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World War Three, Part 3:
August 19, 2002:
In this piece, I want to continue with my discussion from last
week of the threats we face. I continue to believe that we are
one year into World War Three. I also believe that our president
has yet to take it seriously. The truth is, he just doesn't get
it. He seems to be going off in all directions and putting up
all kinds of straw men while ignoring the chaos in Afghanistan.
As another straw man, he is suggesting a Hitler type of civilian rat network. He wants people to rat on their neighbors and turn them in for suspected crimes. I remember when people said Hitler was doing that in the forties. I was just a 12 year old kid when it started. I was outraged. Everyone said how evil it was. Can you imagine having some kind of beef against one of your neighbors? Maybe they kept you awake with a raucous party or loud music one night. What a neat thing it would be to tell the blustering blundering FBI that you saw Arabs skulking around that neighbor's house. Why don't we go after our enemies fo God's sake?
We desperately need leadership. All the same, I don't necessarily want to replace the president. I want him to get off of the dime and start fulfilling his contract. He contracted to be the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military. He is not effectively fulfilling that role. He is dinking and dunking and wasting time and resources to no effect. We must either replace him of get him off of the dime. That may be as simple as getting rid of a few entrenched political hacks and getting him some advisors who understand. The left over elder Bush cronies are not doing it.
On the television news, we hear that they are still talking about invading Iraq. It seems that we are almost poised for the invasion. I believe they really intend to go through with this madness. Please don't misunderstand me. To be sure, Iraq is a threat and needs to be dealt with, but we have other concerns. We are not mobilized. We are spread very thin as it is. We do not have the military manpower or hardware to carry out a two front offensive. Perhaps that is the real reason our president is dinking and dunking. We lack the resources to do anything else.
I continue to insist that we need a war machine. We need the kind of resources we created to prosecute World War Two. We cannot count on others. If we invade Iraq, we are not going to have many allies. We better be sure we can do it alone. As to the terrorists, it would be a perfect time for them to hit us again while we are involved in Iraq. It would be like we set ourselves up for them. It's simply not time to invade Iraq now. The administration doesn't seem to get that we have more pressing concerns.
I believe it is not just our government who does not get it. This ignoring of facts seems to permeate our entire society. Almost a year has passed and some fools are squabbling about what to do with the real estate occupied by the World Trade Center. That is just nonsense. That has to be set aside. We are at war and we must mobilize for that. This war is not unusual. We have always been fighting madmen and we always should. It is only insidious and frightening because we have not yet choose to fight it seriously. Once we organize against it, it will be no different that any other war. We will find their hidey-holes and burn them out. We cannot do that by having the postman spy on Americans.
As to homeland security, it is simply a fraud, another straw man. The new Homeland Security Department is nothing more than a conglomeration of groups and departments already proven inept. Now they want more money to squander. Even a peasant knows that a fork-full of manure thrown into the air will still be manure when it comes down. Reshuffling old failed solutions will not fix anything. If they could not do their separate jobs, how will they do better on their combined jobs?
When industry consolidates, it does not increase it's staff and budget. Quite the opposite is done. There is no way combined groups should be larger or more costly than the original groups. Why can't the government try to combine functions, eliminate redundancy, and streamline response? Why can't we fire bureaucrats? Why can't we eliminate deadwood from the Civil Service?
Look at the realities of security. On August 31, 2002, the media reported that another bomb attack in Israel killed a bunch of students in a cafeteria. If a totally totalitarian militaristic state cannot be secure, how does anyone really expect to have homeland security here? The only way to have even minimal security is to close the society. I believe that is what Ashcroft intends to do.
The only real way to be secure is to go after the terrorists in their homes. The best defense is an attack. Patton is not the first or the only true warrior who has said that. I repeat, we must mobilize just as we were mobilized for WWII. I remember 1941 through 1945. We knew we were at war and everyone was involved. Able bodied men became soldiers. For the rest, if you could use one hand, you could be employed. We used everyone available. There were some tough Christmases for everyone.
On reading this, some mother is sure to say to me, "How dare you? You want to send my son to war."
My answer is as simple as it is brutal. We are at war. I simply want to win. To do that, your son may indeed be lost in the fight. If he is not prepared to risk that, he has no business here. A democracy will survive or not because of its people. When people are unwilling to step up and do what is necessary, the democracy will disintegrate. It will degenerate to anarchy and the savages will have won.
The truth is, our democracy is approaching anarchy now. This attack on America should have mobilized us. If we had good leadership at the crucial time, it would have. We do not have leadership. The president prefers to go toward hedonism. Hedonism is just another form of anarchy. It is the extreme of personal short term satisfaction at the expense of the long term and the many.
War is expensive in human life and in material resources. WWII was very expensive. In about 60 months, we used more resources than the whole world had used up to that time. We also lost thousands of fine young men. That is the nature of war. The alternative is to surrender, then we would all be lost along with civilization. The result of that would be the same as if we did not fight Hitler. It would be the end of democracy and human freedom.
When a man puts on the uniform of the United States military there is the possibility that he will lose his life in service of his country. If we don't rise to the challenge, if he does not put on the uniform and go after the terrorists, there is a likelihood that he will be killed in his home. He could die of Anthrax poisoning or some other horrible tool of evil. These people intend to destroy us. There is nothing we can do about that. They are insane and insanity is not susceptible to logic. The only thing we can influence is the likelihood of their success.
Before this is over, there is a good chance that every able bodies person in this country will be involved in the hunting down and execution of terrorists. Ultimately, I see no other solution. These people are insane and there is no cure for that. We cannot restrain them, We do not have prisons enough to hold all of them. Call me an imperialist. I can accept that. If there are to be imperialists in this world, I insist that we fulfill that role.
Our enemy is trying to destroy us. We cannot prevent their attempt. We can only prevent their success. To do that, we must realize that we are in the biggest, most dangerous war we have ever been in. Then we must pursue victory with whatever it takes. We must systematically destroy our enemies strongholds and resources wherever they are. We must take and occupy territory. We must execute terrorists. We must establish viable democracies in every fundamentalist country in the world. We must, once and for all, make the world safe.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, it does not matter. Those people are
savages. They rape their own daughters, their children. The savages
in the Middle East are about where European Christianity was in
the Crusades of the middle ages. The problem is, the Middle Eastern
savages have better weaponry that those Christian savages had.
They can do a great deal more damage. If we let them, they truly
will destroy civilization. They are savages and monsters. Their
holy wars are exactly the same as the holy wars of Europe. The
Christians destroyed a civilization and the Muslin fundamentalists
will do a more thorough job.
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