Why Are We In Iraq?

Mens News Daily.com ^ | January 29, 2005 | Raymond S. Kraft

[FARS]

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, New Zealand, 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 in 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 butt 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 European nations could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. The so-called "Coalition Forces" are, in most cases, little more than a "Token Force" to keep face with the US. And once attacked, like the train bombing in Madrid, they pull their forces and run for home. 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 $180 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost over 2,300 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 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 1 hour 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 with no 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 more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq in 3-years. 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.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Forget the errors for a second because you have to take into account this is coming from a Liberal lawyer.

His point to all of this is as follows:

Jihadists are Conservatives who are trying to take over the world and unless they are stopped, liberalism will die.

Now to put it in a different perspective. America is hated not because of financial jealousy or giving off the perspective of arrogance. America is hated because of liberalism. Secular beliefs and decadent lifestyles which most of the world, outside of Communist nations abhors. Even the Communists abhor liberalism. For them it is a tool to destroy free societies before they come in, instil their ideology and kill all the liberals.

[EQAndyBuzz]

"Even the Communists abhor liberalism. For them it is a tool to destroy free societies before they come in, instil their ideology and kill all the liberals."

"instil = instill"

Forgot to mention one thing. Elitists on the left don't care because they believe that money will get them to places where they will be immune from the slaughter.

With term limits, this all goes away because the money dries up.

[JasonC]

The detailed, necessary corrective to this common bit of "whig history" is Lord Acton's paper "the Protestant Theory of Persecution", which establishes in no uncertain terms that there wasn't a trace of later liberal ideas in reformation-era protestantism. All thought the purpose of government included, or even consisted in, persecuting all those who did not match each thinker's doctrinal positions.

[usmcobra]

I do know that besides The ballon bombs The Japanese also had several submarine aircraft carriers built for the very purpose of attacking the continental US and Panama.

But wait that's not an invasion is it?

Let's see the Germans had plans to attack the east coast with submarine lauched V2s and the Japanese had plans to attack the west coast by submarine aircraft (and some believe those aircraft were to use a Japanese nuke that may have been tested in North Korea) and in each case their plans were not well known or even mentioned in the majority of history books.

You're right, no records of any invasion plans have ever been released.

[Sam Cree]

*

[tonycavanagh]

In fact many committed Nazis went on to being very committed Communists in East Germany.

Many early Stasi officers were former officers of the Nazi SS with East German Communist leaders actively seeking former Gestapo Many early Stasi officers were former officers of the Nazi SS with East German Communist leaders actively seeking former Gestapo and SD to lead the Stasi in its formative years.

[ImpBill]

In my opinion the author has built his entire proposition on a false ides.

"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."

The Quran really doesn't teach tolerance. Convert or die, is the basic and reoccurring message I find in "their book".

[patriciaruth]

I would appreciate your expanding on your comments. What are we doing out there? What tactics are we using and why?

[JasonC]

Here are Acton's relevant details on Luther. There are two distinct periods. Acton applies his historical "power corrupts" principle and his method "let a man incriminate himself".

While still in opposition and without support of civil princes, and before the Zwinglian schism, Luther put religious purity in his literalist sense above obediance, but did not invoke civil authority to persecute in religious matters. This was in conformity with his immediate interests, since he would have been the target of that principle, at the time, not his opponents. He was most nearly "liberal" at this time. Once he had power that changed - more on the later, mature doctrine below. First, here are the relevant statements from his early period.

"Princes are not to be obeyed when they command submission to superstitious errors, but their aid is not to be invoked in support of the Word of God."

"If they prohibit true doctrine, and punish their subjects for receiving the entire sacrament, as Christ ordained it, compel the people to idolatrous practices, with masses for the dead, indulgences, invocation of saints, and the like, in these things they exceed their office, and seek to deprive God of the obediance due Him. For God requires from us this above all, that we hear his Word, and follow it; but where the government desires to prevent this, the subjects must know that they are not bound to obey it." Works XIII, 2244.

"I will compel and urge by force no man; for the faith must be voluntary and not compulsory, and must be adopted without violence." Works XX, 24, 1522.

Those principles justified revolt of Protestant subjects against Catholic authorities, including his own revolt, and tried to forbid authorities from attacking his disobediance, by claiming they were disobeying the higher authority of God.

But once there were Protestant princes he could find shelter and political protection from, and especially after the unlimited principle of secession the previous sets up was used against his own movement by Zwinglians, Anabaptists, and other Protestant groups, he changed his doctrine to the characteristic obediance to the civil power he is later known for.

This happened as soon as there were other literalists in the field against him. (He recognized his own role in that, incidentally). Before that, scripture was the ultimate standard and ran even against the civil power. After it, it was the duty of the civil power to persecute anyone who departed from his system, as the following statements, from later on, show.

"I beg first of all that you will not help mollify Count Albert in these matters, but let him go on as he has begun... Encourage him to go on briskly, to leave things in the hand of God, and obey His divine command (sic) to wield the sword as long as he can."

"Do not allow yourselves to be much disturbed, for it will redound to the advantage of many souls that will be terrified by it, and preserved."

"If there are innocent persons among them, God will surely save and preserve them, as He did Lot and Jeremiah. If He does not, then they certainly are not innocent... We must pray for them that they obey, otherwise this is no time for compassion; just let the guns deal with them."

"...If they refuse to acknowledge and to obey the civil authority, then they forfeit all they have and are, for then sedition and murder are certainly in their hearts."

"Christian freedom consists in the belief that we require no works to attain piety and salvation."

Those persecuted by the civil power had no legitimate recourse, and no duty or pact or responsibility bound governors - "A Christian must suffer violence and wrong, especially from his superiors... As the emperor continues emperor, and princes princes, though they transgress all God's commandments, yea, even if they be heathen, so they do even when they do not observe their oath and duty... Sin does not suspend authority and allegiance". Of course this doctrine did not apply to the Pope or to Luther's own, by then consumated, revolt.

He explicitly justified crime by the civil power. "Princes, and all rulers and governments, however pious and God-fearing they may be, cannot be without sin in their office and temporal administration. They cannot always be so exactly just and successful as some wiseacres suppose; therefore they are above all in need of the forgiveness of sins."

He taught that past religious scruple has made governors too meek. "Thus they are persuaded by monks to be gracious, indulgent, and peaceable. But authorities, princes, and lords ought not to be merciful."

He urged Protestant princes not to tolerate Catholicism "for no secular prince can permit his subjects to be divided by the preaching of opposite doctrines".

Acton saves the most damning quote for the end of his brief.

"Heretics are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard, and whilst they perish by fire, the faithful ought to pursue the evil to its source, and bathe their hands in the blood of the Catholic bishops, and of the Pope, who is a devil in disguise."

Riffel, Church History II, 9 and Table-Talk, III 175.

Not a tea party. The ideological leaders were urging whatever power they could gain the allegiance of to persecute and exterminate their opponents. The other Protestant reformers are not better than Luther was; most are worst. There are a few voices for tolerance, but not among the powerful leading it all.

We cannot teach Muslims anything about the principle of tolerance by whitewashing European history and pretending ferocious bigots were tolerant liberals. Tolerance came much later, first through exhaustion at the failure of wars to give a clear winner - which initially just drove it inside countries without ending it - and gradually through the spread of liberal, enlightenment principles.

This was not peculiar to Germany or to the 16th century, nor to the Protestant side. A French king ordered the extermination of all Protestants in his territory late in the 17th, a generation after the 30 years war ended. Pacifist quakers were being hanged for heresy on Boston common in the last decade of the 17th century. Catholics were persecuted in the most liberal and "whig" country of all, England, well into the 18th (whigs supported tolerance among Protestant denominations, but not toward "Papists") - and in its possession Ireland, well into the 19th.

[patriciaruth]

Hi, Allegra! Nice to see you're still in the chum.

[patriciaruth]

Interesting apologia for Chamberlain. We don't get much of that wider view of the situation here in the States.

Thanks for expounding more on the context of the times. People can have very good, sound reasons for not doing what history (Monday morning quarterbacking) eventually proves wrong.

[Allegra]

Hi, Allegra! Nice to see you're still in the chum.

Hi! I just got back to The Sandbox from vacation yesterday. It sure was nice being free out there and eating whatever I want. ;-)

[patriciaruth]

Excellent post on Civil War casualties, which proves brilliantly that Americans are better at killing Americans than anyone else in the world.

And also may explain the fratricide that goes on with increasing frequency here at Free Republic.

Biologically we explain this as the principle that the highest competition for survival goes on between individuals or groups occupying the same niche.

[tonycavanagh]

re : What are we doing out there?

Phase four stabilization and pacification.

In case you don't know there are four phases.

Phase 1 Movement into position.

Phase 2 The air war softening up targets comms logs defensive positions.

Phase 3 the land war.

Phase 4 occupation stabilization and pacification.

The reason for phase 4 is because with the removal of Saddam there was a major power vacuum, no government, no stability in fact anarchy started to take hold, in fact we could of ended up with another Afghanistan scenario with a Taliban type movement taking control as did happen with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

re :What tactics are we using and why?

Tactics and Strategy a common compliant is we are fighting a war why aren't we fighting it like it is a war.

Well we are but there are different types of war High Intensity like the Second World War, liberation of Kuwait, the Arab Middle east wars, and low intensity such as North Ireland Algeria and a host of colonial wars.

Vietnam was both high and low intensity which led to a mismatch of tactics and strategy.

Over the years many tactics and stretefies have evolved in fighting low intensity wars thse are covered by the term COIN.

Counter Insurgency.

We are fighting a Counter Insurgency War in Iraq. Our role is to stabilise the region until such a time as we either defeat the terrorists military or we hand over to a stable Iraqi government with a unified and professional strong Iraqi Security force.

I think the latter is what we are aiming for. An important component in dealing with an insurgency/terrorist movement is denying the support of the local population to the insurgents/terrorists. (ps : military term is insurgent, Civilian term is terrorist). There are two schools of fault here, use of terrors and reprisals, or winning the support of the local population. If we take the Second World War as an example, The Germans occupied most of Europe and practised differing methods of occupation policy. What was found was the more brutal the repression the more organised was the resistance and more supported by the local population.

Poland, which experienced the most brutal repressive measures of all the occupied nations, had the most organised resistant group.

In Czech Hedrich who favoured Terror with terror ran such a liberal regime that Czech became a very important part of the German Armnements Industry, he was assassinated, the Germans switched to an oppressive regime, which resulted in more sabotage in the factories and more organised resistance, this was the same in the other occupied countries.

I can give you other examples , the Soviets in Afghanistan, Stalin’s repression, France in the Algerian War, third world examples such as Rwanda. My own country when we decided to teach the Irish nationalists a lesson resulting in Bloody Sunday, best recruiting tool the IRA ever had. The same in India in the 30s when General Dhafor decided to teach the Indians a lesson they will never forget.

There are so many examples of where meeting terror with terror failed.

Today we look at winning the support of the local population, and denying that support to the terrorists. Hearts and Minds as it is called.

There have been notable successes where local intelligence has led to a number of captures of leading terrorists who will supply us with a wealth of intelligence leading to more captures.

It may not be sexy, it may not be visual with pictures of fast moving jets, aircraft carriers, MI tanks spurting over a battlefield job, but it does get the job done. Which is what counts.

[CougarGA7]

No, it began on September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Most of the figures and dates in this thing are wrong.

I've always viewed the begining of WWII as 1931 myself when Japan invaded Manchuria. But I dont know where this 1928 date comes from.

[FARS]

totally agree with you. Again - did not want to edit the author. It was not my article to amend.

[patriciaruth]

I never claimed that any of the first Protestant sects were "liberal" as to freedom of thought and religion as we understand it today.

I stated that to my knowledge Martin Luther did not call for the "extermination" of those who did not agree with his positions on interpretation of Scriptural, whereas the Catholic church did try to take him to Rome for execution. Local politicians (=local aristocratic rulers) and local people from the peasant revolt prevented that order from the Pope, for their own reasons of nationalism, etc. by threatening to abandon their support of the Germany-Austrian Emperor of that time if the Emperor obeyed the order to hand over Luther.

Luther was the hingepin on which these groups made their successful revolt from Rome for reasons which had little to do with religious doctrine. A number of people, however, did believe in the humbler version of Christianity based on Scripture which Dr. Luther expounded and codified later in his own Catechism and in other voluminous writings, and some were killed for exposing that set of beliefs.

When we talk of Inquisition, we talk of people who were forced to recant on pain of death, too often with what modern liberals would consider torture, and of burning at the stake those hardy and stubborn few who didn't recant their beliefs.

I don't believe any of his writings Dr. Luther called for "exterminating" those who didn't agree with him, but if you have some quotations from some particular works that run counter to my current belief, I would be interested. He did want to exterminate certain practices, like selling "indulgences" and ungodly behavior by princes of the church that he witnessed in Rome, but not to kill the offending people.

[patriciaruth]

I was hoping for something more intriguing than what I already knew was going on, at least this is what we've all been told is going on there.

Maybe some of the finer points from T.E.Lawrence's private writings and how they apply to today's situation, like how eliminating leaders of an insurgency causes a loss of expertise and confusion in the rank and file, would have been fun to discuss.

Or something about counterinsurgency efforts directed toward Iran, who supplied by far the majority of the foreign fighter captured in Iraq this past year.

At any rate, from the terrorist round up reports that Straight Vermonter posts, it looks like the strategy is to go after the leaders, and to deny them safe haven to get reorganized. They on the other hand have done a fair amount of going after needed infrastructure, but wasted a great deal of time and resources and natural good will in the populace by attacking civilians.

I am definitely very worried by Iran's insane leaders and the militancy of the widespread fundamental Islamic beliefs taught the populace there by the Imans. And even more worried by the fact that certain other countries, especially Russia, have decided to feed that tiger, thinking they will be able to ride it and cut back on U.S. influence in the region.

[tonycavanagh]

re :like how eliminating leaders of an insurgency causes a loss of expertise and confusion in the rank and file, would have been fun to discuss.

LOL you are not trying to imply that we have a shoot to kill policy and are engaging in deliberate assassination now are you.

Or something about counterinsurgency efforts directed toward Iran, who supplied by far the majority of the foreign fighter captured in Iraq this past year.

That would be more insurgency efforts as they are directed at a foreign nation.

LOL are you saying that we would be underhand enough to deliver arms and other support to the Northern and Southern insurgents in Iran.

Those topics are not polite enough for the dinner table or open forums

[patriciaruth]

Well, your teaser did suggest you were going to divulge something juicy.

And all I got was polite dinner conversation about the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.