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My dad, who was working as Director for Homeland Security out in Cali at the time, sent me this email saying, "This is the best analysis I've seen of what's going on in the Middle East today, and how we need to learn from history if we wish to prevent the deaths of millions and survive as a free people." If you have a few minutes, read up. There's some very interesting info in this.

(In case you haven't seen this guy's essay, take time
> to read and pass on. pw)
>
> Subject: Fw: EXCELLENT essay
>
> Historical Significance
>
> 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.
>
> At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist
> mood, 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 , which 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 , from Norway to
> Italy, except Russia in the East, was already under
> the Nazi heel.
>
> America was certainly not prepared for war. America
> had drastically downgraded most of its military forces
> after W.W.I and throughout the depression, so that at
> the outbreak of WW2, 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. And 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
> on 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 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 first turning his
> attention to Russia , at a time when England was on
> the verge of collapse, in the late summer of
> 1940.
>
> 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 million people in the
> sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them
> from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also
> more than a MILLION soldiers.
>
> Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to
> focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then
> America . And the Nazis could possibly have won the
> war.
>
> All of this is to illustrate that turning points in
> history are often dicey things. And 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. And that 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.
>
> 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 known yet which 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.
>
> You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next
> winter? 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 and the Islamic
> terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. And
> 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 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 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.
>
> 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. W.W.II 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 $160
> billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York .
> It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is
> roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed
> on
> 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning W.W.II
> would have been unimaginably greater -- a world
> dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.
>
> Americans have a short attention span, conditioned by
> 30 second sound bites,
> 60 minute 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.
>
> 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 " 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 somebody
> prevents 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.
>
> 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, 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
> 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.
>
> 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 . 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 W.W.II the US averaged 2,000
> KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual
> battles of W.W.II 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).
>
> It's difficult to understand why the American left
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~
> Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern
> California . Please consider passing along copies of
> this article to students in high school, college and university as it
> contains information about the American past that is very meaningful
> today -- history about America that very likely is completely unknown
> by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied
> the facts of our history, they are at a decided
> disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking
> through the issues of today. They are prime targets
> for misinformation campaigns beamed at enlisting them
> in causes and beliefs that are special interest agenda
> driven.
>
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