Ras
Number of posts: 22
Age: 50
Location: Lexington, KY, USA
Registration date: 2008-07-26
 |  Subject: Seven Years Into The War On Terror, at Least  Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:31 pm | |
| Remember the Alamo
Remember the Maine
Remember Pearl HarborRemember the WTC, Pentagon, and Flight 93 I trust everyone reading this page knows what happened on this day, seven years ago. And I’m not talking about Ethiopian New Year’s Day. It was on this day in 2001 that Americans were shockingly brought into the twenty-first century. After ignoring events abroad for the previous decade, we suddenly learned that militant Islam was at war with us. Most of what I have to say on this subject would merely be a repeat of what I wrote last year. One difference is that I haven’t heard anything lately from the kooks who think 9/11 was an inside job. Maybe those of us with enough sense to know that conspiracies don’t control the world have sufficiently debunked them. Or maybe they were too busy campaigning for Ron Paul. Also, it has come to my attention that we’re taking forever to build anything meaningful on the sites of the attacks. Just today they dedicated a memorial at the Pentagon, but they haven’t even gotten started on a memorial at “Ground Zero.” And to think that a few years back, folks were talking about raising a new tower or towers, that would be grander than the fallen ones of the World Trade Center. Have we lost our willingness to do something daring? Have we lost our “get up and go?” By contrast, the Empire State Building was completed in only fifteen months, in the middle of the Great Depression. And we ought to go back to the drawing board, when it comes to designing a memorial for the brave folks on Flight 93. Really, an arc of trees forming a red Islamic crescent? I don’t remember seeing swastikas or Japanese battle flags prominently displayed at World War II memorials. What are they thinking? Click on the link below to find out what else is wrong with the design. http://xenohistorian.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/20050908wp_flight93memorial-1_450.jpg?I will finish by reposting links to what I wrote about the war on The Xenophile Historian:
The current conflict between terrorism and the modern world, like it or not, is the most important struggle of our lifetime. There is as much at stake here as there was in the two World Wars and the Cold War. Maybe even more so; Kaiser Bill, the Nazis and the Communists were at least products of Western civilization, albeit a nastier faction of the West than the faction that defeated them. Now that we have been fighting terrorism for several years, only four groups of people in the West still don’t see the threat posed to their way of life by militant Islam. Those are:
- The willfully naive.
- America-haters.
- Jew-haters.
- Those who are afraid to confront evil.
Well, there are none so blind as those who will not see. We are now in the middle of World War III or World War IV, depending on what you think of
the Cold War. Historians will draw parallels between the War on Terror and previous conflicts, and this helps to let us know how we’re doing. However, there are also some important differences between this war and previous ones, and if we forget them, we risk making the same mistake as those generals who plan to fight the next battle the same way as they fought the last one.
First, there isn’t a clear date as to when the War on Terror started. You may be saying right now that it started on September 11, 2001, but if you do so, you forget that Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States three years earlier. Did it start then? With the attack on the U.S.S. Cole? The bombing of the US embassies in Africa? The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center? Hezbollah’s 1983 attacks on the peacekeeping troops stationed in Lebanon? Or did it begin all the way back in 1979, when Iranian militants took 65 Americans hostage and held most of them for 444 days?
Second, the terrorists are not declared combatants, with flags and uniforms to call their own. You probably wouldn’t recognize them as enemy warriors,
if you met one of them on the street. Women, children and even animals are occasionally used as suicide bombers, especially in Israel. And while we’ve been led to believe the typical terrorist is a man of Middle Eastern ancestry, between the age of 17 and 40, they can also come from anywhere else, or be native-born converts. Examples of these include “Taliban” John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid (the “Shoebomber”), Jack Roche (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli embassy in his country), the July 7 bombers in Britain, Muriel Degauque (a Belgian woman who blew herself up attacking American soldiers in Iraq), Sulejman Talovic (the Bosnian-born teenager who went on a shooting spree in a Salt Lake City mall), Cho Seung-Hui (the Korean immigrant responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre), and the “Fort Dix Six” (ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo).
Because we’re dealing with a “phantom menace,” much of this war has to be waged by the intelligence agencies of the West, so one of the major fronts
will be invisible. We will never know all the real heroes because many of them belong to the CIA, FBI, Scotland Yard, etc.; we won’t always know when they stop a terrorist strike, and their accomplishments may remain top secret forever. And just as we can’t be sure when the war started, we may never know for sure if it’s over; there won’t be a formal ending like when the Japanese surrendered on the U.S.S. Missouri. Instead, a lot of those on the other side will simply disappear into the civilian masses around them. Heck, it looks like Osama bin Laden has done that already–if he’s still alive.
Third, the totalitarian ideology in this war has more believers. An estimated 1.3 billion people–one fifth of the world’s population–claim Islam as their religion; Mohammed is the world’s most common first name. A 2008 survey reported that only 7 percent of Moslems favor terrorism and a society governed by the Shari’a, but that’s still a problem; it means Islam has 91 million potential terrorists! And I suspect that the real percentage is higher, judging from the way moderate Moslems have been so silent when extremists make their religion look bad. At the height of the Cold War, communism claimed a billion followers, but those were coerced followers. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of its citizens stopped taking Marxist philosophy seriously.
Even fewer believed in Fascism or Nazism; most of those who did were confined to a few countries (mainly Germany, Italy and Japan), and only in Spain and Portugal did a Fascist dictatorship last for more than a single generation.
Fourth, there’s the creepy death cult promoted by Moslem extremists. Some will compare it to the kamikaze pilots of World War II, or the monks in South Vietnam who burned themselves to death to protest an anti-Buddhist government. Well, keep in mind that the monks did not try to take anybody with them. As for the kamikazes, remember that they only attacked military targets, and their tactic was an act of desperation; when they started turning their
planes into flying bombs, the war had less than a year left to go. Aside from the Japanese, who were motivated by samurai teachings about an honorable death, most Fascists, Nazis and communists lived for the present, and didn’t want to die for the cause if they could help it. Nikita Khrushchev, for example, frightened the West when he said, “We will bury you,” but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice Moscow for a chance to obliterate New York City. By contrast, today’s terrorists value dying more than living, and are in a hurry to go from this world to the next one. That means we won’t be able to contain Islamic fundamentalism by threatening to destroy it, the way the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine kept the United States and the Soviet Union from
using nuclear weapons on each other. MAD doesn’t work against those who are truly mad.
Each article in this chapter has its own page. Click on one of the following to go to:
[/b] |
|
Home 
Our FREEDOM Forum Blog 
Register 
Log in 
