War on terror: Faced with a formidable foe

We are at war. It is against an enemy that will never negotiate a peace. The question is whether our generation will have the endurance to fight it out. True, these are the sort of things being said by George W. Bush and John Howard. Not surprisingly, many people take the attitude that if Bush and Howard are for it, they are against it. Both have shamelessly exploited security concerns for partisan political purposes.

Bush did it in the 2002 congressional elections when he unfairly painted the Democrats as weak on the war against terror. Howard tirelessly tries to back Labor into the same weak-on-terror corner. Witness his shameful effort in parliament this week to paint Simon Crean as a Saddam Hussein lover.

But this issue is so important and fundamental that distaste for Bush and Howard should not blind anyone to the reality.

We are at war - a war declared on us without our realising it. Indeed, it is hard to pinpoint when this war began. Certainly it was no later than 1983. In Beirut that year, the US embassy was bombed, killing 63 people, followed by the bombing of a marine barracks, killing 242 Americans. Ronald Reagan's reaction? To scuttle out of Lebanon, leaving his allies at the mercy of the Syrians. And little mercy they showed.

Since then there have been many attacks, and a roll call of death. Just some examples:

Bombing of US military quarters in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American military personnel, 1996.

Bomb attack on USS Cole, 2000, killing 17 sailors. To these and many other attacks there was no substantial US response. We note from the terrorist literature that they gained nothing but encouragement from what they saw as weakness.

The key point is that this is not just a series of random attacks. The war of terror is the logical expression of a form of extremist Islam that seeks the radical transformation of the Islamic world as a preface to re-establishing the caliphate - a multi-national Islamic empire that will stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

This extremist ideology is intolerant on a grand scale of all that does not conform to its version of Islam. It tolerates no other religion or behaviour, it condemns all women to ignorance, ever-present fear, oppression and subjugation to the male will.

Whatever you think of the attack on Iraq and the removal of Hussein, the fact is that the prime battleground of this war at the moment is Iraq.

We have twice in the past 70 years faced similar threats, once from Nazism and once from Soviet totalitarianism. No, don't wince. This is not just a facile comparison. Of course, Nazi Germany was a much more massive and immediate military threat than these terrorists; of course the Cold War carried in itself a threat of global nuclear destruction that even a dirty bomb from terrorists does not begin to encompass.

BUT the key thing about both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union was that there was going to be a winner and loser in a global battle of philosophies and power. There was not going to be a negotiated settlement. Nor will there be in this one.

In late May 1940 Winston Churchill faced the prospect of imminent defeat from an advancing German army. Still, he refused negotiations with Germany, saying to his ministry on May 28: "We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."

Harry Truman refused in 1948 to succumb to Soviet military threats and instead mounted the Berlin airlift. John F. Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev over Cuba. In such conflicts, to back down means not compromise but defeat.

General John Abizaid, the US general who heads the US military effort in Iraq, said on July 16 this year: "War is a struggle of wills." He is right. But it is not just about the will of the leaders, of the Churchills, the Trumans and the Kennedys. In the end what will be crucial is the will of the American people and the will of the people of the US's allies in a long struggle in which the people are the targets.

At the end of 1995, at celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, there was much talk of the "great generation" that had successfully fought the 1930s Depression, World WarII and the Cold War.

Those who began the present war against us believe they will win because they are utterly convinced our generation has none of those great-generation qualities, but is instead degenerate, weak and cowardly, interested only in pleasure and luxury. They believe this generation will surrender. We shall see.

Michael Costello, former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was chief-of-staff to former Opposition leader Kim Beazley.

The entire West ( dare I say "the civilized World?" ) is locked in a fight to the death with militant Islam.

There will be no second-place winner, no "third way" solution-- it is March or Die time, folks.

It is Us versus an eighth-century "culture" of plunder, forced religious "conversions," and the mistreatment of women.

The sooner we face up to this fact realistically and quit dancing around PC talking-point nonsense about diversity and tolerance, the better off we'll all be.

We did not pick this fight- which really has roots in Jimmy Carter's appeasement in 1979 of militants- but we had damned well better see it for what it is, and be prepared to face it and finish it.

I'll put it in raw, personal terms-- I don't want Sharia law visited upon my women, and I don't want a goat-roper "culture" infesting my land.

I don't want their vile, nasty, loathsome weapons of mass destruction loosed upon my fair country, either.

They picked the fight, and now it is up to us to finish it- balls to the wall, hammer and anvil, fire and blood and iron... freedom is never, ever free, and the coin you pay it in is men's lives and tears and blood.

What we saw during Gulf War I was our military doctrine ( high tech ) versus Soviet doctrine ( throw a lot of low tech iron at the problem )-- and we all know how that turned out.

What we have just seen in the 3-Week War is Information-Tech,
( What some are calling it Hyperwarfare... )
or 21st Century warfare versus 20th Century...

What I would suggest, and call your attention to, is the fact that we, and Israel, are capable of waging 21st Century warfare, and the entire Arab world is not.

Proven fact, by recent events.

One more thing- this will be a war where we are all called to be warriors- so I suggest to you that the time has come to get hard, and stay hard... it really is the time for fire and blood and Iron...

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