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Historical Perspective

I don't do this often but felt that, no matter what the source or when it was written, this piece is worth posting. I have not been able to find the original writer's work online anywhere. If this was indeed written by Raymond S. Kraft of Loomis, California, I hope he won't mind my publishing it on my blog. It may have been around for years but it's new to me. If it's new to you, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. If not, my apologies in advance.

A California Lawyer's Perspective on the 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 ofAsia, 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 ofAsia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then theUnited States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control ofAsia 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 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 atPearl 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 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. 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 theMiddle 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 theMiddle 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, inIraq.

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 theMiddle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in theMiddle 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 ofUS occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again .... a 27 year war.

World War II cost theUnited 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. TheIraq 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 theMiddle 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 ofEurope. 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 a 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 off without 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 fightingGermany.

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 Killed-in-Action in Iraq in 3 years. The US took more than 4,000 KIA on the morning ofJune 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 ofIraq, 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.

Comments

Anonymous said…
When I get a post this long, I cut it and paste it into my word processing program so I can print it out and make some notes. Note: You don't even have to go to law school to be a "lawyer" in California - you just have to pass their bar exam, and a lot of their "lawyers" do better in the bars than in the courts.
Mr. Kraft has to hope that his readers will have forgotten history as much as he has.
But some of us have not.
"Sixty three years ago . . ." this must be old. In 2006, that would have been 1943!
"The US was in an isolationist . . . .etc." Yes the conservatives like Henry Cabot Lodge had defeated the idea of a League of Nations which could have checked Hitler. With no Marshall plan, Europe and most of the world had fallen into a deep depression after WWI.
As to the allies, first you'd think it was just Germany and Japan - he forgets Mousolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain. Yes Germany and its allies rolled over much of Europe and northern Africa. But a failure to note the contribution of the Resistance in most of those countries (who hid Anne Frank in the Netherlands? See the resistance museums in Bergin, Norway or Macon or Lyon in France - these I have seen; I am sure there are others.
Italy was not under the "Nazi heel." Its own facist government had moved into Ethipoia
And he forgets the support we had from other parts of what was then the British empire - proud Indian troops, troops from South Africa, Pakistanis, Kiwis from New Zealand. He also fails to note that in Asia, both the old Chinese nationalist government and the rising Chinese Communist forces stood against the Japanese.
We had been building naval forces (to this day, many accept the theory that they were "caught" in Pearl Harbor because someone in Washington felt the only way the isolationist mood of our Congress could be broken, was for us to suffer a drastic loss).
"Britain was saved . . .only . . ." omits lots of things. Britain was saved in large part because the British air force got the upper hand when Britain perfected radar (of which the Germans were unaware) so they could "see" and track approaching German planes long before they would have been detected otherwise.
But the biggest mistake here is lauding Russia. Hitler was able to run over western Europe - again, in part, because the envisioned League of Nations never got any real authority, and also, in part, because all of those countries were caught up in the depression, but most especially because Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler - Hitler rolled west with no concern for his eastern front, and then, after rolling quickly over much of the west, turned east - breaking his pact - (and not anticipating the resistance - it would be much like it could be for us, if, after taking Bagdhad in 7 days, we had rolled into Syria or Iran, not anticipating the latter pockets of resistance which would come into being in Iraq.) Even in Russia, it was the civilian resistance which largely determined Hitler's loss on his Eastern Front.
This Kraft is as screwed up in his thinking as he is in his history. Consider this paragraph:
"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 . . . . . . . . . . "
Take out the qualifier (which says that "Islam" is a "a radically conservative . . . form of . . .Islam"), and you read that "They believe that Islam . . . . should own and control. . . . ."

I believe it was an ancient Chinese warrior who said: "Know yourself; know your enemy. A thousand battles; a thousand victories."
Kraft does not know his history, and he cannot discern the difference among the various Islamic splinter sects we are facing. It is unfortunate that right now, they know us better than we know them - or ourselves.
Finally, of course, Kraft gives himself away. he says: "Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti pacifists kill them."
He must think that the Roman Empire won and the Christians lost.
That the British empire won and Ghandi lost.
That old South Africa won and Nelson Mandela lost.
That Jim Crow won and Martin Luther King, Jr. lost.
He and I just don't read the same history books. Hitler's Germany is gone (they are friends of ours today); Tojo's Japan is gone (also good friends), along with Franco's Spain, Mousolini's Italy, Tito's Yougoslavia, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. John McLain has returned to Vietnam.
Kraft's ideas have so much garbage, that I simply cannot stomach them and it amazes me that there are people sending them on to their friends.
I fear Wahabbis in Islam, but I fear skinhead "Christians" (like Timothy McVeigh) too. Mostly I fear warmongers who will distort history and truth to sell more bombs and planes and send more young men to early graves.
Kraft's diatribes are not unlike Hitler's - designed to stir up the reader's blood and put down anyone who would disagree with him.
Respectfully, I am one who would disagree. - Roger Buffett
Rena Bernard said…
First of all, Roger, thank you for your lengthy and well-considered comment to this post. I don't often get as thorough a response as yours and it's a pleasure to read that someone actually copies the post into Word and then comments on it in such detail. How refreshing!

Frankly, I didn't post Kraft's commentary because he is a lawyer. I don't give anyone special status based on his profession anymore. I've lived long enough to know that any dolt, given enough time and money, can pass college courses and bar exams or medical boards. I posted his piece because I fully agree with his position on what we must do to win this war.

The phrase that meant the most to me in the entire piece was this: "the most determined always win." I disagreed with his statement that it is the most "ruthless" that win. They do not, as you so aptly pointed out. However, it is indeed true that the most determined win. The most determined are those that put everything on the line for what they believe, for what is true, right, and honorable. This translates in my book to "right makes might." I whole-heartedly believe that to be true.

I think that you might have missed a salient point in your own commentary when you said, "Hitler's Germany is gone (they are friends of ours today); Tojo's Japan is gone (also good friends), along with Franco's Spain, Mousolini's Italy, Tito's Yougoslavia, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China." That point being that we fought and won wars against those countries (with the exception of China). By having a clear victor and vanquished, we were then able to settle down to a more peaceful world. With China we are battling on a different front -- an economic front. It remains to be seen how well we fight that battle.

Kraft may have omitted some points in his recounting of our history; however, you seem to be lacking in your understanding of the League of Nations. Even though the US refused to join the League, we were probably wise to do so. The League of Nations was in place prior to WWII and failed to prevent it. Much like the UN has failed to prevent so many of the conflicts worldwide today.

I am no warmonger, nor is the United States as a whole. It is a mistake to view our country as such because we have patiently tried to work through many of the attacks on our people over the past 20 years (USS Cole, Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, hijackings, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, etc.). There comes a point when patiently tolerating these attacks becomes senseless and leaves us open to more abuse.

While your issue may have only been with Kraft's recounting of history, I read a bit more into your commentary. I fear zealots of any religion. McVeigh was a zealot just like the Islamo-fascists we face today. Both are scary are to be dealt with as expediently as possible to provide a safer world for our children and theirs.

Again, thank you for the well-written and enlightening commentary. I do hope you'll continue to read my posts and comment whenever the mood hits you. I value all opinions and can learn much from them.

All the best,
Dawn
Anonymous said…
Europe Maps and Pictures
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/mercator/europe/
Rena Bernard said…
Nice maps but I'm a bit lost on why this link was posted. Can you shed a little light on the intent for me? I can sometimes be a bit dense when no context is given...

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