Iraqi border. They're aiding our enemies, so we attack them. We don't declare war (they haven't) we just blow things up in Iran in violation of their borders exactly as they are doing in Iraq. Tit for tat, but we use a lot more power. This makes them crazy, but what the hell are they going to do? They are already maxed out on nasty. A headlong ATTACK would allow us to level them. They can't do more than they already are to destabilize our position, and if we start bombing their terror support infrastructure in Iran, and unleashing swarms of Special Forces to disrupt Iranian economic centers, etc., their life becomes far more difficult, particular since their proxies in Iraq will either be cooperating with their Shi'ite Arabist brethren running the South of the country, or because they will have lost their heads and initiated a Shi'ite on Shi'ite civil war in Iraq which will be bloody as hell and drain more of the swamp. If Muslim radicals want to kill each other, the hatreds among Muslims grow and nationalisms grow, and the inability for them to coordinate an outward strike grows. This is precisely the method of divide and agitate by which the British captured all of India with a few handfuls of troops.
WE do not need to do the fighting.
What's the alternative?
What we are doing now has a shelf life of 2 years. Then the exhausted American people pull the plug, because there will be no victory in a six-sided civil war in which we will take no side.
Pull out and let the Islamists consolidate WITHOUT all that messy Muslim-on-Muslim violence that will stir up the hatreds sufficiently to cause Muslim to hate Muslim so much they'll kill each other and face off against each other, like Reformation Christians, instead of being able to focus outwards on the West (and Israel). Nobody in Iraq is thinking about Israel right now: they have too many IRAQIS to hate and kill to worry about faraway Jews.
Once we decided to cut loose with an undeclared war and 150,000 troops, we bought ourselves this situation and this civil war. My strategy is one that will WIN IT for the US. It's imperial, and vicious, but it kills a lot of enemy manpower, keeps the Muslims divided and at war with each other, and leaves us in possession of key sattelite dependencies in the region.
We bought Iraq, and now we're stuck in it.
What I have said offers victory. It's winning ugly, but it's winning. And relatively SWIFTLY too, which is itself a mercy.
I've thought it through just fine, and talked it over with some folks too. THEY reject it not because "it won't work", they know damned well that it will WORK. They reject it because they think it is EVIL, and that the United States "Shouldn't be doing things like that."
So instead of winning dirty, they're committed to losing clean.
That is why I call them pansies.
In war, real war, it ain't baseball. Winning is not the main thing. It's the ONLY thing.
Yes, I have thought it thoroughly through.
And talked it over with folks.
It's not as though this advice isn't going up the chain.
It's not as though the President hasn't been presented with variants of this option. He has publicly rejected them thrice, always on MORAL grounds.
Note, please, that a divide Iran with a Kurdish Sunni north and a (diminished and divided) Shi'a south is not an Iran that can adopt ONE Shia Islam as its law. It will face a Kurdish secession, which we would need to support under such circumstances. Keeping Shi'a and Sunni unhappily within Iraq keeps them from being able to move in a unified direction. BUT keeping the Sunni ARABS intact: THESE are the Nazis. THEY are the ones killing Americans. THEY need to be made an example of. And in their flight, they will end up helping us utterly wreck stability and economic life in Syria. Entire a million refugees into Syria, exit Syrian stability and the Syrian future. Causing Syria to teeter on the edge of collapse and starvation and wild internal riots hurts the very people who have been hurting us for a long time real, real bad. That's a good thing.
The President hates this plan, because it views the Islamists as what they are, barbarians who hate us, and pits one against the other in an orgy of blood designed to completely destroy the idea of united Arab civilization in religious civil war just as surely as the Reformation destroyed Christian moral authority and ended up handing Europe over to secular humanism.
That's the point.
Unleash Islamic civil war and let all of that bile and hatred go into killing EACH OTHER, thinning THEIR ranks, and letting their bile and hatred tear each other to pieces. Worked to end Christendom. Would end Islam too.
And we would not have to be defeated.
Currently, Bush would rather be defeated than unleash forces that will kill millions.
Bad attitude.
It is more important that America WIN and be safe than that those people over there be safe and comfy. We can't MAKE them safe and company. Demons are abroad in their land. We CAN channel their aggression at each other, choose sides, and control the winners.
This is not "stuck on steroids". It's clear thinking, methodical, ruthless, evil, and effective. I am willing to be very evil in order to pull out the win.
Bush would rather lose.
That's idiocy.
When you state "a new government just like Germany and Japan got" you are forgetting that once we had Hirohito step away from claims of the divine, we, in turn, left him, and the related Shinto culture in place, repected the cultural aspects and instead of destroying the culture, overlaid it with an additional layer.
Your call for a crusade to stamp out Islam at gun point, is beyond impractical, it is down-right counterproductive to having a succesful win against terroristic jihaidist elements in the world. Such action, policy advancement or the like is the one and only one thing that would turn all of the Islamic world to jihad.
Star Traveler, WE cannot do these things.
Don't you understand? This is real live war. It's not a game. Our country is going to be defeated in a war and it is going to be an utter disaster for us at home and abroad.
We have to change strategy.
What you have suggested: AMERICA goes to war against Islam, all types, in Iraq, is crazy talk. That means everybody kills Americans, and the whole thing falls apart.
The current strategy: hold the enemies apart until they come to their senses, is foolish. They're Islamist radicals. They've been under war and torture for generations. They are never going to come to their senses.
What you need to do is get Islamist Arabs of ONE sort killing Islamist Arabs of ANOTHER sort, destroying Arab unity, destroying pan-Islamic movements, pitting one form of Islam against another, just like Lutherans and Anglicans and Catholics tore Europe to pieces in the 1500s. Net result? The OTTOMANS took over all of the Balkans and North Africa! That's the point. We need to be the Ottomans here.
The Middle East is already a tinderbox over Israel. But puny little Israel has held them off. That anger has become Islamism, and the attacks now come AT US. That's why we're there, to take the fight OVER THERE. If WE do the fighting in this long war of attrition, we're going to lose a lot of people and treasure and get exhausted and fail.
We need to get THEM to fight each other, to exhaustion, thereby depleting the ranks of belligerent males GENERALLY, destroying whatever ideal of Arab brotherhood there is, destroying the ideal of Pan-Islamist unity. There is a civil war in Iraq, and its a proxy for the civil war between factions of Islam everywhere. If the belligerents are killing EACH OTHER, they will not be killing US, and the winners will be so weak and exhausted that we can deal with them. In Iraq, we can make the Kurds and the Shi'ite Arabists DEPENDENT on us for their survival, ESPECIALLY once they have the arms and go on a rampage against their ethnic and religious enemies and do what all of those barbarians all want to do: wholesale slaughter. Once they COMMIT the slaughter, everyone hates them, and they can't hold power after that without our continued support. THEY do the fighting, and we sell them the arms. We go into bivouac and act as the final backstop of the government, and use airpower to wreck the terror supporting infrastructure across the border in Iran. This may well provoke another Iran-Iraq war, and THAT makes Iraq all the more dependent on us.
We NEED to be at war with a whole bunch of these countries, and wreck them so they can't use that oil wealth to wreck us. Iraq is the toehold, but we're going to lose it if we cannot be realistic.
Trying to make barbarians be nice to each other, the current strategy, is childish.
But your idea of AMERICA going on a jihad against Islamists is even worse. Islamists need to be taken out, yes, but it needs to be done by OTHER Islamists, in the context of a civil war which widens into a regional war and tears apart the whole fabric of the civilization in the region. Right NOW, they can sit back inside their borders and use money and arms to fight a proxy war against OUR people in OUR western cities. They need, instead, to be spending that time, money and malicious intelligence feasting on the blood and corpses of their own Arab and Islamist brethren.
THAT will finally break them of the Islamist fetish. Civil war and millions of deaths that bring the whole civilization to ruin. That's what THEY started when they brought down the towers.
Bush talked a good game, but he is shying away, now, from doing the really hard thing and choosing sides. He wants to turn Iraq into Pennsylvania, not be a meanie.
It's going to lose us a war we must not lose.
On a practical level, what make you think the Sunni Arab states will tolerate all of this, and not act? How do we protect the Kurds in their land locked state from the Turks or whomever? By C-130's or something? It is grand that you are so sure the Islamic Arab Shia state in Iraq will not become in Iranian vassel state. I wonder about that. I suspect it will, with the Sunni states funneling arms, a lot of them, and lots of money, and maybe more, to the Sunnis that America has decided simply don't fit in.
If that is the end game of American policy, I would be tempted to become an isolationist. America just can't handle the moral burden, and should stay the hell out of foreign adventures that are other than directly related to ending states that attack us, de jure or de facto, ala Afghanistan.
By the way, putting aside all the histrionics, it may well be necessary to effect a partition (which is sort of what you are saying, albeit with the Sunni's have relatively few zip codes left, and very many to most of them causing trouble elsewhere, angry and hateful of the US, and ready for more, via Syria or whatever), if things go wrong with the current policy, which they may well, but it should be done while minimizing the sanguinary, not maximizing it. That would be moral.
You said -- "Your call for a crusade to stamp out Islam at gun point, is beyond impractical, it is down-right counterproductive to having a succesful win against terroristic jihaidist elements in the world. Such action, policy advancement or the like is the one and only one thing that would turn all of the Islamic world to jihad."
In case you haven't noticed, the whole Islamic world has turned to jihad. There are those who support it by going out to fight, those who give money, those who teach, those who recruit, those who give quiet support and say nothing, but privately agree, and those who protest on the streets and say, Islam is going to take over the world. There's not too much more that you can do to involve the entire Islamic world than what is already happening.
All you're doing by supporting the present "WOT" is picking on the wrong enemy -- and insuring that we're going to be fighting a 100-years-war, instead of a five, ten or fifteen year war.
I'll absolute guarantee you *without a doubt* that you could turn the entire country of Iraq into a 1776 revolution with their own George Washington and a Bill of Rights better than we got -- and you would still have Islamic terrorism around the world and terrorists trying to set off their next major 9/11 on this country. Iraq is not the answer; it is only the symptom.
Regards,
Star Traveler
"If that is the end game of American policy, I would be tempted to become an isolationist. America just can't handle the moral burden, and should stay the hell out of foreign adventures that are other than directly related to ending states that attack us, de jure or de facto, ala Afghanistan."
It is the end game.
Remember: isolationism does not work unless we abandon Israel.
No Israel, no US tensions in the Middle East. Muslims are not blowing up the Chinese.
Abandoning Israel is immoral too.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
You said -- "Star Traveler, WE cannot do these things."
And that's why we're going to get a perpetual and 100-years-war. It *will not* go away -- period, no matter what happens in Iraq or how great our success there. Iraq is not the answer, it is only the symptom.
You also said -- "Don't you understand? This is real live war. It's not a game. Our country is going to be defeated in a war and it is going to be an utter disaster for us at home and abroad."
I understand that war is brutal and you kill your enemies and you destroy their government and you take over their country. You don't make "nicey-nicey" comments about how "sanitary" a hanging was (or was not). You don't worry about whether you dusted up someone's Koran, you don't worry about someone feeling depressed that they're in a dank dark prison and somone had some dogs barking at them...
The majority faction over in Iraq is supported by Iran. Iran is out to get us. They pretty much already control the government over there in Iraq and will only have to wait until we leave (if they were smarter, they would make it *real quiet* in a hurry and we would leave the day after tomorrow...). And when we leave, then Iran has Iraq, too -- another Islamic country to perpetuate their Islamic rule over the world, as they believe they're destined to do. Now, it's Iraq and Iran and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan -- after the U.S. has pulled out of the region. Then we have a worse war on our hands and then we *really get hit* this time around -- big time -- worse than before. And all because we didn't want to get nasty on the first round....
Regards,
Star Traveler
P.S. -- I hope everyone is getting ready for this ongoing 100-years-war, which is going to be happening regardless of what we do in Iraq and no matter how successful anyone wants to make it out to be.
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