PDA

View Full Version : Good Essay (Long)


Patrick
06-20-2007, 06:06 AM
Not all will agree but this is well written and informative.

Most of us are not old enough to remember that every family in America was seriously impacted by WWII; Rationing of meat, shoes, sugar and gasoline.
No tires for our automobiles and a speed limit of 35 mph, not to mention no automobiles.

Read this and think about how you may feel about being taken over by foreigners in 2007 or the near future.

Historical Significance.

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America taking food and war materials

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist m ood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European 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 , who had not yet attacked us . It was a dicey thing . We had few allies .

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers . Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia..

Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico , as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

America 's only allies then were England , Ireland , Scotland , Canada , Australia, and Russia . That was about it. All of Europe, fr om Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East! ) was al ready under the Nazi heel

The US was certainly not prepared for war. The US had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WW I because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW II, Army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks A huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or 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 actually the property of Belgium ) given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could .

Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of its Royal 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. Hitler, first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940 at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

Ironically, 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 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone . . . 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war .

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. ! ;Now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.

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

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs -- they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. To them, all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated . They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel , and purge the world of Jews . This is their mantra . (goal)

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, but it is not yet known which side will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, 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 educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had 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, 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. 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 and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing . . . . . . . . in Iraq . Not in New York , not in London , or Paris or Berlin , but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 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 people, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here. 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


Continued:

Patrick
06-20-2007, 06:06 AM
WW II, the war with the Japanese and German 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 the US 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 a gain . . a 27 year war.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WW II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist at! tack cos t New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack .

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism .

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything comes out okay . The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be .

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like 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 to conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them from getting them.

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 .

OR

4 . 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 possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

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.

The history of the world is the history of civilization 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 .

Remember, perspective is every thing, 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 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action 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 WW II the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far

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)

It's difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America , where it's safe.

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran , Syria , Iraq , Sudan , North Korea , in the places that really need peace activism the most? I'll tell you why! They would be killed!

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!

This thing isn't going to be over in a few years, it will take many years before it can be stabilized.

If we don't stay the course and take care of business in Iraq and deal with the militant presense there, I have no doubt we will eventually be fighting them here.

Moody
06-21-2007, 01:36 PM
The clash of cultures.

A startling fact:

It is estimated there is close to 2 Billion Muslims on earth. If 1% of the Muslim community are associated with extremist groups, values or beliefs that would give them an army of 20 million. Although it is believed that 10 - 15 % is more accurate for those who would side with extremist Muslim views. That is an army of 200 - 300 million people ready to end our way of life right now. :eek3:

sbfuller
06-21-2007, 01:43 PM
2 billion muslims, isn't there about 7.5 billion people on earth? that is a startling fact if it is actually true...

Crystalline
06-25-2007, 11:51 PM
Hmmm... I want to know who wrote this article. Can I have the link??


(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians .

Terrorism is defined by the U.S. Department of Defense as "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."

There are so many leaders/dictators out there that are terrorists and we (the United States) don't do anything about it. Shit, they probably think we are terrorist. I don't think this would be an issue if it weren't for us working with
Israel. Plus there are many terrorists groups among the middle east. They would need to figure out how to work together before trying to take over.


I also don't think this is like WWII. The Nazi's were an actual military. The terrorist groups among the middle east are using PREGNANT WOMEN to get into the Israel border to do a suicidal bombing. That is nothing compared to the Nazi's. We got involved in WWII for few different reasons. These aren't comparable. Just my .02.

GLD
06-26-2007, 03:58 PM
I'd like to know who wrote it too. The author uses the set-up if this then that multiple times without providing the logical linkage between the two. Finally the author frequently states opinion as fact: "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".

Someone with a different point of view could easily look at the same situation and state "We run a good chance of screwing stuff up in Iraq that will require a consistent foreign presence to stop a slip backwards into anarchy. The current American presence creates the paradox wherein if they pull out the country will surely lapse into chaos, however, by maintaining their presence they create a recruitment tool for the very groups bent upon their destruction and only become the catalyst for the growing American resentment entrenching itself in the Middle East. This resentment is what allows the moderates to turn the blind eye to the extremist actions."

The author also seems to cite previous war as a justification of war. I'll accept war is a way of life but not a necessity-I do not understand the authors need to state the duration of previous wars as some sort of justification of the current.

Also I don't see much difference between options 2 and 4. And point 2 is based upon a faith in Iranian propoganda. Most of the global community does not believe Iran has the current enrichment capability rate despite their claims. Two their is a large difference between having all the materials and actually making a weapon.

The author also points out a worst case future scenario as a rationale for current action. He/she also starts by framing this as a war of ideas and not action. In which case how can one possibly expect to win with action?

The essay in actuality is a terrible essay, it might conclude what you want to hear (and that's ok) but the logic to get there is terribly flawed and it's full of fear mongering not fact.

AliceInChains02
06-28-2007, 07:07 PM
well put.:icon_thum