-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
“Allah, there is no strength but your strength. Destroy, therefore, the Zionist occupation and its helpers and its agents. Destroy the U.S. and its helpers and its agents. Destroy Britain and its helpers and its agents. Prepare those who will soon unite the Muslims of the world and march in the footsteps of Saladin. Allah, we ask you for forgiveness, forgiveness before death, and mercy and forgiveness after death. Allah, grant victory to Islam and the Muslims in the coming war.” What Freud might have described as “self-hating,” Muslims commit overt and bloody atrocities against non-Muslims (but other Muslim sects will suffice if there are no Jewish or Christian targets in the vicinity), and then claim innocence – that they are being discriminated against, or that there is a vast anti-Islamic conspiracy. Bin Laden and other Muslim terrorists could have given German Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels lessons about the “big lie.” The terror attack on Sept. 11 is an obvious case in point, where Muslims screamed that “Jews” were behind the attacks to defame Islam. A short time later, Muslim gunmen from the “Army of Omar” shot and killed 16 innocent Christians who were praying in their church in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. Pakistani officials (our “allies”) claimed it was the work of Western influence in an attempt to defame Muslims. They attack and murder those who do not accept their narrow view of the world, but when called to account for their crimes, they claim it is plot to defame Islam! This goes beyond craven cowardice. There is no way to know how many people the Taliban murdered in the Kabul soccer stadium, and elsewhere in Afghanistan, in the name of Islam. Thousands of Christians have been brutally murdered in Nigeria in the name of Islam. One man, a 26 year-old former Muslim who had not only had the audacity to convert to Christianity, but had become an ordained Catholic priest, was attacked, had his eyes gouged out and was left on the road to die. Nigerian journalist Ulanugu Eneh wrote, “The greatest threat to Nigeria as a nation as presently constituted is Islamic extremism.” The Sudan has seen war and famine for generations, but in the past 20 years, almost 2 million Christians and Animists have been murdered in the name of Islam. In Algeria, some 100,000 people have died in the name of Islam, including the murder of Bishop Clavier and the beheading of seven Trappist monks. In Yemen, Catholic nuns were murdered, in the name of Islam. In Egypt, the recipient of a billion U.S. tax dollars every year, a reign of terror exists against Coptic Christians and other non-Muslims – again in the name of Islam. Saudi Arabia, another supposed Arab ally, is listed by the U.S. State Department as not allowing religious freedom. Christians there are flogged, imprisoned and executed by a government that prevents non-Muslim worship, even in the privacy of a home – also in the name of Islam. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf organization, with ties to bin Laden’s Al Queda network, have tortured and murdered priests and other Christians, have taken hostages and defaced churches, all in the name of Islam. In a recent article, British journalist Paul Johnson argued the West has evolved because it has grown and learned from mistakes, based on the secular rule of law, which has allowed society to grow and in which democracy and liberty take root, therefore wealth flourishes. He argues, “All the systems of the world, notably the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indian, have learned much from the West in turn, and benefited thereby. The Islamic world has been the least willing to adopt the West’s fundamental excellences. This is why it remains poor (despite its wealth of raw materials), unfree, and unhappy.” Again, as Freud might point out, based on this have-not mentality, Islamic fundamentalism is bent on destroying, rather than learning from, the West. However, before the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and initiated the Islamic revolution, Middle Eastern terrorists were politically motivated by Marxist-Leninist ideology, rather than Jihad. Arab/Muslim terrorists have attacked Western infrastructure since the 1960s, when Yasir Arafat was still identified as a terrorist with the Fatah organization and Arab terrorists were hijacking and blowing up planes to achieve their objectives. As Islam is more a way of life than a religion, however, the fervor of the Islamic revolution has replaced stale Marxist-Leninist ideology. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism captured the existing fervor and convinced many Muslims that secular revolution was passé, while becoming martyrs for Islam carries with it much more value for self and family. Also, as a matter of practicality, those holding the power over these “martyrs,” like bin Laden, are assured that the death toll among “infidels” is much greater when a martyr blows himself up amid a group of unsuspecting civilians, than a Marxist-Leninist who wants to live and fight again. Given this bleak picture of a worldwide religion that refuses to learn from the West, but rather wishes to destroy it, a major concern is the ongoing migration of millions of Muslims westward, outwardly seeking a better life for themselves and their families – but is that their only motive? When loyalty is first and foremost to their religion, just how loyal are Muslims to their adopted countries when a Jihad is called? A poll conducted in Britain showed that over two thirds of Muslims there said their Muslim faith was more important to them than their British citizenship. As a country with a large number of Muslim residents, and the victim and target of Muslim terror, the United States needs to take note. In a country based on laws, equality and social justice, there is no room for blind bigotry and prejudice against Muslims living here. However, as has been identified many times since 9-11, most of the 19 Muslim hijackers were either legally living in, or had legally entered, the United States. Until loyalty is established, there needs to be greater security, scrutiny and vigilance, particularly while we are engaged in a war against Muslim terrorists who may use dirty nuclear, biological and chemical weapons without concern for innocent lives. If saving American lives and infrastructure means covert surveillance, profiling and questioning, so be it. Until otherwise shown, Americans need to be on guard and aware of the potential of terrorists in their midst. And Muslims in this country need to be on notice that their loyalty is in question until proven otherwise. The risks are too high to have it any other way. Patrick Hayes is a contributing editor to DefenseWatch. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- ARTICLE 04 – U.S. Military Success: Beyond a ‘Hyperpower’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- By David Warren In a sense, Afghanistan has been a "classic" colonial war. The United States has been sparing of its own troops, instead taking sides and choosing local allies as its proxies, while using its own incontestable technological superiority to help them quickly win. The resemblance to the way the British took India in the 18th and 19th centuries – one tribal patch or princely state at a time – ends there. The Americans have no long-term plans to rule the place, and are happy to let anyone else send “peacekeepers." This is what the Europeans and Canadians turn out to be good for, this time around. We have the equipment, the manpower, and the budgets, to do sentry duties. (As a retired Canadian officer told me after the federal budget was tabled on Dec. 10, "It's all very well for the Americans to spend a fortune on defence, they have to defend the free world from terrorism. We only have to defend our own smugness.") Except for the most elite British special forces – a small handful of men – help would just get in the Yankees' way. Moreover, the two percent or less of the West's Afghan campaign that was offloaded on the British (and a few French special forces, too), was essentially unnecessary. The help was accepted as a political favor, in answer to British and French supplications. This was probably made clear when the British defence secretary, the aptly-named Geoff Hoon, told BBC breakfast television Dec. 9 that if Osama bin Laden fell into British hands, he would not be turned over to the U.S. for trial – unless the U.K. first received assurances that Osama would not face the death penalty. I would have liked to be a fly on the line when George Bush called Tony Blair about that one. I doubt we'll be hearing anything so unctuous from Mr. Hoon again. Offers of British and other NATO aircraft were politely declined. They have inferior equipment and pilots, and as the U.S. learned over Serbia, you can't really fight a war while waiting for 19 different defense ministers to sign off on each target. What has changed, in the last decade, and especially in the last two years (the technological developments since the Balkan campaign in 1999 were greater than those between that and Desert Storm in 1991), is the status of the United States as a military power. At the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. emerged as the world's only superpower. Now it has become what the French call a “hyperpower". It is not only at the top of the international "top ten" in military spending. It outspends the other nine, combined, and can afford to, given the present scale of the U.S. economy. Not the British, at the height of their empire, nor even the Romans, contesting with distant Medes and Parthians, enjoyed such military predominance. And yet, this quantitative comparison actually understates the U.S. advantage. For there is a real qualitative difference, not only in American equipment, but in the skills of its troops. The Pentagon made use of the contractions in general manpower through the 1990s, and applied the "peace dividend" to hone a much more skilled and variously specialized fighting force. The U.S. does not employ "grunts" anymore, only soldiers who call themselves "grunts" with a certain droll pride. At the officer level, Europeans visiting the American military academies have been tremendously impressed by what they have seen, over the last decade. And one may see this for oneself by visiting the various institutions on the Internet. Unlike his European or Canadian opposite number, the contemporary West Point or Naval War College graduate is familiar with Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Fuller, Liddell Hart – and with Sun Tzu and Mao-tse Tung for that matter. Nor is it just a showy "book-learning," for the courses are designed to make the students apply what they study, consistently and imaginatively, to the circumstances the U.S. might face today. I have myself been tremendously impressed to read theses posted here and there on the net, by young cadets who could obviously skate rings around your average "politically correct" humanities professor. On the ground level, in Afghanistan, it has become increasingly evident that the U.S. was able to parachute troops who could speak Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Urdu. They needed these both for making contacts with potential allies, and for interrogating prisoners who fell into their hands. They could also use translators effectively (this is actually a skill), as well as ride fast horses and put pack mules to work carrying high-tech gear. A remarkable interview which The Washington Post obtained with Capt. Jason Amerine, an injured member of the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group on his sickbed in Landstuhl, Germany – gives some hint of the ground capabilities. This was the unit that went into the mountains of Oruzgan to rendezvous with Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's prime minister-designate. (They didn't need Pashto because he speaks fluent English.) In five short weeks, this little vanguard of less than a dozen men, mostly in their mid-twenties, were able to recruit and organize and (through air drops) equip an Afghan fighting force that liberated the provincial capital, then marched on Kandahar. They also ordered and set up distribution for emergency food and medical supplies for the civilian population, while calling down airstrikes on a Taliban convoy and other positions, almost in their spare time. "We could go in there naked with flip-flops, and as long as we have good radios we could do our job," Capt. Amerine said of their survival training. His unit made up for unfamiliarity with the local physical and cultural landscape with a crash course in Pashtun anthropology in the days before going in. Hunks, yes, but these are nothing like Europe's idea of "GIs." Indeed, the U.S. Marine Corps general force now camping in the Rigestan desert are probably up to the special forces calibre of a generation ago. Technology plays no small part. Some 91 per cent of munitions the U.S. has dropped in Afghanistan have been pinpoint targeted – compared with six percent on Iraq. Even gravity bombs dropped from B-52s can now be placed within a few meters of the crosshair, thanks to advances in computer calculation. And yet the "garage workshop" spirit is kept alive with the invention of weapons like the "Daisy Cutter" – hand-made with old-fashioned welding tools, and perhaps the most awkward-looking 15,000-pound explosive we shall ever see (it resembles the water-tanks on the roofs of old New York City apartment buildings). The U.S. armed forces are thus not only strong, but extremely adaptable. Yet even this is to understate the U.S. advantage, for it is likely to grow in the coming years. Prior to Sept. 11, the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was fighting a nearly impossible uphill battle against Congress to transform the whole organizational structure of the U.S. military. His goals are to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, replace surviving conventional with many more special forces, and vastly increase the capacity of the military to respond to unexpected threats, or recover quickly from unexpected hits. The terrorist strikes on New York and Washington, and his performance since, have vindicated his position, and the overhaul is now proceeding. The French may have to invent a word for what comes after a "hyperpower." © 2001 Ottawa Citizen, reprinted with permission. Other articles by David Warren can be read at his website, www.davidwarrenonline.com. Table of Contents *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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