About World War II And Jihadism
By Raymond Kraft
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
United States
was in an isolationist and 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, for the
Vichy
government of
France
aligned with its German occupiers.
Germany
was not an ally, for it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a
Thousand Year Reich in
Europe
.
Japan
was not an ally, for 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 of
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 World War I and throughout the
depression. At the outbreak of World War II there were army soldiers
training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have
guns, and using 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 $600m 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 rear by putting up a desperate fight for two years
until the United States 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
United States
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
United States
would very likely 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 now at another one.
There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has or wants to
have, and may soon have the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological,
or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless it is prevented
from doing so.
France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling these Islamic nations
weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea,
Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein
skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the
United Nations with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.
The Jihadis, or 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 and then the world. All who do not bow to Allah should be killed,
enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy
Israel
, and 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, or the Jihadis, will control
the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the
United States
, European, and Asian economies the techno-industrial economies will be at
the mercy of OPEC. This is 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, move out of the 10th Century into the 21st Century.
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 just anywhere 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 and whether Saddam Hussein was
directly involved in 9/11 or not the issue. 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
and 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.
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