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Historical Review of Iraq Situation A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq War
email | 11/1/05 | Raymond S. Kraft

Posted on 11/01/2005 6:28:13 PM PST by lancer

Subject: Historical Review of Iraq Situation
A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq War

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.

Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor.

The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, 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 attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally; it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia.

Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for themselves.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and 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 the property of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler - actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove they could. Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping loses 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 turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America's ass 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, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million.

Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.

Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941, instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse. I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things.

And we are at another one.

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, unless they are prevented from doing so.

France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) 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 Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

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 today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and 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 well-educated and 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 jobs? 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, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very 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 guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else. 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.

The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French, Germans, and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat to anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons?

And Iraq was paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the UN Oil For Food Program (supervised by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his son) that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education, for Iraqi children.

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, WWII 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 1,800 American lives, which is roughly 1/2 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11.] But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 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.

If we do this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the Reformation will ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle East hope it will. We will be there to support it. It has begun in some countries, Libya, for instance. And Dubai. And Saudi Arabia. If we fail, the Inquisition will probably prevail, and terrorism from Islam will be with us for all the foreseeable future, because the Inquisition, or Jihad, believes they are called by Allah to kill all the Infidels, and that death in Jihad is glorious.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. 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 we prevent them. Or somebody does.

The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting it and winning it will be horrifically greater. 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 be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America. 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.

We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to the Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against them.

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 battle 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 in to the Jihad.

Senator John Kerry, in the debates and almost daily, makes 3 scary claims:

1. We went to Iraq without enough troops.

We went with the troops the US military wanted. We went with the troop levels General Tommy Franks asked for. We deposed Saddam in 30 days with light casualties, much lighter than we expected.

The real problem in Iraq is that we are trying to be nice - we are trying to fight minority of the population that is Jihadi, and trying to avoid killing the large majority that is not. We could flatten Fallujah in minutes with a flight of B52s, or seconds with one nuclear cruise missile - but we don't. We're trying to do brain surgery, not amputate the patient's head. The Jihadis amputate heads.

2. We went to Iraq with too little planning.

This is a specious argument. It supposes that if we had just had “the right plan" the war would have been easy, cheap, quick, and clean.

That is not an option. It is a guerrilla war against a determined enemy, and no such war ever has been or ever will be easy, cheap, quick, and clean. This is not TV.

3. We proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security.

This too is a specious argument. It was never our intention to govern and provide security. It was our intention from the beginning to do just enough to enable the Iraqis to develop a representative government and their own military and police forces to provide their own security, and that is happening. The US and the Brits and other countries there have trained over 100,000 Iraqi police and military, now, and will have trained more than 200,000 by the end of next year.

We are in the process of transitioning operational control for security back to Iraq. It will take time. It will not go without hitches. This is not TV.

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

The US has taken a little more than 1,000 KIA 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 WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII 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).

I do not 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 where it's safe, in America.

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world 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 and lawyer living in Northern California - - - - - -

Please consider passing along copies of this 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 and truth 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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: fascism; germany; iraq; islam; japan; jihadis; liberalism; middleeast; wahabbis; worldhistory; wwii
Let the lefties chew on this one.
1 posted on 11/01/2005 6:28:16 PM PST by lancer
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To: lancer

mark for later read


2 posted on 11/01/2005 6:44:07 PM PST by tsmith130
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To: lancer

They can't read.


3 posted on 11/01/2005 6:46:30 PM PST by sarasmom (What is the legal daily bag limit for RINOs in the USA?)
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To: lancer
"Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy."

Not true. Their worst enemy is George W. Bush and the American conservative movement. If the Left can't regain power then their ideology isn't worth a hill of beans...and they know it!

The left is selling its soul to the devil in order to regain power. But it's a fools game because the devil rarely looses his bets.

dung.
4 posted on 11/01/2005 6:51:52 PM PST by Moose Dung (Soiling the Shoes of the Lunatic Left)
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To: lancer
This is a very important piece of writing and Kraft indicates the true hitorical backgroud of todays events in Iraq. Kraft does not mention though, that liberals in the United States thought that the European fascist movement was fine prior to WWII, that the fascists of Europe were good people insisting on the manifestation of national heritage in new rejuvinated government. The fascist of Europe used the same techniques of terror to strangle democratic governments in order to rise to power in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Balkans. A bunch of thugs. Liberals in America, like Joseph Kennnedy, father of president J.F. Kennedy, them ambassador to Britain, and Charles Lindbergh: thought that German fascists were very much to be admired before the ramp up of the Nazis to WW II.Today the US is host to a popular movement in which liberals likewise side with Islamo-fascists propaganda against our own armed forces.They weaken our nation. The Islamofascists are misnamed by modern liberals as "freedom fighters." What foolishness! It would be laughable if true democracy , future world peace, and the worlds economy were not at stake! VICTORY IN IRAQ! Thank you Mr. Kraft. Your essay will find its way into the hands of the right people here in Vermont!
5 posted on 11/01/2005 7:01:09 PM PST by Candor7 (Into Liberal Flatulence Goes the Hope of the West)
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To: sarasmom

and even if they could read their attention spans are about as long as a typical TV commercial


6 posted on 11/01/2005 7:14:09 PM PST by cdrw (Freedom and responsibility are inseparable)
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To: lancer

Fantastic article. Too bad we couldn't force the liberal (communist) party to read and sign their name to the bottom of the article. Brain dead, well no hope.


7 posted on 11/01/2005 7:45:09 PM PST by Logical me (Oh, well!!!)
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To: lancer

Lancer, this is a FANTASTIC. Thank you, so much, for posting this. It is so 'on the money' and, like Mr. Kraft, I don't understand why the libs don't get it.
I plan to share this with as many people as I can.....and, sharing with students is an excellent idea.


8 posted on 11/01/2005 8:01:51 PM PST by 4integrity
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To: lancer
"...Russia saved America's ass by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany..."

In the main, most of your points are correct. I have to dispute the above statement that you made, though, since it closely parallels our situation today.

The Soviet Union found itself in it's catastrophic situation of 1940 through it's own actions. In the late 1920's, the Soviets made a deal with the devil and agreed to help Germany thwart the League of Nations inspectors looking for banned weapons of war, just exactly like they did in Iraq in the 1990's.

In a small Russian town named Lipetsk, far removed into the interior of the Soviet Union, Germany was provided assistance, airfields and personnel to design, test and perfect the weapons later used in WW2. The agreement was that the Soviets would share in all technology developed, since Stalin had killed all of his best engineers, and found himself in a pickle. He agreed to help the Germans overrun and destroy Western nations, actually delighting that the Germans would make his job of Communist conquest easier.

Stalin's mistake was figuring that in the knife fight that followed, the Soviets could quadruple-cross the Germans- after they had taken care of the Brits, French and the other capitalists. He overestimated the time he would have to turn on the Germans.

Meanwhile, the world marveled at the modern new German fighters and bombers which just popped into existence at precisely the time to be combat tested in the 1935 Spanish Civil War.

The Germans had a dozen years to develop in secret the very weapons forbidden them by the Armistice. And the League of Nations inspectors, American and British, were made to look like fools, for as hard as they looked they could find no sign of the new weapons in the late 1920's.

Why? Because the weapons were where the inspectors couldn't look- in the minds of the designers, in the easily hidden notebooks of data from Lipetsk.

After the inspectors left in '28, the Germans smiled and knew that they had won... with the help of the despicable Soviets. Manufacturing the first high-performance fighter took years. Manufacturing the second one, and each one thereafter, took only days.

Americans have to understand that the effort and money necessary to research and develop WMD is extensive. Once it is perfected, however, and all the temperatures, incubation times, process procedures, etc. are optimized and recorded in a little notebook... that little notebook, shared by FAX machine with all the enemies of man, will enable even splinter terrorist groups to leapfrog 20 years and a billion dollars worth of research.

Saved our asses? How about reaped what they sowed. We knew even in 1940 what the Soviets had done. It's just that no one seemed to be able to convince FDR that Uncle Joe wasn't his good buddy. Naivete dies hard, and takes many good G.I.'s with it.

We know what the Soviets have again sown, thinking that they could use surrogates to hurt the capitalist world. Only this time, we don't know how far those seeds were spread, and cannot take the chance.

9 posted on 11/01/2005 8:11:57 PM PST by pickrell (Old dog, new trick...sort of)
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To: 4integrity

That's the kind of reaction I was hoping for. Thank you!


10 posted on 11/02/2005 5:21:30 PM PST by lancer (If you are not with us, you are against us!)
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To: Candor7
Thank you Mr. Kraft. Your essay will find its way into the hands of the right people here in Vermont!

You've got your handsful if you are trying to educate the citizens of Vermont! You might start with Patrick ("the Joker") Leahy (apologies to Batman, but the resemblance is too much...)

11 posted on 11/02/2005 5:24:08 PM PST by lancer (If you are not with us, you are against us!)
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To: lancer

The folks from Vermonts three small cities full of New Age Yuppies( Rutland/Brattleboro/Burlington) elect the Joker
to office, as well as the Penguin( Jeffords). Of course The Mad Hatter is along for the ride ( Sanders).

We folks who live out in the country of Vermont
( conservative Batman minority) are more like Nebraskans and Texans.

I vote a full GOP ticket every time, state and federal, as do my fellow countrymen.


12 posted on 11/02/2005 6:09:31 PM PST by Candor7 (Into Liberal Flatulence Goes the Hope of the West)
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To: lancer

What tees me off is how the left throws around words like "debacle" and "quagmire" to describe a war that has, in reality, been incredibly successful. We’re 2-3 years ahead of schedule on reconstruction and it’s all been done with less cost and fewer casualties than any analyst predicted. Donald Rumsfeld deserves a lot of credit, though the leftwing media will never give it to him. Even FOX takes potshots at him. I guess we'll have to wait for the history books to get the real story of how Iraq was one of the best planned and executed conflicts in military history.


13 posted on 12/10/2005 10:54:28 AM PST by DougJ
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To: DougJ
Even FOX takes potshots at him.

I just learned yesterday that a Saudi "prince" owns a chunk of Fox and put in a call to Fox owner Rupert Murdock to get them to stop calling the muslim riots in France "muslim riots" and to start calling them "civil riots." That would also explain the "potshots."

14 posted on 12/10/2005 11:10:20 PM PST by lancer (If you are not with us, you are against us!)
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To: lancer

That's very interesting -- and more than a little depressing.


15 posted on 12/11/2005 7:14:46 AM PST by DougJ
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Comment #16 Removed by Moderator

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