The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (3 page)

We have only to look as far back as the presidency of Jimmy Carter to find a time when a Pandora’s box was opened and the Islamic revolution was unleashed. Carter’s worldview—as exemplified in his latest book,
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
—clearly articulates the belief system of the extreme Left. This ideology was alive and well during the time of the shah of Iran and leaves no question in my mind that it was responsible for the destabilization of Iran, a pro-Israel and pro-Western ally. Khomeini could never have succeeded with the birthing of the Islamic revolution without the assistance and support of President Jimmy Carter. Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, in turn, birthed the onslaught of terrorism by which the entire world has been gripped and victimized.

We invaded Iraq for a number of reasons. The late Saddam Hussein’s regime supported terrorism and had repeatedly used weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against the Kurds of Iraq’s northern regions and during the Iran-Iraq War. He murdered tens of thousands with chemical weapons during his time in power. Cleverly, however, as world pressure grew on Iraq to prove that they no longer had WMDs, many believe Hussein moved them into Syria before Operation Iraqi Freedom, and we have yet to hear the end of not finding them.

Still others believe that we invaded Iraq to set up a democracy there, but it was a democracy in Europe that voted Hitler into power, a democracy in Gaza that elected Hamas to control the Gaza Strip, and a democracy in Lebanon that gave Hezbollah seats in their parliament. While democracy is the hope for the future of the Middle East, as long as that democracy simply reinforces ethnoreligious prejudices, it won’t matter. Until those in the Middle East are willing to follow the rule of law and allow freedom of religion for everyone, democracy there will only support mob rule and thugocracies. Besides, how can you have democracy in countries that are theocratic?

No, the United States went to Iraq to take the fight to the terrorists. In this we have been very successful. Every terrorist organization in the world is now in Iraq, and we are holding them at bay. The chaos in the streets is not a sign we are losing but a sign of a very difficult war fighting a type of warfare that we have never fought before. This war is not over, and we need to hold our resolve to see it through. Better we fight in the streets of Baghdad than in Washington, Los Angeles, or Dallas.

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Militarily, the United States is well poised to defeat any enemy worldwide. The U.S. Armed Forces defeated Hitler’s Nazi machine in World War II. Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev with, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” and was credited with ending the Cold War. Even when faced with the possibility of taking on Iran, the United States is, by far, the better military technician, but appeasement will nullify that strength.

President Bush is trying to take down the wall that was built by family-owned corporations called countries—thugocracies—and the wall that was built by Islamofascists. The reality is that the family-owned corporations are like the Mafia; they are card-carrying cartels. The way the thugocracies keep the terror organizations from turning on them is by paying them off and by funding and fueling their causes. It is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In this light, Saudi Arabia continues to fund terrorist-Sunni rebels in Iraq, hoping to keep democracy as far from its borders as it can, even though the same tactic didn’t work for them with Al Qaeda.

An enemy is needed in order to have an army. The Islamic world doesn’t want the Palestinian crisis solved. The thugocracies and Islamofascists will do everything in their power to keep it from being resolved. If the Palestinian crisis were resolved there would be no enemy, and they need Israel to be the “Little Satan” of the Middle East in order to have someone to blame for their problems. The thugocracies and Islamofascists have models for Iraq: Afghanistan and Vietnam. The terrorists are depending on the antiwar liberals in America to rally behind and support their cause, and, in fact, they are.

The majority of Muslims are not opposed to democracy. There are more than seven million Muslims in America that are part of America’s democratic system, and they are part of that system by choice. The majority of these men and women love democracy. The majority of Muslims are not Islamofascists—they want to live freely by the dictates of their own consciences just as the rest of the world does—but the Islamofascists do not, and they will do anything to keep even their own people from having freedom.

But the question begs to be asked: are our strengths and President Bush’s policies enough? I am concerned that they are not. The United States certainly has the technology, but does it have the will to stay the course until victory is realized? Can the American people overcome the lack of will to win, the self-loathing, and the unconcern that seem to surround the war on terror?

The liberal Left has convinced many Americans that the war on terror cannot be won through military action and has fractured our will to win. The liberals point to the U.S. pullout in Lebanon, in Korea, and in Vietnam, or to the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to support their pronouncements. What these pundits do not seem to understand is that it was a military force that precipitated each decision to leave the field of combat—the Viet Cong, the North Koreans, Hezbollah, and the Afghan fighters. Were these not military victories for each of these groups?

Appeasement has been the offshoot of self-loathing. We hate war. General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is hell.” Rather than believe that those who wage war against us are evil, we begin to see ourselves as evil for retaliating or, even worse, preemptively striking to prevent a sure danger to regional or world security. Self-loathing replaces righteous indignation—and begets appeasement. The desire to negotiate, no matter the cost, gives rise to those in the West who become unwitting cohorts to the jihadists. These individuals rationalize the presence of evil and attacks by terrorists based on their perception of our own past sins.

Daniel Pipes defines such concepts in these words:

The result is unconcern, complacency, or lack of motivation—the disorder has many names. Whatever the name, it results in simply not taking the threat of terror attacks seriously. The first World Trade Center attack in 1993 should have been a wake-up call; however, few have realized the import of that momentous explosion. It was a precursor to 9/11.

If we don’t act now—and before terrorists have further access to nuclear weapons—for what will the 9/11 attacks be a precursor?

There is only one way to win in this clash of civilizations. Winston Churchill understood this when he spoke before Parliament on June 4, 1940, following the dark days of defeat at Dunkirk in which 338,000 Allied troops had to be evacuated to English shores:

It was Winston Churchill who said that the world lacked the democratic courage, intellectual honesty, and willingness to act to stop Hitler’s war machine in 1935.
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If they had stopped him then, sixty-one million people would not have died.

The terror of 9/11 should have gotten our collective attention, but our attention span seems to be measured in nanoseconds rather than the years it will take to win this struggle. We tend to ridicule the ragtag armies of many of the world’s superpower pretenders—Iran being a case in point. We refuse to admit that America, like Israel, could suddenly become a repository for suicide-belted jihadists intent on our destruction. We dismiss as a “nuisance” the threats made by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After all, what can these fanatical practitioners of Islam really have at their disposal?

• Weapons of mass destruction or the ability to obtain them
  
• Rabid religious fanaticism
  
• Funds flowing into their coffers from oil-rich Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, among others
  
• Broad appeal—from beggars in the streets to university professors in the halls of academia; from Riyadh to Boston; from Tehran to Toronto
  
• Immigration and infiltration—legal immigrants to non-Muslim countries such as the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Canada, and Spain are well-versed in using the legal and political systems in those countries to further their agenda of ultimate domination.
  
• Sheer numbers—if the radical element of Islam measures only 10 percent of Muslims as a whole, the number is a staggering 125-million-plus. That is a sizeable army of radicals with only one ultimate aim: kill infidels wherever they may be found.
  

Will the lack of resolve, the self-loathing, and the lack of motivation cause the United States to end the war on terror? Will the West fall victim to disastrous losses of human life and goods? How long will it take to recognize the truth that no one, I repeat, no one—not a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or even a Muslim—is safe from the assault of the radical Islamist hatred? And the most pressing question of all: can the civilized world survive the onslaught of such fanaticism? What will it take to jar the West from its comfortable complacency?

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When the 2006 elections took a left turn, it caused us not only to have to fight to bring peace to the streets of Iraq but also to prove to the liberals that the war was not only justified in the first place but also part of a much larger picture. Whatever form it takes, we will pay much more dearly down the road if we don’t find a strategy for victory in Iraq.

We need to learn from what happened in the early 1980s in Lebanon. By pulling out because of the two suicide attacks, we left the country to Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations to do with it as they liked, and the result has been a war without end. Many are saying the same about Iraq, but the truth of the matter is that if we stay and finish the job, we can end it. If we pull out, we will only be setting up another, bloodier fight down the road. Had we stopped Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s, winning this war might have been much simpler—or might never have had to be fought.

In the coming months, the United States must find a way to victory in Iraq—not appeasement and premature withdrawal of our troops. That will mean curbing Iran’s influx of weapons and fighters into Iraq and its support of terrorist proxies, as well as disarming its nuclear ambitions. If we let the terrorists off now, they will only be that much stronger the next time we face them.

In the following pages we will explore why we are where we are today in the Middle East, the reasons for pushing forward with the moral clarity necessary to win the war on terrorism, and what the best road ahead will be. It is time for our nation to come together.

On March 30, 1863, in the midst of America’s Civil War, Abraham Lincoln called the nation to prayer based upon 2 Chronicles 7:14: