The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (2 page)

S
ix days before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I met with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He and I had been asked by the office of the mayor of Jerusalem to tape a segment to honor Ehud Olmert, who was leaving that post. As Mayor Giuliani and I talked, I asked him why he rejected the $10 million donation for disaster relief from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

He noted that when the prince had commented that the United States “should reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause,” thus suggesting that U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks, Giuliani felt it would be morally irresponsible to accept the money.

He reiterated what he had commented to the media at the time: “I entirely reject [his] statement…. There is no moral equivalent for this act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered…innocent people.”
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I thought again about the words of Isser Harel, a good friend and founder of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. On September 23, 1980, I had dinner at Harel’s home with Dr. Reuben Hecht, the senior advisor of Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister at that time. I asked Isser three questions, and I shall never forget his answers because all three came to pass just as he said they would.

“Who do you think will win the presidential election, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan?”

“I know Carter is ahead in the polls, but the word on the street is Iran will have something to say about that. They are planning on releasing the hostages during the inauguration of Ronald Reagan to keep Carter from being reelected.”

“Will President Sadat succeed with Jimmy Carter in pushing for human rights and democracy in Egypt?”

“We saved his life twice from radical Islamic terrorists. He will not always be there. I fear he will be killed.”

“Will terrorism ever come to America?”

“America is developing a tolerance for terrorism. The United States has the power to fight terrorism, but not the will; the terrorists have the will, but not the power. But all of that could change in time. Oil buys more than tents. You in the West kill a fly and rejoice. In the Middle East, we kill one, and one hundred flies come to the funeral. Yes, I fear it will come in time.”

“Where will it come to?” I asked him.

He thought for a moment. “New York is the symbol of your freedom and capitalism. It’s likely they will strike there first at your tallest building, because it’s your greatest fertility [phallic] symbol, and it is a symbol of your power.”

As Giuliani and I talked, I kept thinking of statements I was hearing about Israel. I became convinced that Israel would once again be forced to pay the appeasement bill for the upcoming war, as it had during the first Gulf War. Once again they would be pressured into accepting a “land for peace” plan, just as they had at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991. I remember it well since I had covered it at the Royal Palace of Madrid and was the first journalist to confront the then secretary of state James Baker during the event.

Since 2003, Tony Blair, prime minister of the United Kingdom, America’s strongest ally, has pressured President Bush to push the “Road Map” plan that called upon Israel to relinquish Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem.

I write this book with a sense of urgency because “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is precisely what is happening, once again, to appease racial and religious bigotry against the “Crusaders” and “Zionists”—the Christians and the Jews—but this time the stakes are much higher.

Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are on the brink of exploding into a Shiite/Sunni Islamic revolution—a revolution that is spreading like an Ebola virus throughout the Middle East, a revolution that also has America in its crosshairs and hopes to spread to our shores. A volcano of terror is at the brink of exploding in Iraq. When it does, its destructive powers will spill over into Jordan and Israel if it is not stopped. This crisis is the greatest threat to the United States since the Civil War.

On December 6, 2006, James Baker and Lee Hamilton released the
Iraq Study Group Report
on what their bipartisan commission believes should be done in Iraq. In it they recommended that

• the Golan Heights be returned to Syria (a terrorist state);
  
• Judea and Samaria be given to a terrorist-led government (the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority);
  
• Iran and Syria be invited to the negotiating table as a “support group” with no preconditions and with UN resolutions against those two nations forgotten;
  
• right-of-return into Israel be given to Palestinians (terrorists) in Lebanon;
  
• Israel be required to return to pre-1967 borders (which would mean the dividing of Jerusalem);
  
• the UN be allowed to determine the destiny of Iran’s nuclear program (which would, in my opinion, guarantee Iran with the bomb in a matter of a few years);
  
• amnesty be granted to terrorists (insurgents) who slaughtered American soldiers in Iraq.
  

On January 10, 2007, President George W. Bush addressed the nation concerning the Iraq crisis. He stated, “We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.”
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He also said that he was immediately sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East.

This call to appeasement—just like Chamberlain’s in the face of Nazi aggression in 1938—couldn’t be clearer. My prayer in writing this book is that we will wake up before we find a sea of glassy-eyed human corpses (suicide bombers) strapped with dynamite and roaming our streets as they have done in Israel. I fear there will be another attack on American soil before the 2008 elections. Radical Islamic terrorists only step back when they fear us.

L
OOKING
B
ACK

When I sat down to write
Beyond Iraq: The Next Move
, it was in the midst of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and our troops were still pushing toward Baghdad. I was deeply concerned about the outcome of the war, and I remember writing:

• The war in Iraq would not begin until it had ended. The greatest threats to American troops would come after the war for Baghdad had been won.
  
• Iraq’s future will be more mess than messianic.
  
• There will be an army of human corpses spread like a plague across Iraq in an attempt to weaken the resolve of the American people to win this war.
  
• Deposing Saddam Hussein would not end terrorism. Instead, Iraq would become the new Ground Zero. Terrorism in the Bible land would not end with the fall of Baghdad but rise to a new level.
  
• Syria and Iran would play the diplomatic card until the heat was off and then clandestinely go back to supporting terrorism.
  
• Every possible attempt would be made to start a civil war in Iraq. Islamic radicals would attempt to turn Iraq into another Lebanon.
  
• The war could not be partially won; the victor would be determined by who wins the last battle. We must see this war through to the end, or else the next time we have to fight terrorism it will be much worse.
  
• Can we lose the war on terrorism? We can, indeed, if we lose the battle for Iraq.
  

In October 2006, American troops in Iraq lived through their bloodiest month in over a year and a half—oddly coming right on the eve of our midterm elections where the war was a deciding factor for many voters. Those elections saw the Democrats decisively take over the House and capture a narrow majority in the Senate. The media called the election a mandate for the United States to get its troops out of Iraq.

Unfortunately, the talk was not about getting our troops out of Iraq after we have won, but about the quickest route to pulling them out without completely losing face in a kiss-and-run. Too many are willing to concede Iraq as another Vietnam because they can’t stomach the cost of actually winning this fight. What they don’t realize, however, is that if we don’t win this fight now, the cost of the next one will be far greater.

An unrestrained Islamic revolution is spreading from Iran through Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territory as the world sleeps. The goal is to take over the Middle East and then the entire world. Many of us don’t understand the true nature of what it will take to defeat this web of terror. We don’t seem to understand that Iraq is not a war in itself, but only one of the first battles in the overall war on terrorism. Too many don’t recognize the next World War has already started, and we are right in the middle of it. America needs to have the same resolve in dismantling the terrorists’ worldwide network that we did in fighting the Axis powers.

Stabilizing Iraq is not a “Pottery Barn rule” about fixing what we have broken; it is only one of our first solid steps for victory in the war against the Islamofascists—a group even more dangerous than the Nazi Fascists of Germany of the 1930s and World War II. Too few Americans today realize that the “insurgents” we fight in the streets of Iraq are not disgruntled Iraqis caught in a cycle of incomprehensible ethnic intolerance, but terrorists sponsored by oil-rich countries like Iran—the current leader, financier, and exporter of world Islamofascism—sent to sow civil war into the fledgling republic of Iraq with the same goals the Taliban had in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. They really believed that they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and that it caused the collapse of the entire Soviet Union. They think that the same thing will happen if they defeat the United States in Iraq.

Just days after the release of the
Iraq Study Group Report
, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, intimated at his Holocaust-denying conference attended by David Duke, the grand wizard of the KKK, “The U.S., Britain, and Israel will eventually disappear from the world like the pharaohs. It’s a divine promise.”
³

We fail to realize that we are fighting the newest world power set not on an ideology such as Communism or Nazism, but on a zealous, distorted form of Islam whose constituents are willing to both kill and die in the hope of spreading it worldwide. Their hope is to chase democracy and freedom from the Middle East, then from the world at large. Iran, the leader in this Islamofascism, is a regime with the mentality of a suicide bomber that is willing to go up in smoke as well, in the hope of wiping Judaism and Christianity off the map.

Iran’s leadership is set on obtaining nuclear weapons and advancing its missile technology so that it has the power to destroy Israel and cripple the United States and Europe.

Ahmadinejad and his cohorts are willing to tell any lie and sign any treaty without the slightest intent of keeping it, simply to advance their cause—after all, one need not truthfully negotiate with “infidels.” Just as Khomeini joined with and then ruthlessly turned on his allies in the Islamic revolution that transformed Iran into his own kingdom on Earth, so Iran now will cut any deal to get what it wants and then turn on those who helped them when it fits their greater purposes. Iran hopes to keep the international community at bay long enough to develop its own small nuclear arsenal—and once that is done, all previous bets will be off. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be within one strike of doing what he has claimed for years ought to be done: wiping Israel “off the map” as the first step toward the world he envisions as ideal—a world without Zionism or America.
⁴
Most leaders do not believe he could ever really succeed, but they know that a dirty bomb the size of a refrigerator, planted in Tel Aviv or New York, could kill as many as a million Jews and Americans.

What we don’t seem to understand most of all is that the road to victory in Iraq is not as much a matter of the Iraqis finally policing their own streets but of defeating the nuclear agenda and closing the terrorist-funding, petrodollar purse strings of Iran, which has $62 billion in reserves and believes it’s on a mission from God.

The key to victory in Iraq is not promoting the agenda of Nuri Kamel al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, but disarming the Islamofascist bigotry of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hossayni Khamenei. Right now the battle must not be over Iraq’s stability or democracy but over ours. Regardless of how bad things look in Iraq, I would rather fight the worldwide Islamofascists in Iraq than in the streets of America.

They proved on 9/11 that their choice is to fight us on our own soil. We must never let it come to that again.

The world stands at a critical crossroads, but unfortunately it does so wearing politically correct blinders. Because of them, we see our friends—namely Israel—as the root of the problem, and our enemies—Islamists set to destabilize the democracies and moderate (in other words, “non-terrorist-supporting”) governments of the Middle East—as misunderstood militants fighting for religious and political freedom. If we don’t correct our view, we may soon abandon our friends to appease these “militants,” only to find a nuclear knife in our backs as the reward.

If we don’t find a way to turn the right corner in 2007, the road ahead may never again be as clear or as safe as it is now.

W
HY
W
E
F
IGHT

Too few have seen the true costs of what we have to do in Iraq to win this crucial initial battle in what I call the “World War Against Terrorism.” As a nation overall, we have been blinded by liberal rhetoric to the purpose of the war. It’s time we set our blinders aside and acknowledge the truth.