HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

Email | 04-04-07 | Raymond S. Kraft

[Ancesthntr]

I'm going to Fisk this article a bit - even though I agree with Kraft's conclusion that we need to fight and prevail against the Jihadists - sooner, rather than later when they get control of nukes.

Sixty-three years ago...

Try 66, during the Spring of 1941. 63 years ago we were 2 months from the D-Day invasion.

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.

Let's see, 2 years after June 22, 1941 (when Germany invaded the USSR)...by June of '43 we had long since begun bombing Germany, we had tied down large resources by having hundreds of thousands of troops in England, we had gone a long way toward wiping out the U-boat fleet, had taken away North Africa from the Germans (with the English) while killing or capturing hundreds of thousands of Germans and Italians, and we were about 2 1/2 weeks away from Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Already, hundreds of thousands of German troops were tied down in Greece, Sicily, Sardinia and Italy proper, awaiting an allied invasion - troops that couldn't fight the Soviets or anyone else. Further, Kraft doesn't mention that the Soviets would have lost by the end of 1942 without American aid - trucks, fuel, aircraft, etc. Without our aid, the Germans would have likely taken Stalingrad in the late summer/early fall of '42, and moved onto the Caucasus oil fields (or at least cut them off from use by the Soviets). Without the Caucasus oil, the Soviet military would have ground to a halt.

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 MILLION soldiers.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The Soviet Union lost approximately 26 million during the entire war, both civilian and military. I don't attempt to minimize these losses in any way, but the combined populations of Moscow and Leningrad weren't close to 24 million. Oh, and Moscow was NEVER under siege in WW2. The Soviets lost roughly 10.6 million citizens to combat deaths (including partisans & militia). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_Soviet_Union_during_World_War_II

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.

I do hope for the outcome in the last sentence, but the gas and the heating oil will be there for Americans. Why? First, we get very little from the Arab world - most of our imports come from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. To the extent that we can get oil and people are starving/freezing in large numbers, I can guarantee that any President will order the seizure of any Western Hemisphere oil fields that aren't producing at full capacity and shipping the product to us. You'll also have full-scale production of diesel (from petroleum), biodiesel and no pollution regulations on diesel vehicles, plus rationing, to cut down on demand. Yeah, the dollar wouldn't be worth much, but it'd be worth a whole bunch more than the Euro - because that continent would be the one that suffered the most.

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 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11.

This is outdated - I don't know about the costs, but I do know that we're up over 3,000 dead.

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon

That would've been a really neat trick on Napoleon's part, inasmuch as he was imprisoned on St. Helena from 1815 until his death in 1821.

It is a shame that so many factual errors appear in an article like this - because they detract from the very cogent and well-reasoned argument presented and discredit the author, who's obviously a very bright guy.