Our Past Revisited

[crobertson1]

I recieved this in an e-mail and wanted to share it:



HISTORY

FYI - A bit long, but thought you would appreciate the historical perspective.

I think that this is an excellent " different " ( unpopular ) perspective on how its so easy to overlook the obvious.


MOST OF YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN

AMERICA WAS GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WW II. MOST OF YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE
RATIONING OF MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES,

AND A SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD. NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW

AUTOMOBILES. READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING TAKEN

OVER BY FOREIGNERS IN 2007.


Historical Significance:

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and

hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had

sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and
America taking 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, who 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.

The US was certainly not prepared for war. The US had drastically down-

graded most of its military forces after WW I because of the depression,

so that at the outbreak of WW II, 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. 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

losses and the near decimation of its Royal 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. Hitler, first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940

at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

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 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and

Moscow alone . . . 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians,

but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers. Had Russia surrendered,

Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits,

then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often

dicey things. 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.

To them, 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. (goal)

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 yet known which side will win - the Inquisitors or the Reformations.

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. Do you want gas

in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be

worth anything? You had 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, 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.

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. 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 the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively

supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam was a terrorist!

Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths

of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 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.

WW II, the war with the Japanese and German 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 the US 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 a

gain . . . a 27 year war.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -

adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WW II cost America

more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which

is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack 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 killed

(within the United States ) in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably

greater -- a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism.

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything

comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain,

and sometimes bloody and ugly It 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 ally, like England, in the Middle East, a

platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East.