Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in northern California.
Mr. Kraft receives receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net

Islam is offended. Islam is easily offended. Islam is very easily offended, by the slightest suggestion that Islam, the Islamic world, the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims, are anything less than perfect. A few days ago, Pope Benedict XVI improvidently quoted a 14th Century Christian Emperor of Byzantium as saying, "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." In response, and proving the point, the Islamic world, much of which is busy spreading the faith by the sword, erupted in outrage and indignation, demonstrations and riots, and in some places the Islamic world erupted in gunfire aimed at Christian churches. "I don't think the church should point a finger at extremist activities in other religions," said Aiman Mazyek, president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) rose to the defense of Jihad and called upon Christians to learn more about Islam. CAIR did not, however, condemn the Muslims rioting in Pakistan to protest the Pope's remarks, or the Organization of the Swords of Righteousness that unleashed volleys of gunfire on Christian churches in Gaza, or those who tossed Molotov cocktails into Christian churches in the West Bank. It is axiomatic that those with the least to be honestly proud and confident of are the often quickest to take offense at any real or imaginary slight. Those of real achievement tend to ignore their detractors, knowing that criticisms, if true, should be heeded, and, if untrue, are merely displays of ignorance, jealousy, or the hatred that grows from the slacker's internal morass of envy and self-loathing. Those of little achievement, or none, are the people most sensitive to being "dissed." The greatest underachievers are the most easily offended, precisely because every criticism, especially if true, threatens to penetrate and evaporate their tenuous, false, and exaggerated illusion of self-importance, the illusion by which they justify themselves. They are ostentatiously proud, because there is nothing to them but their ostentatious pride.

Muslims feel free to call Jews "apes and pigs," they feel free to march in the streets calling for "Death to America," the Great Satan, they feel free to riot across France, burning thousands of cars and homes and businesses, for weeks. They feel free to execute homosexuals for their homosexuality, and send women to prison for the crime, or sin, of having been raped, or stone them for actual or suspected adultery. But at the slightest suggestion that they, or Islam, or the Prophet, are any less perfect than they claim to be, they erupt in fury and violence, the behavior of a culture fixated at the emotional level of a narcissistic four-year-old who throws a screaming tantrum every time he does not get precisely what his childish little heart desires.

With this thought in mind I turned to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual-IV (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, to the section on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And now I am going to offend Islam, again. For the tantrums of Islam that we see in every day's news match precisely all eight of the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

"Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

The Islamic world of today has precisely this grandiose and delusional sense of self-importance, as it declares Islam to be the cure for all the world's ills, despite the rather obvious fact that where militant Islam is dominant, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan, society regresses into barbarity. Each day I open the paper to see that the Religion of Peace has slaughtered another hundred Iraqis in Iraq, or that, having failed to develop anything even vaguely resembling a self-sustaining economy and destroying most of what was left to the Palestinians by the Israelis when they withdrew, Hamas in Gaza cannot even pay the salaries of its own employees and must go about panhandling the "international community" for enough money to feed its people, dependant on the charity of its enemies. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rattling his nuclear saber, threatening the annihilation of Israel and proclaiming that Iran is better suited than America to "lead the world," blithely avoids the fact that the prosperity of Iran, and the populist largesse it allows him to shower on the Iranian people, and his own derivative sense of power and purpose, largely depend on the sale of Iran's petroleum to the Western countries he despises.

The Islam of today does not export science, or literature, or music, or art, or charity, or humanitarianism, or freedom. Islam has produced no Einsteins, no Da Vincis, no Beethovens, no Churchills or Franklin D. Roosevelts, no Declarations of Human Rights, no Mother Theresas. Islam today exports oil, and terror.

Yet Islam wallows in the self-inflicted delusion that it is the center of the world and the quintessence of civilization.

(2) Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success.

The Islamic Jihad of today is rather publicly preoccupied with the fantasy that it will destroy Israel and the rest of Western Civilization, and usher in an eternal Fourth Reich of Theocratic Islamic Totalitarianism, fulfilling the word of the Prophet at Koran 9:33 - "He it is who hath sent His Apostle with the Guidance and a religion of truth, that he may make it victorious over every other religion..."

(3) Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

Islam from its inception has taught that it is "Special," and that Muslims should associate insofar as possible only with other Muslims. As the Prophet said in Koran 5:60, 76: "O you who believe! Take not Jews and Christians as friends. They are but one another's friends. If any one of you taketh them for his friends, he surely is one of them! God will not guide the evil doers...Infidels now are they who say, 'God is the Messiah, the Son of Mary;' for the Messiah said, 'O children of Israel! worship God, my Lord and your Lord.' Whosoever shall join other gods with God, God shall forbid him the Garden, and his abode shall be the Fire; and the wicked shall have no helpers..."

Indeed, "Specialness," the instant and effortless "Specialness" that does not come from achievement or accomplishment, or from humanitarian service, but merely from the act of belief in the Prophet and in Islam, is the great and terrible seduction of fundamentalist Islam, and those who become martyrs, who commit suicide and murder, killing Infidels (who are not "Special," because they are not Believers), achieve the greatest of all possible "Specialness" in the eyes of Allah and in the annals of Islam and are greatly rewarded in Paradise.

Islam, unique among the world's religions, is the only religion which confers its highest accolade of "Specialness" upon those who murder others and themselves, acts which other religions call "sins." Christianity and Judaism honor those who minister to others. Islam honors those who kill. In the world of militant Islam, only Muslims are Special, and among Muslims, the most Special people of all are its mass murderers, who in any other culture would be condemned to prison or death or ignominy as mass murderers.

(4) Requires excessive admiration.

This is a corollary of Islam's pathological obsession with its "Specialness" and the inferiority of those who are Unbelievers, those who follow any other religious faith, or no faith at all. When Islam is insufficiently admired (or, God forbid, critiqued) by those it is attempting to kill, enslave, dominate, and subjugate, Muslims around the world riot and protest that they have been offended and demand apologies. The stance of Islam toward the West is, We can slaughter you, but you cannot criticize us. We can call you pigs and apes and infidels worthy only of death and hell, but you must admire us.

(5) Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or compliance with his or her expectations.

Throughout Europe, and in other non-Muslim countries, Islamic immigrants and communities expect special treatment. They expect respect for their demands to be governed by Sharia, rather than by the laws of the countries to which they have immigrated. They do not want to assimilate into the cultures and societies into which they have come, rather, they demand that France, Denmark, Germany, England, and all other Western nations that now have large Muslim communities, accommodate them. Islam sees itself as the defining force of every community and culture and country into which it spreads. It is intolerant of all others, and it intends, in time, to displace and then replace all others. Islam dreams of a world in which there is no East and West, no Judaism, no Christianity, no Hinduism, no Buddhism, no Agnostics and no Atheists, only Islam. This is what the Prophet has promised, and to this it is entitled.

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said yesterday" "[Muslim nations] should have tanks, warplanes, warships, guns and missiles...Yes, they need to have nuclear weapons too, because only with the possession of such would their enemies be deterred from attacking them...Well, if you allow Israel to have them, why should the others not have them too?"

He ignores, of course, the fact that Islam has enemies only because it has declared war on everyone else. If Islam were in truth a religion of peace, it would have no enemies, and it would need no weapons.

But they are Special. They are entitled.

(6) Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

Islam has been, for years or decades now, taking advantage of the immigration policies and public generosity of Europe, America, Canada, Australia, in order to achieve its own ambitions of global domination, as explicitly explained in The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji. Islam and Muslims, as a cultural trait, take every possible advantage they can of everyone they can, including other Muslims. As a Muslim client once explained to me, "We are different from you Americans. When you make a deal, you make a contract, that's it. You make a contract, then you do it. With us Muslims, a contract is just for today, and tomorrow it is the place to begin negotiating again." Another, an Iranian with a PhD in pharmacology, came to California to escape the purges of the Khomeini revolution in Iran after the Shah was deposed. peaking no English, he went to work in a restaurant owned by two of his nephews, doing whatever needed to be done, prep, cooking, cleaning, bussing. They paid him minimum wage for forty hours a week, although they never actually paid him in full, and required him to work from opening to closing every day, seven days a week, more than a hundred hours a week. He was allowed to sleep on the floor in the store room, and he was not allowed to leave. In other words, they made their uncle their slave. He escaped, and with an Iranian acquaintance to translate went to the Labor Commission to file a complaint for unpaid wages, and after he returned his nephews beat him nearly to death. He wanted to know if he could sue them. I replied that he could, but asked what they would do to him if he did. He answered, "They will kill me."

(7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

Lack of empathy - indifference to the emotions and feelings, the pain and suffering, of others, is also a defining trait of psychopaths, "...predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they cold-bloodedly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt." (Hare, Robert D., Psychopaths: New Trends in Research, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, September 1995).

This narcissistic psychopathy is amply on display in the embrace of terrorism by militant Islam. Those who have empathy for the emotions, feelings, grief, pain and suffering, for the lives of others, do not blow up nightclubs filled with vacationers in Egypt or Bali, wedding parties in Jordan, schools full of children in Beslan, Russia, trains filled with commuters in India and Spain and England, buses, synagogues, banks, and consulates in Turkey, police recruits and shoppers in Iraq, cafes in Israel, and they do not plot for years to fly airliners full of innocent passengers into the World Trade Center in New York, killing thousands of people from dozens of countries, Muslim and Infidel alike. They do not decapitate Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg on TV.

If Islamic terror were not hiding behind the Mosque and the Koran, and if America and Europe were not intellectually blinded by its camouflage of religion, and its outspoken protestations of "offense" at every criticism, and by our own uncritical and indiscriminating Liberalism, which is a sort of inverted Nihilism (while the Nihilist approves of nothing, the Progressive Liberal approves of everything except rational discrimination between good and bad), America and Europe would not hesitate to call these terrorists and their allies what they are, pre-meditated mass murderers, and the Jihad, the Global Intifada, what it is - a world-wide conspiracy to commit mass murder, serial murder, in the relentless narcissistic pursuit of religio-political power.

(8) Is often envious of others, or believes that others are envious of him or her.

It is probable that one of the driving forces underlying the Jihad, the Global Intifada, perhaps the most powerful and dangerous one, is jealousy, or envy, the unspoken, perhaps unrecognized, inarticulate envy of many Muslims who resent Israel and the West for their success, which contrasts badly with the failures of much of the Islamic world. The Islamic world should (according to Islam) be most greatly blessed by Allah, it should dominate the globe, and the greater achievements and prosperity of the West presents a stark challenge, a desperate cognitive dissonance, to the ideology of Islamic perfection, supremacy, Specialness. To the narcissist who seeks Specialness above all else, to compensate for his lack of real accomplishment, those who achieve what he has not, or will not, or cannot, are hateful. He despises them, because they become a mirror in which he sees himself for what he is, or what he is not, but cannot admit to being or not being.

A mirror which must be broken.

(9) Shows arrogant, haughty behavior or attitudes.

The Islam of Jihad, the Islam of the Global Intifada, displays absolute arrogance. This Islam assumes that it is privileged to attack every continent, and any nation, killing people all over the world, burning churches and synagogues and temples, killing Christians and Jews and Hindus merely because they are not Muslims, without remorse, without apology, killing Muslims by the thousands to destabilize Iraq to prevent Iraq from becoming a peaceful and prosperous democracy friendly to the West. Then in the next moment Islam takes extreme offense at any criticism or disparagement of Islam, demonstrating, rioting, calling for retractions and apologies, disdaining all other political traditions and religious faiths as illegitimate. Its arrogance knows no limitations. It is infinite.

Islam is in desperate need of soul-searching, of self-reflection, of reality. Islam needs a long hard look in the mirror. Islam needs to see itself as others see it, not merely as it sees itself.

If Islam continues down the path of Jihad, the path of Global Intifada, the path of Islamo-Nazism, it will continue making enemies of the rest of the world, and in the conflagration that will inevitably follow either Islam, or Civilization, or both, will be devastated. Islam calls itself the religion of peace, but Islam is making itself a religion of blood. And I am offended. We are offended. We who love life more than death, and peace more than war, and freedom more than totalitarianism, we are offended.

When the Pope says that "Jihad" is contrary to God's nature and to reason, and calls for a "genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today," Islam does not respond with dialogue, but with outrage. And we are offended.

When the news reports that 100 people were found dead in Baghdad in twenty-four hours on Wednesday, or that 400,000 Iraqi bodies have been exhumed from the mass graves of the Saddam Hussein regime, not a single Muslim government or spokesman expresses outrage. CAIR does not condemn Al Qaeda for killing Muslims in Iraq, CAIR condemns Pope Benedict for calling for dialogue and peace. Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, does not condemn Al Qaeda for killing Muslims in Iraq, he calls on the Church to "clarify its position" so that it does not confuse Islam with Islamism. And we are offended.

When in Pakistan women are sent to prison for committing adultery, or for having been raped, Haken Al-Mutairi, leader of the Islamic Nation Party in Kuwait, expresses no outrage, but he demands an apology from Pope Benedict for "unaccustomed and unprecedented remarks" and calls on all Arab and Islamic states to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican and expel those from the Vatican until the pope says he is sorry "for the wrong done to the prophet and to Islam, which preaches peace, tolerance, justice, and equality..." Yes, Mr. Haken Al-Mutairi, tell that to the two million Sudanese killed by Muslim raiders in Darfur. Tell that to the widows and fatherless children of 9/11. We are offended.

We are offended by the disingenuousness and duplicity of Islam that claims to preach "peace, tolerance, justice, and equality," in one breath, and in the next breath promises the abolition of Israel and the Islamization of Europe and the Death of America. We are offended by the Islamic world that is not offended by the slaughter of Sunnis by Shias, and the slaughter of Shias by Sunnis, and the slaughter of 100,000 Kurds and 400,000 Iraqis by Saddam Hussein's regime but has not lifted a pen to denounce him, a world in which Abdullah al-Amiri, the judge presiding over the trial of Saddam, can make the astonishing statement to Saddam from the bench that "You were not a dictator. You were not a dictator. You were not a dictator." Three times.

We are offended by an Islam that hears Ahmadinejad promise the "abolition of Israel," racial genocide, the final solution, and applauds him, or, if it does not, raises not a voice to oppose him. By silence, Islam consents.

Yes, there are a few Islamic leaders trying to find a civilized path for Islam, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, comes to mind, who in a recent speech to Congress said, "The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq, then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere...This is a battle between true Islam, for which a person's liberty and rights constitute essential cornerstones, and terrorism, which wraps itself in a fake Islamic cloak, in reality wages a war on Islam and Muslims and values and spreads hatred between humanity..."

He is right. But far too few Muslims seem to accept his perspective, and we are offended. We are offended every time the Global Intifada, commits another atrocity, and the leaders of Muslim organizations in America, and Europe, and of Muslim states in the Middle East, fail to condemn it. We are offended every time Muslims are "outraged" by any criticism of Islamic barbarity, rather than admitting that Islam has a malignancy in its soul which only Islam can expunge. We are offended that Islam is failing, day by day, to take responsibility for the atrocities committed in the name of Islam, to punish the offenders, to root out the offenders, to heal its disease of Jihad, its disease of Global Intifada, its disease of Islamic Nazism.

We are offended that Islam is not offended by its own atrocities.

We call on Islam to apologize. We call on Islam to apologize for the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, and for the atrocities of 9/11. We call on Islam to apologize for the riots in France, and for the bombings in London and Spain and Bali. We call on Islam to apologize for the dead children of Beslan. We call on Islam to apologize for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and for the safe haven and protection given to Osama bin Laden, and for the barbarities of Al Qaeda, and Hamas, and Hezbollah. We call on Islam to apologize for its invidious, racist, hatred of Israel and Jews. We call on Islam to apologize for the Global Intifada, the Islamic Jihad against all non-Muslims. We call on Islam to apologize for the rise of Islamic Nazism.

We call on Islam to rise up against terrorism. If Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, justice, and equality, then we call on Islam to open its hearts and doors to Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, as the world has opened its doors to Muslims. You can build a mosque in America, but you cannot build a cathedral in Tehran. You can build a mosque in Jerusalem, but you cannot build a synagogue in Mecca.

We call on Islam to build a cathedral in Tehran. We call on Islam to build a synagogue in Mecca.

We are offended.

Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in northern California.
Mr. Kraft receives receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net

War has morphed, indeed, in ways unimaginable fifty years ago.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (IRM), the Jihad, which includes Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and all other like-minded folk, is much smarter about it than we are. It has turned the civility of the United States and Europe, into a weapon and turned it against us. It has weaponized niceness, it has weaponized compassion, it has weaponized the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. It has weaponized our desire for peace. It has recognized that our goodness is no match for its savagery, and will continue to exploit that fact until we lose and they win. However long it takes. Centuries, generations, decades, years, months.

The soft underbelly of America in particular and Western Civilization in general is that it has become so excessively nice and decent and civilized that it is now loathe to rise to its own self-defense, loathe to kill civilians when necessary, loath to cause "collateral damages," loathe to fight and defeat other countries, even when its own survival is at stake. We have emasculated our will to rise to our own defense, to the defense of our interests, to the defense of our friends and allies, to the defense of our own civilization and its unique freedoms. We would rather die than kill. We are willing to martyr ourselves and our children and their children and our country to the conceit of our own goodness. We have spent sixty years obsessing (as a culture, as a nation) with whether we might have done the wrong thing by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if it did end World War II, even if it did save a million American casualties and maybe five or ten or twenty million Japanese casualties . . . the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might well have saved Japan from extinction, since if the Japanese had all fought to the death as they promised and threatened to do there wouldn't have been enough Japanese left to be Japan anymore, so that, in a perverse way, Japan may now owe its existence to America's willingness to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We can't imagine ourselves nuking Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or firebombing Dresden or Tokyo anymore, killing scores of thousands of civilians in the process, or laying waste to Beirut, or Damascus, or Tehran. We're way too nice for all that, now. We have become much more civilized.

So the Jihadis hide in plain sight among the civilians, and thumb their noses and say "Check!" And we are stuck harassing their pawns because we lack the will to topple their knights and bishops, kings and queens, with all the "collateral damage" that would happen in the process. We can't imagine ourselves nuking Beirut, or Damascus, or Tehran, not even to save the world from the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Jihad of puritanical Islamic Nazism. So far, we can't even imagine ourselves deconstructing the infrastructure and economies of Syria and Iran in the way Israel is presently deconstructing Lebanon to save ourselves from the Jihad.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, the Jihad of puritanical Islamic Nazism, is strategically very intelligent. It has calculated that although it lacks the massed military force to confront the United States directly in battle, by The Management of Savagery it can foment endless incidents of terrorism and theaters of seemingly inexhaustible savagery in many places all over the world, year after year, decade after decade, until the Americans, Aussies, and Brits, are worn down, exhausted, demoralized, and no longer have the political will to keep trying to defend Western Civilization from the savages. At that point the IRM can begin to take things over with little objection or resistance, since they will promise peace--PEACE--the peace America is psychologically and politically obsessive about. They will offer peace with the right hand, and an end to the savagery they have created with the left. And after years or decades of widespread savagery, peace will be welcomed. The price for peace, of course, will be an Islamic Empire, an empire in which the unique freedoms of Western Civilization, intellectual freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, will not exist, an empire in which one can be anything one wishes to be, as long as it is Muslim.

Today, we see this strategic philosophy at work in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Sudan, in Somalia, and its gestation in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is arming against an American threat that does not exist, in order to turn Venezuela into a hostile camp calculated to pull America into a military intervention to prevent the destabilization of South America, a strategic calculation intended to force America's military and economic overextension, and therefore America's weakening, with the assistance of Russia, China, and the Islamic Resistance Movement.

This Strategic Philosophy is very clearly articulated in The Management of Savagery, translated from the Arabic, which can be readily found on the Internet via any good search engine. While America wants peace, and recoils from the projection of deliberate savagery, the Islamic Resistance Movement embraces and adopts savagery, "managed savagery," as its primary militant tactic, calculating, correctly, so far, that America, which wants to be nice and doesn't really want to hurt anybody, will never respond with equal or greater force, or savagery. Thus, it calculates, Islam can easily withstand the pulled punches America is willing to throw, while America will eventually succumb to the never-ending managed savagery of militant Islam. Unfortunately, America does not appear to have a Strategic Philosophy, and therefore, the IRM accurately calculates, while America does not want to lose this war, America, blinded by the conceit of its own goodness to the ruthless malevolence of others, does not understand this war, and therefore lacks the will, the clear vision, and the decisiveness to win it.

The Chinese and the Russians do not want to fight a war with America, not openly and directly; they would get hurt too badly, no matter who "won," and they do not need to. They want a reasonably prosperous and productive America to sell stuff to, and buy stuff from, but they would be hugely pleased to see America cut down to size a bit, or a lot, an America that was a No. 3 Semi-Super Power, after China and Russia, or Russia and China, in either order, or maybe No. 4 after China, Russia, and the New Islamic Caliphate. They would like to see an America that is about as much a threat to anybody as the European Union is now, so the Chinese and Russians can run the global show as they see fit, ration the oil, and pocket the profits.

Thus, they are perfectly happy to sell weapons to Hezbollah, calculating that the Hezbos & Friends will do the dirty work for them, will maintain a generation of savagery all over the world (except in Russia and China), and that America will exhaust itself, its politics, its will and economy, trying to "control" and contain the savagery, but lacking the will and strategic vision to root out its roots, because that would cause way too many civilian casualties, and America cannot stomach the infliction of civilian casualties, or the destruction of nations, even if they are sponsors of terror. We're way too nice for all that. And so our "niceness" is turned and weaponized against us. We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive. The dagger of our decency stabs us in the back.

We've been sucker punched, but we set ourselves up for it, and we won't admit it. We actually think that Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Quaeda, the whole Islamic Resistance Movement, the whole Jihad, is a bunch of "non-state actors." Technically, but only theoretically, they are. In form, but not in substance. In real life they're rather conspicuously the agents and co-conspirators of nation states (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China, North Korea, at least) that want to deflate America without having an open war with America, and have figured out that as long as they can send in the street soldiers of the Muslim Mafia to do the dirty work we will do everything we can to avoid a real war with the real Godfathers. We love peace too much. And it's working. Perfectly.

In the law of agency, the Principle is liable for the acts and omissions of his Agent. The Employer (principle) is liable for the acts and omissions of his Employee (agent), at least within the course and scope of the employment, at least within the scope of the intended purposes and objectives of the agency. The Conspirator is liable for the acts of his Co-Conspirator, at least within the scope of the objectives of the conspiracy. Thus, applying this basic principle of agency and conspiracy to geopolitics, we should be holding Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China, and North Korea, who are providing weapons to the Jihad with which to attack Israel and America and the new Iraqi democracy, and providing safe havens and money and technical assistance for the Islamic Resistance Movement, responsible for the acts and omissions of their agents, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Quaeda, et al., but we lack the intellectual and strategic clarity, and the political will, to do so.

We insist on indulging our fine little fantasy that "nation states" are, ipso facto, somehow legitimate, and should not be attacked, much less destroyed, not even on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly by John Bolton, not even when they engage in a criminal conspiracy with the terrorists of the Islamic Resistance Movement to obliterate Israel and divide, demoralize, deplete, defeat, deflate, and dessicate America.

Israel is doing a little better than we are, at last, and we should follow the Israeli example, as far as it goes, and then go the rest of the way. We will have to, sooner or later, unless we intend to aquiesce to the vastly diminished role in the world our enemies have planned for us. We should do so sooner, before the Jihad gets nuclear weapons, rather than later, after it has them, when the price of defeating the Jihad, in dollars and blood, ours and theirs, will go up by several orders of magnitude.

A good start would be to give short notice to Iran and Syria that we expect the terrorism, in Iraq and everywhere else, to end, NOW. They've been hospitable to the Islamic Resistance Movement, the IRM, the Jihad, they support it, they arm it, they give it safe haven, and it's time to stop to it. Lob that ball back into THEIR court. So, they have, say, a week, two weeks, ten days, to shut it down. No more. After that, if there is an Islamic terrorist attack ANYWHERE ON EARTH we start rolling up the carpet on Iran and Syria (while Israel continues to dismantle Lebanon)--i.e., hold Iran and Syria hostage to American terror, just as they are now holding the United States hostage to Islamic terror.

Except we do not hold them hostage to random terror, as they do--WE GIVE THEM CONTROL--if they end Islamic terrorism, then they have nothing more to fear from us. If they do not end Islamic terrorism, then they have everything to fear. And if the terrorism does not stop on schedule, then we start taking apart the armed forces, infrastructure, and economies, of Syria and Iran, piece by piece, using all necessary and convenient force, until the terrorism stops and they surrender, unconditionally, as Germany and Japan once did. So far, because they understand that we do not yet fully understand this war, and will not do what is necessary to win it, they do not fear us.

Now, Russia and China want to be on the winning side of things in ten years when the dust settles, so they are selling weapons to the IRM, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Iran, betting that America will not wake up and smell the coffee, and will not develop the intellectual, strategic, or moral clarity to recognize that it is dying a death of a thousand cuts, until long after it's too late to save the patient, or the victim. So far, Russia and China are betting on the right horse.

And so as the political will of America to save itself slowly (or quickly) expires, we will see, in our lifetimes, maybe within the next few election cycles, or the next few years, a New World Order emerge, not the one American conspiracy theorists fear, but a far more deadly and malevolent one in which a new Islamic Caliphate, a new Islamic Empire, rises as a strutting puppet of the new superpowers, Russia, and China, with America relegated to geopolitical inconsequence, vying with the geopolitically inconsequential European Union for a distant fourth or fifth place in the pecking order.

Russia and China will not be overrun by the Islamic Resistance Movement, since they do not have our qualms about collateral damages, civilian casualties, nor our obsession with being "nice." They do not have our pathological desire to be liked by everyone. They do not fancy themselves quite so civilized, so "over-civilized," as do we, and so their civility cannot be weaponized and turned against them. They do not want "peace" as obsessively as we do, and so their passion for "peace" cannot stab them in the back. They will have no trouble ceding a large part of the world to the Islamic sphere of influence, the Arabian subcontinent, Africa, southern Europe, western Europe, with the message to Ahmadinejad, or whoever succeeds him, that "you can do whatever you like, as long as you cooperate with us, and as long as you don't threaten us, in which case your life expectancy will grow very short." Russia and China are not paralyzed by our pathological aversion to the use of savagery in self-defense, or in the pursuit of their national self-interests.

I.e., Russia and China are waiting in the wings to pick up the geopolitical spoils after the Islamic Resistance Movement deflates and defeats the will of America to defend itself and its interests, and exhausts and obliterates Israel. Russia and China will not threaten American sovereignty in North America, because they will be very happy to look to America as a source of technology exports, cheap labor, and cheap food.

The support of Russia and China for the Islamic Resistance Movement (via Iran) will, however, evaporate, when, or IF, the United States comes to its senses and begins to systematically deconstruct the ability and will of Iran, Syria, and the Islamic Resistance Movement, to project terrorism throughout the world. Russia and China, quite logically, want to be on the winning side of things when the dust settles. And if another horse starts to run faster, they'll change their bets.

It is not yet too late for America to wake up, smell the coffee, come to its senses, but with each day it gets later. The unsettling reality that America must recognize is that, if it is to survive in anything resembling its present form, dominance, influence, and prosperity, it must decide to subordinate its "niceness," its debilitating civility, its incapacitating decency, its sniveling obsession with being "liked" by the rest of the world, no matter how ineffectual or snobbish or opportunistic or barbaric the rest of the world may be, to the necessities of defending itself and others, its allies and friends, its Judeo-Christian civilization, and indeed the entire non-Islamic world, from the otherwise implacable advance of the Islamic Resistance Movement that intends to abolish Western Civilization as we have known it, and usher in a new world order of Islamic Empire, a thousand year reich of puritanical Islamic Nazism.

Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in northern California.
Mr. Kraft receives receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net

Over the last few years, as the future risk of global warming and the Kyoto Accord were hotly debated, the Environmentalists, Democrats, and other proponents of the Kyoto Accord widely asserted that even if the real impact of global warming cannot be predicted, the fact that the impact might be severe must invoke the precautionnary principle, the idea that if there is a possibility of great harm, even if the risk is remote or cannot be accurately calculated, then all possible precautions must be taken to prevent that harm. Better safe than sorry. A stitch in time saves nine.

In October, 2004, I wrote an article first entitled It Will Be The Death of Liberalism, published at www.ChronWatch.com, about the necessity of fighting and winning the war on Islamic terrorism. It has been circulated since under other titles, including A History Lesson, A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq, and Why We Are In Iraq. A number of correspondents have asked me to update it, but there is little in it that I would change. However, the time has come to write Part II, in response to the three year drumroll of criticism of America's conduct of the Iraq War, which has culminated in last week's Revolt of the Generals.

There have been two primary thrusts of criticism levelled against the Iraqi war policy of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One, fired insistently by many leading Democrats, and other Liberals and Pacifists and the national leaders of a few other countries, is that the war was a mistake ab initio and should never have been started. The second, in which General Colin Powell, General Anthony Zinni, General John Batiste, General Wesley Clark, and several other retired flag officers have joined, is that the war should have been fought with overwhelming force that would have prevented or quickly defeated the persistent insurgency that has followed the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

I do not intend to impugn the personal integrity of the dissenting Generals. I am certain they speak what they honestly believe to be true. And I do not challenge their right to dissent. But I think they are mistaken, and this is why.

The assumption that the invasion of Iraq with a force of 500,000, rather than 150,000, would have resulted in a much different and better outcome is entirely speculative. It cannot be known to be true. Since this did not happen, the result of this option is inherently unknown and unknowable. Only that which has happened can be known with certainty. The assumption of a better outcome presumes that the Jihadists' strategy would have been much the same as it has been, and that a larger force could have suppressed and destroyed the insurgency quickly and completely. While this might have happened, it is only one of multiple possible outcomes.

Let me propose a short story. A brief alternative history. What might have been.

In 2002 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, convinced by the advisors and strategists advocating a massive force invasion in the Department of Defense that a heavy force operation was the best option, gave orders to prepare for an invasion of Iraq with a force of 500,000, about 20% of the total US military personnel of all branches throughout the world. The objective was a quick and decisive victory, the quick suppression of any insurgency or civil war that might erupt, and rapid imposition of a new government in Baghdad.

The invasion began (as it did) in March 2003. Three weeks later Saddam Hussein fled and the Baathist government fell. Soon after, his sons, Uday and Qusay, were surrounded and killed in a firefight. A month after that, Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a spider hole on the outskirts of town, was taken into custody, and thence to a secure prison to await trial.

Hiding in a remote area of northern Pakistan, protected by friendly tribes and warlords, Osama bin Laden remained the final arbiter of Al Qaeda strategic policy. He had considered two possibilities, both of which had been publicly discussed in the American press, and privately and fiercely debated within the Pentagon and the White House and Congress for over a year before the invasion.

Option One: the Light Force invasion with 150,000 troops, modelled as much as possible after special operations doctrine, move fast, stay fluid, hit hard, using speed and surprise as force multipliers. This idea is not new. It informed General Patton and General McArthur and the Hitlerian Blitzkrieg of 1939, and is as old as Sun Tzu and Gideon of Old Testament renown who staged a completely successful surprise attack on ten thousand Phillistines with a force of 300.

Option Two: the Heavy Force invasion, modelled on standard WWII and Cold War doctrine, with 500,000 troops. The Heavy Force will move more slowly and be less maneuverable and fluid, and no surprise at all, but is intended to overwhelm the opposition with massive troop numbers and firepower. It can also present a massed troop target more vulnerable to chemical, biological or radiological weapons attacks, than a smaller and more dispersed force.

Osama, reasoning that Rumsfeld was most likely to choose the Light Force option, as he would have done himself, had planned to field an insurgency soon after Saddam fell, to engage the Americans in a running war of attrition of which the American public and political classes would soon tire, and to stage apparently random attacks in Iraq intended to keep the country in a state of turmoil, until American support for the war evaporated, the Americans went home, and Al Qaeda could infiltrate and ultimately take over the government.

Surprised when Rumsfeld elected to field a Heavy Force instead, Osama bin Laden quickly adjusted his tactics. He immediately ordered his field commanders to withdraw and withhold the insurgents waiting to fight American in Iraq. "We cannot win against a force this large, and we will sustain unacceptable losses. We will win another way. We will lay a trap for the Americans. We will make an ambush of their own arrogance."

Osama reasoned - correctly - that a force of 500,000 troops in Iraq would be more expensive than America would sustain for long, and that, if there was no insurgency, America would declare a victory and bring them home with bands playing as soon as possible. It was an astute evaluation, but Osama was an intelligent strategist. The Heavy Force deployment did, indeed, cost over $200 billion a year, three times the annual cost of the Light Deployment option, and Congress was not willing to maintain that expenditure any longer than absolutely necessary.

There was no insurgency, and little post-Saddam violence. The massive force enabled the US Army and Marines and British forces to garrison the Syrian and Iranian borders, and patrol the Iraqi National Musem of Antiquities and most city centers to prevent all but occasional looting. A few looters were shot, word got around. The Iraqi people were grateful to have Saddam gone, but widely resented the ubiquitous presence of American troops on Iraqi soil. There were too many, and they looked and felt like the occupation force they really were. There was much concealed resentment, but in the face of overwhelming force and with no other options, they cooperated, and in a few months a coalition government of Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds, had been hammered together, a Constitution hastily written, and the new Iraqi Defense Force which included some nearly-intact elements of the old Iraqi army was organized and began recruiting and training.

With little violence and none of the insurgency that was feared, by some, the Bush administration and the Armed Forces were elated, America was jubilant, and Democrats who had been critical of the war discouraged. U.S. forces had sustained fewer than 200 casualties due to enemy fire. In his January 2004 State of the Union address President Bush confidently predicted that the war to remove Saddam Hussein was an unqualified success, and that Iraq was already emerging as the first Islamic Democracy. And he promised that most of America's troops would be home for Christmas. The crowd erupted in wild cheers. A million mugs and glasses clinked in bars across the land.

The 2004 presidential campaign proved to be a one-sided slugfest. With a won war in his pocket, President Bush rode high in the polls, and John Kerry never came within 10 points of catching him, not even in the bump week after the Democratic National Convention. In September, Bush promised that most of America's troops would be home from Iraq by the end of October, before the election. It was a no-risk prediction, since more than half had already been redeployed back to the U.S., and thousands more were returning every week. By the end of October 90% of the invasion force was home, and by Christmas only a few hundred advisers, ithe largest contingent officers from the Army Corps of Engineers assisting with reconstruction planning, remained, along with a company of Rangers and a company of Marines to provide security for the American advisers, which, in the near-total absence of violence, was almost a ceremonial duty. Soldiers grumbled that they would never earn a CIB this way.

Bush had been re-elected by the second largest landslide in history. Christmas and New Years came and passed without incident, the Americans celebrating quietly behind the walls of one of Saddam's former palaces that had been requisitioned to serve as an American compound, and which was already scheduled to be handed back to Iraq by the end of 2005. On January 20, 2005, President Bush placed his hand on a Bible held by the Chief Justice and took his oath of office for the second time, scarcely able to stifle a broad smile. He turned to the podium and began his Second Inaugural Address. Al-Jazeera TV carried it live. That was the signal.

It was night in Iraq, half the world away, and ten thousand Jihadis and Mujuhadeen who had been chafing at the bit for a year and a half began digging up the AK-47s, RPGs, and explosives, they had buried in yards and under house and factory floors in the fall of 2002, and moving quietly in ones, twos, and small groups, to their rendezvous points. Twelve hours after President George W. Bush had made a victorious Second Inaugural Speech dwelling at length on the emerging new Islamic Democracy, a dozen men, most in traditional dress, some in Western suits, approached the guards stationed at the several entrances to the new Iraqi Parliament building.

Greeting the guards, they each asked directions, and then quickly with sharp knives slit the throats of each of the guards who died in astonishment as they slid to the ground. The men walking casually by the capital and chatting in the street fell into assault lines, uncovering their guns, running in through each of the now unguarded entrances, into the lobby, in through the service entrance, into the delegates' entrance from the motor court, shooting everyone they saw on sight. Designated teams fanned out to assinate the staff in each of the offices, and a special picked team burst through the doors into the midst of the Iraqi Congress, in session and in full debate. Alashnikovs leveled, triggers pulled, clips emptied, empties flew and clattered like hail, the room filled with smoke and a deafening roar of gunfire, and one minute later every member of the coalition Iraqi Congress lay dead or dying on the floor, now awash in a sea of blood and littered with splintered chairs and desks and scraps of flesh and clothing and bone.

At the White House early next morning, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld were in the Oval Office with several leading Republican and Democrat members of Congress discussing the possibilities for extending the new concept of Islamic Democracy from Iraq to other Arab countries, when Karl Rove barged in without knocking, his eyes wide, his tie askew, his face ashen.

"We've got a problem," he said, "Big problem. Get the TV on, get Al Jazeera."

Al Jazeera was broadcasting the massacre of the new Iraqi government, including all members of the Congress, the President, and the Secretaries of all Ministries except the Ministry of Defense, who proudly announced that the coup d'etat he had helped orchestrate had been even more successful than had been hoped, that he was taking over as a temporary governor until Saddam Hussein could be brought from prison to be reinstalled as President of Iraq, and that the purge of all those suspected of cooperating with the Americans had begun.

In the next thirty days, more than a million Iraqis and Kurds would die, those who had worked with America, and their families, and many of their friends and some of their mere acquaintances, anyone who might have been been tainted by contact with the infidels. Diplomatic inquires were quickly made as to the status of approximately one thousand American troops and advisers still in Iraq. The Iraqi ambassador replied that he was unaware of any Americans in Iraq. The bodies would never be found.

A few hours later Saddam Hussein appeared on a live feed through Al Jazeera TV, with a fresh haircut and shave, a new suit, looking a little tired and gaunt, but gloating in the victory that Allah had given him over the Great Satan, and promising that there would be vengeance until the Infidels cried for mercy, but there would be no mercy, for God is great. Alla-hu Akbar.

America would not have the stomach to go to war in Iraq again. Rightly fearing multiple terrorist attacks inside America over the next months and years, America ramped up its internal security until it became the police state it had long denounced in other places. Some of the attacks succeeded anyway.

So, there is one possibility, one scenario, that might very plausibly have happened had the U.S. invaded Iraq with a force of 500,000, as some retired generals, and many leading Democrats and media pundits, think we should have done. The advice of the Heavy Force advocates might have been followed, and the consequence might have been a false victory, followed by a sudden, unexpected, and catastrophic defeat. The enemy adapts.

Others have contended that the Iraq war was a mistake ab initio, unjustified, illegal, undertaken on trumped up evidence of WMDs that never existed. Bush lied, people died. Most of the WMD arguments, for and against, have been made many times by many writers for many months. I will make only one.

If the Precautionary Principal requires extraordinary measures to protect against the uncertain possibility that at some time in the near or distant future Global Warming might become a serious problem, does not the Precautionary Principal compel, with even greater urgency, extraordinary measures to protect against the certainty that in the near future Islamic regimes under the political control of Jihadist radicals will acquire nuclear weapons which they intend to use against Israel and the West, unless prevented from doing so? Does not the Precautionary Principle mandate that we do whatever is necessary to protect America, Israel, and Europe, from the threat of a radicalized Middle East bristling with nuclear weapons, and with its hands on the oil pump handles?

Most of the major Arab countries have been chasing after nuclear weapons, some off and on, since the 1960s. For reference, see The Islamic Bomb by Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney (New York Times Books 1981).

Today, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and but for American intervention in 2001, 2002, and since, might well be under the political control of Al Qaeda today, rather than the more moderate government of President Mushaaref. If, or when, Mushaaref falls from power, there is a grave risk that a far more radical government will succeed him, and it will have a finger on the nuclear trigger. But for US intervention in the Middle East, it is probable that a more radical Islamist government would be in power in Pakistan today, with a finger on the nuclear trigger.

After the Iraq invasion, President Gaddafi of Libya made a "pre-emptive surrender" of his nuclear weapons program to the United Nations and U.S. inspectors and forces. Reports emerged that Libya's nuclear weapons program was far more advanced than US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the UN had expected. But for US intervention in the Middle East, it is probable that Libya would have continued its nuclear weapons research, and might be a nuclear power soon, or already.

After the Iraq invasion, no evidence was found that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, or an active nuclear weapons development program, but some 500 tons of yellowcake uranium was found, probably imported from Niger in the 1990s. On Sunday, June 7, 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed a French Osirak nuclear reactor at Tuwaitah, near Baghdad, which was soon to go into operation and would have enabled Iraq to develop nuclear weapons. In 1981. But for the US intervention in Iraq, it is probable that Iraq would have sought to develop nuclear weapons again some time in the relatively near future, when UN sanctions were lifted, for which France, Germany, and Russia, the major weapons and technology suppliers to Iraq (under the alleged "Oil for Food" program) were pressing.

Today, Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. There is uncertainty how soon Iran can have a deployable weapon, and intelligence estimates range from 10 years to six months. But for US intervention in Iraq, the US would have little or no military presence in the Middle East today, since our forces were removed from Saudi Arabia in response to Islamist political pressure there. Because of US intervention in Iraq, we now have a major US military presence in Iraq, next to Iran. Iranian President Ahmadinejad has promised, or threatened, to destroy Israel and America.

But for American intervention in Iraq in 2003, or soon after, it is somewhere between a probability and a certainty that Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Libya, would have either nuclear weapons under development, or deployable nuclear weapons, now, or soon. Probably within months or years, not decades. It is possible, if not certain, that the proliferation of the Arab Bomb would quickly spread to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, if only as a matter of self defense: the reasoning would be, If Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Libya have the bomb, we'd better have the bomb to protect ourselves. Makes sense. But any Arab country that developed the bomb in self-defense might later see its government fall to the Jihadists, who would then have another bomb. Saudi Arabia comes to mind.

Thus, but for American intervention in Iraq on or about 2003, there is a clear and present danger that at least four, and possibly as many as nine, of the Arab nations would have the bomb, now, or soon, and that all or most of them would be under the political control of the Jihadists who have been preoccupied, recently, fighting Americans and killing Iraqis in Iraq. Instead of having at least a tentative ally in Pakistan, and facing Iran with a nuclear program, but no weapons yet, we, and the world, would be facing the present or imminent prospect of a Middle East bristling with nuclear weapons, and also in control of the world's largest oil reserves and production capacity, both of which could then be used to blackmail America, Europe, China, Japan, and India, into dhimmitude, some degree of submission to the will of Islam, or into nuclear war in the Arabian subcontinent.

This would be the direct consequence of America's decision not to invade Iraq, not to intervene in Middle Eastern affairs, even if we had (as some critics think we should have done) made a brief and forceful expedition into Afghanistan, found and arrested Osama bin Laden, and brough him back to New York for trial.

But for the Iraq War begun in 2003, or something very much like it, either this president, now or soon, or the next president, or the next, in the near future, Republican or Democrat, would face an imminent threat of nuclear war with one or more nuclear powers in the Middle East under the political control of Al Qaeda and driven by visions of a restored pan-Islamic Caliphate and a global Islamic Empire centered in Iran, or Iraq, or Pakistan, or Libya, or Syria. This is a confrontation between radical Islam and civilization that cannot be avoided. It can only be joined before Al Qaeda or its ideological compatriots control the Arab bomb, or after. "Never" is not an option.

If the long-term threat of disruptive Global Warming at some indefinite future time calls for implementing the Precautionary Principle, surely the near-term threat of a Middle East bristling with nuclear weapons and churning with Jihadist ambitions must mandate the implementation of the Precautionary Principle. Better safe than sorry. A stitch in time saves nine.

Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in northern California.
Mr. Kraft receives receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net

December 7, 2008, began inauspiciously.

At 0753 at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the attack that had triggered America's entry into World War II, sixty-seven years before, was ceremoniously commemorated, an honor guard, taps, a 21-gun salute, the bugle's notes and the rifles' crack drifting across the bay to the USS Arizona memorial, where Admiral Arthur Peterson, USN Ret., laid a wreath in memory of the sailors sleeping below, one of whom was his own grandfather.

On the West coast it was 1053, and in Washington D.C. it was one fifty-three in the afternoon, 1353 military time.

In 2006 America, tired of War in Iraq, had elected Democrats to modest majorities in both houses of Congress. Representative Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency. In the spring of 2007, on a narrow, party-line vote, Congress, led by Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer refused to authorize spending to continue the war in Iraq, and set September 30, 2007, as the deadline for complete withdrawal of American troops.

President Bush spoke to the country, to the American forces in Iraq, to those who had been there, and to the Iraqi people, to apologize for the short-sightedness and irresponsibility of the American congress and the tragedy he believed would follow after leaving task of nurturing a representative and stable government in Iraq half done, his voice choked, tears running down his stoic face, a betrayal of emotion for which he was resoundingly criticized and denounced in much of America's media.

The level of violence across Iraq immediately subsided, as the Americans began preparations to redeploy back to the States. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised the new Congress for its clear vision and sound judgment. America's Democrats rejoiced and congratulated themselves for bringing peace with honor and ending the illegal war based on lies that George Bush had begun only to enrich his friends in the military-industrial complex, and promised to retake the Presidency in 2008.

"The failure of many Americans, including many of the leading Democrats in Congress, and some Republicans, to fully appreciate the persistent, long-term threat posed to America's liberties and survival, and to the future of Liberal Democracies everywhere, by an Islamic Resistance Movement that envisions a world dominated and defined by an Islamic Caliphate of religious totalitarianism, and which will fight any war, make any sacrifice, suffer any hardship, and pay any price to achieve it, may prove to be the kind of blunder upon which the fate of America turns, and falls."

At 1000 on September 30, 2007, precisely on schedule, the last C-5A Galaxy carrying the last company of American combat troops in Iraq had roared down the Baghdad runway and lifted into the air. Only a few hundred American technical and military advisers and political liaisons remained in-country.

The Galaxy's wheels had scarcely retracted when Iraq erupted in the real civil war many had feared and foreseen, and which many others had predicted would not happen if only the American imperialists left Iraq. Sunni militias, Shia militias, and Al Qaeda militias ravaged and savaged the country, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis known or suspected to have collaborated with the Americans, killing Shias for being Shias, Sunnis for being Sunnis, Americans for being Americans, and anyone else who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By noon, not one of the American advisers and liaisons left behind remained alive. Many had been beheaded as they screamed. Most of their bodies were dumped in the river and never seen again. In the next thirty days more than a million Iraqis died. The General Assembly of the United Nations voted to condemn the violence, and recessed for lunch and martinis. In America, there was no political will to redeploy back to Iraq. And after a few months of rabid bloodletting, the situation in Iraq calmed to a tense simmer of sporadic violence and political jockeying, punctuated by the occasional assassination, while several million refugees fled the country. Only Kurdistan, in the north, which had thrown up a line of its Peshmurga fighters to keep the southern violence away, remained stable and at relative peace.

In the spring of 2008 America began its quadrennial circus of a national election, and in November elected a Democrat, the Junior Senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as it next president, to the surprise of few. Her running mate, to the surprise of many, was San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose intelligence, charisma, and reputation as an indefatigable campaigner for gay marriage and the homeless of San Francisco helped solidify Clinton's support among liberal Democrats who only grudgingly forgave her for not openly opposing the Iraq war sooner, and the Clinton-Newsom ticket went to the top with a narrow 50.2% lead over Republican John McCain's 49.8% of the popular vote, despite, or perhaps because of, Clinton's and Newsom's lack of foreign policy and military experience.

America, or a slim voting majority of it, felt it had had all the war it ever wanted to see, and Hillary had led her party to a glorious (if narrow) victory with the unambiguous slogan: "Clinton & Newsom: No More War." Crowds at every whistle stop had cheered and chanted, No more war! No more war! No more war! At victory parties George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were hung and sometimes burned in effigy, enthusiastic crowds chanted "No more war!" many times more, and local bands cranked up the theme from the first Clinton electoral victory, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow...yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone...," and indeed, it was.

President Bush had been a very lame duck since the 2006 election, and with a Democratic Congress could do little but veto most of the bills it sent him. The Democrats couldn't override his vetoes, so for nearly two years almost nothing important had been accomplished by anyone on the Hill or in the White House. After the 2008 election it was transition time, flocks and herds of thoroughly demoralized Republican staff began leaving Washington in search of greener pastures, Congress adjourned for the Holidays, Democrats came house hunting, and Clinton and Newsom began the briefings they would get from a fully cooperative Bush administration on the state of the nation and the state of the world they would inherit and have to cope with for the next four years, or eight, and in those last weeks of November both Hillary and Gavin seemed to age rather quickly. The exhilaration of the campaign was over, and the weight of a tumultuous world began to settle on their shoulders.

Back in early October, 2006, North Korean President (for life) Kim Jong Il had announced the detonation of a nuclear bomb deep in a tunnel in the stony mountains of North Korea. The seismic signature had been small, and American intelligence at first doubted whether it had been a nuclear explosion at all. Traces of radioactive emissions were detected a few days later, and the intelligence estimate revised to conclude that it had been a failed test that produced perhaps only 10% or less of the expected yield, only 0.5 to 1.5 kilotons, not the 20 kilotons, at least, that Western intelligence had anticipated.

Kim Jong Il gloated. The deception had worked. The Americans were thinking in terms of long range intercontinental ballistic missiles with huge warheads that they could shoot out of the sky with their sophisticated billion-dollar anti-missile defense systems. He was thinking in terms of small warheads carried by small, medium range cruise missiles that could be launched from many places, and infiltrated close enough to slip in under the radar and hit America's coastal cities.

On the evening of December 6, 2008, a junior analyst in the National Security Agency was going over routine satellite photo production of ship movements in the Atlantic and Pacific within a thousand miles of the US coasts. Late in the shift he thought he saw something through a haze of fatigue and caffeine, and called a supervisor over to talk.

"Look," he said, photos up on several computer screens, more printed out and spread across his desk, "See? These boats, not big ships, fishing boats, yachts, they've been moving in along shipping lanes for several days, across from the South Pacific toward the West coast, up from the South Atlantic toward the east. Nothing very unusual, they're all small and slow, and scattered up and down the oceans, it seems, but if you look at the times and courses..." and he pulled out a chart he had plotted, "They're approaching so they will all arrive at about the same time, or all be about the same distance off the coast at about the same time...," he trailed off.

The supervisor looked a bit quizzical. "Coincidence? Probably. You need more sleep. Too much fun in the night, eh? Let me know if you see something we can do something with." And walked away.

At 0723 Hawaii time on the 67th Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack three old fishing trawlers, about 100 miles apart, and each about 300 miles off the east coast, launched six small cruise missiles from launch tubes that could be dismantled and stored in the holds under ice, or fish, and set up in less than an hour. The missiles were launched at precisely one minute intervals. As soon as each boat had launched its pair, the skeleton crew began to abandon ship into a fast rubber inflatable. The captain was last off, and just before going overboard started the timer on the scuttling charges. Fifteen minutes later and ten miles away, each crew was going up the nets into a small freighter or tanker of Moroccan or Liberian registry, where each man was issued new identification as ship's crew. The rubber inflatables were shot and sunk, and just about then charges in the bilges of each of the three trawlers blew the hulls out, and they sank with no one on board and no distress signals in less than two minutes.

The missiles had been built in a joint operation by North Korea and Iran, and tested in Iran, so they would not have to overfly any other country. The small nuclear warheads had only been tested deep underground. The GPS guidance and detonating systems had worked perfectly, after a few corrections. They flew fifty feet above sea level, and 500 feet above ground level on the last leg of the trip, using computers and terrain data modified from open market technology and flight directors, autopilots, adapted from commercial aviation units. They would adjust speed to arrive on target at specific times and altitudes, and detonate upon reaching the programmed GPS coordinates. They were not as adaptable and intelligent as American cruise missiles, but they did not need to be. Not for this mission.

They were small, less than twenty feet long, and only 18 inches in diameter, powered by small, quiet, fuel-efficient, high-bypass turbofans, and painted in a mottled light blue and light gray ghost camouflage. Cruising at 600 knots, just below the speed of sound, they were nearly impossible to see or hear. They came in under the radar until they reached the coast. After that they were lost in the ground clutter. Nobody saw it coming.

At precisely 0753, Hawaii time, 1353 in the District of Columbia, sixty-seven years to the minute after the Pearl Harbor attack began, the first of six missiles to hit the Washington area exploded in a huge white burst of nuclear fire just 500 feet above the White House, which disappeared in a mist of powdered plaster and stone, concrete and steel. President Bush and President-Elect Clinton had been meeting with Condoleezza Rice and Mrs. Clinton's national security adviser, reviewing the latest National Security Estimate, when they instantaneously turned into a plasma of the atomic elements that had once been human beings. No trace remained.

Alarms immediately began going off all over Washington, and precisely one minute later the second missile exploded just as it struck the Capital dome, instantly turning thousands of tons of granite that had one moment before been the nation's center of government into thousands of tons of granite shrapnel that shredded several square miles of Washington like a leviathan Claymore mine. At precisely one minute intervals, four more 3 kiloton nuclear weapons exploded at an altitude of 500 feet AGL above the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters, the NSA headquarters, the FBI headquarters, all of which were fully staffed in the middle of the day. In five minutes, the government of the United States of America was decapitated, and a quarter million of the people who made the place run were dead, or dying, or had simply disappeared.

Also at 1353 Eastern time, a missile had blown off just above the New York Stock Exchange, in New York City, and thousands of years of collective financial knowledge and experience evaporated in the nuclear flame. In one minute intervals, others had hit the financial centers of Boston and Baltimore, and the Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia.

Simultaneously, within the same 10-minute window of hell, nuclear tipped cruise missiles devastated the largest intermodel shipping facility on the West coast at San Pedro harbor, exploded just above the Library Tower in central Los Angeles, and short circuited the computer technology ghetto of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County, big time. One exploded ten feet away from the top of the Bank of America Building in San Francisco and set much of the east slope of the city ablaze. Another giant fireball flared among the phalanx of office towers along the Capitol Mall in Sacramento, instantly obliterating Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state government of California, the largest state economy in the US, the seventh largest economy in the world. Two ripped open the heart of Portland, Oregon, one shattered the financial district of Seattle, and the last one turned the Microsoft campus into a pillar of fire and smoke, wiping from the face of history, in a second, the IT giant that had revolutionized global communications.

It was 0803, Hawaii time. Ten minutes.

Three million Americans dead. And not a trace of the assault fleet remained on the surface of any ocean.

Vice-President Elect Gavin Newsom was in his bedroom at home in Pacific Heights, his window overlooking the Golden Gate and the Marin bluffs. He thought he heard an oddly loud crack of thunder and saw a flash reflected on the hills across the inlet, but it was a clear day and nothing else seemed out of place. He continued packing for the return trip to Washington, his second since the election, to continue his transition briefings and begin organizing his staff. His nomination as Hillary's running mate had come as a huge surprise, and he was elated.

Someone rapped on the door, loudly, twice, and without waiting for a reply the senior Secret Service officer on his detail opened it and stepped quickly in. "Come with me, now," he said. Gavin was startled. "I need to finish packing," he replied.

"No time, sir. Something has happened. Very big. I fear. No details yet. We have to get you out of here, NOW! RIGHT NOW! GO! GO! GO!" He grabbed Newsom's arm, swung him around, and pushed him out the door, where two other Secret Service agents flanked him down the stairs and out to a running black Suburban waiting in the garage. They pushed him into the back seat, jumped in, and the driver gunned the engine, out the drive, down the street, tires squealing. Nobody spoke until they were headed over the Bridge, northbound at seventy-five miles an hour, weaving through the traffic which wasn't yet the gridlock it would soon become.

"What the hell's going on?" he finally demanded.

"Okay. This is what I know," the officer said. "The US has apparently sustained multiple nuclear attacks in the last fifteen minutes, including Washington D.C. and San Francisco. Financial district. We're not sure how many, at least ten, maybe twenty. Lots of dead. Got the White House, the Capital, the Pentagon. Our job is to get you on an airplane at the nearest functioning airport, that'll be Novato, and get you to a safe place. Prestissimo."

"Where?" Newsom asked. Things were moving way too fast now.

"Don't know yet. We'll get orders."

The Air Force Learjet had been airborne for two minutes when a cell phone buzzed, and the Secret Service captain answered it and handed it off to the Vice President Elect. "It's Mr. Cheney, sir," he said.

"Gavin?" Dick Cheney asked. "Yes, sir," Newsom replied, subdued, for the events of the last hour had sobered up his elated mood considerably.

"Okay, Gavin. I don't know what you know, so I'll tell you what I can. There have been approximately 20 nuclear strikes on government and financial targets in the US, about an hour ago. No real damage estimate yet, except that it's awful. A hundred times 9/11, maybe a thousand times. I happened to be at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and have moved into Cheyenne Mountain to set up a temporary HQ, until we get things sorted out. As you know Cheyenne was vacated by NORAD a few years ago, so we have plenty of space. You will be flown here, nonstop."

"I know you haven't a lot of national and international experience." Cheney had thought of saying that Newsom had none, but Newsom would be too painfully aware of that. He didn't need reminding. "The President is missing and presumed dead. So is Mrs. Clinton. So you may become the next president, in about six weeks. I don't know. he Constitution says the Vice President succeeds a president who is dead or disabled, but it doesn't say what happens if the President Elect dies before being inaugurated. I suppose the Court will have to answer that, if we can cobble one together by then. In the meantime, I will assume you will be inaugurated. You'll have a steep learning curve, a real steep curve. All presidents do, under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances."

The next day a hard winter storm roared down the West coast from Alaska, pelting rescue workers in bombed out city centers with hard, cold rain, that did not let up for a week. People alive but injured or trapped in the wreckage died of hypothermia before they were found. Two days later, a cold front out of Canada brought heavy snow to the Northeast. Millions were already without electricity, and in a week of subzero weather hundreds of thousands more died. More than four million, altogether. More than one of every one hundred Americans.

Al Qaeda had picked December 7 because it was the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and because, just before Christmas, the Infidel holiday, it would destroy the Christmas shopping season so important to so many retailers, driving another nail into the national economy of the Great Satan. And it would destroy the festive spirit of the season for millions of Americans, perhaps for all. The perfect psyop. Psychological warfare. And the weather forecasters had predicted severe winter storms on both coasts during the week immediately after disaster.

Al Qaeda leaders had calculated, correctly, that by turning up the violence in Iraq during the weeks before the 2006 election it could achieve an anti-war Democratic Congress that would vote to end America's wars in the Middle East, and then by turning down the violence in Iraq after the election of an anti-war Democratic Congress, it could lull America into a false sense of safety and security in anticipation of the "peace in our time" that America's new ruling party had promised would follow from what Al Qaeda perceived, correctly, as America's retreat before the unstoppable determination of the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Jihad. America did not call it that, of course. The Americans thought they were just ending a bad and illegal war ginned up by George W. Bush to depose Saddam Hussein who had proven not to have WMDs after all, the ones the Americans had never found, the ones buried in Syria. Al Qaeda saw more clearly. It was a capitulation, a de facto surrender of the Middle East to the coming Islamic Caliphate that would someday rule the world. The martyrs of Islam had beaten the Great Satan to its knees. In time they would cut off its head.

By Christmas, the American economy had imploded. Inflation soared, unemployment soared, businesses closed, cities that had suffered direct hits became ghost towns. Tax revenues evaporated, leaving state governments without funds to pay unemployment benefits or teachers' salaries. With the New York Stock Exchange gone, stock trading ended, and values plummeted. Retirement assets and pension funds disappeared in a wink. Nobody knew what to expect. Real estate crashed, and major banks filed for bankruptcy. With the collapse of the American economy, the largest on earth, the most productive country on earth, with just 5% of the global population producing one third of the global economic output, the rest of the global economy fell into chaos. Oil shipments stopped, food shipments stopped, and in that winter millions of people in third world countries starved to death.

The America era was over.

"In the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany was poised to dominate the earth. France, the low countries, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and much of Poland had been overrun by the Germans. All of Europe, save neutral Sweden and Switzerland, was in the hands of Hitler's friends and allies: dictators or monarchs who ruled fascist Italy, Vichy France, Franco's Spain, Portugal, the Balkan countries, Finland, and above all the Soviet Union."

"A single German division under General Erwin Rommel, sent to rescue beleaguered Italians in Libya, drove Britain's Middle Eastern armies flying and threatened the Suez lifeline; while in Iraq a coup d'etat by the pro-German Rashid Ali cut the land road to India. In Asia, Germany's ally, Japan, was coiled to strike, ready to take Southeast Asia and invade India. No need to involve the United States; by seizing the Indies, Japan could break the American embargo and obtain all the oil needed for the Axis Powers to pursue their war aims.

"Hitler should have sent the bulk of his armies to serve under Rommel, who would have done what Alexander did and Bonaparte failed to do: He would have taken the Middle East and led his armies to India. There he would have linked up with the Japanese. Europe, Asia, and Africa, would have belonged to the coalition of dictators and militarists."

"The Nazi-Soviet-Japanese alliance commanded armed forces and resources that utterly dwarfed the military resources that the holdouts, Britain (with its empire), and the United States, could field. The English-speaking countries would have been isolated in a hostile world and would have had no realistic option but to make their peace with the enemy, retaining some autonomy for a time, perhaps, but doomed ultimately to succumb. Nazi Germany, as leader of the coalition, would have ruled the world."

"Only Hitler's astonishing blunder in betraying and invading his Soviet ally kept it from happening." - David Frompkin, Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University, writing in What If: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (Putnam 1999) pp. 308, 309.

History is made, wars are won and lost, cultures and nations and civilizations come and go, rise and fall, as much by blunders as by victories.

The failure of many Americans, including many of the leading Democrats in Congress, and some Republicans, to fully appreciate the persistent, long-term threat posed to America's liberties and survival, and to the future of Liberal Democracies everywhere, by an Islamic Resistance Movement that envisions a world dominated and defined by an Islamic Caliphate of religious totalitarianism, and which will fight any war, make any sacrifice, suffer any hardship, and pay any price to achieve it, may prove to be the kind of blunder upon which the fate of America turns, and falls.

by Raymond S. Kraft
Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in northern California.
Mr. Kraft receives receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.net

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 of Asia, 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. (Not even now. General Patton once said, "I'd rather have a battalion of Germans in front of me, than a battalion of French behind me!") 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 of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia 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 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 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 in 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. They were 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, so he turned his attention to Russia. This when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America 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 instead invaded England in 1940 or 1941, 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. 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 as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan. These weapons were paid for with billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the impotent UN with the complicity of Koki 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; that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

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 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. 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 the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win. To do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it everywhere at once ,so we have created a focal point for the battle. Now. At the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin. 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 or was a terrorist, 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. The ones we kill there we won't have to kill here, or somewhere else. We 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.

The Europeans could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihadist, 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 have a million tons of weapons?

And Iraq was paying for much of these French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the UN Oil For Food Program that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education for Iraqi children.

World War II, the war with the German and the 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 of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again . .. . a 27 year war.

World War II cost the United 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 approximately 2,100 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the lives that the Jihadist snuffed on 9/11. What will the next hit cost in dollars and lives if we wait until the Jihads have nuclear weapons?]

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 sho

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, e. g. Libya, 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, the Jihadist, believe 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 (or are defeated by 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. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless WE prevent them.

The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting 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 the Middle 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, which is well underway, and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadist 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 (Islamic law as dictated by the Qur'an), an America that resembles Iran today.

We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against it.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes - cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas. Ideas about what society and civilization should be like. The most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless 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 War, 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 through Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.

Senator John Kerry, almost daily, makes three scary claims:

(1) We went to Iraq without enough troops. Actually, 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 with no 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. Did you know that some American schools start teaching U.S. history commencing with the Civil War? Many young Americans are not learning about the Pilgrims, Colonial America, the Revolution, the Constitution. They think America started with the freeing of the slaves.

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 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 fighting Germany.

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 whose estimates you accept.

The US has lost about 2,100 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 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.

Today, in Iraq, 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 the radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihadist under the Mullahs and the Sharia.

I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. Don't they know that the Sharia considers women as property, that the whim of the Mullah is the law, that there is absolutely NO freedom of choice? The American left seems to favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

The 300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem. The US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, 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. For this privilege, they should thank US veterans. 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? Why? Just look at what happened to the four peace activists from the Christian Peace Maker Teams recently taken captive by the Muslim "insurgents" near Baghdad.

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 will be the death of Liberalism.

Sadly, American Liberals just don't get it.