Can anyone make an intelligent, educated counter argument to this?

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 (Are they ever? 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, Aussie's, 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 losses and the near-decimation of its air
force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by
Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brit's
were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and
turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the
verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.
Russia SAVED America's *** 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 (24 MILLION) 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 Brit's, then America, and the
Nazis would have won that war.
Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941,
instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brit's 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 Brit's), the US
would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were
basically Nazis by another name and 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, paid
for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For
Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan
and his son.
The Jihadi's, 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, and 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 Jihadi's, will control
the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian
economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of
OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis
of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadi's.
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, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.
We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight
the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, 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, but 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 and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or
somewhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic,
peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the
rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American
military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.
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 need 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. (What will the next hit cost in $ &
lives if we wait until the Jahadist have nuclear weapons???) It has
also cost over 2,000 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the lives
that the Jihadist snuffed on 9/11.
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 short attention span, conditioned I suppose by 60
minute TV shows and 2-hour movies in which everything comes out okay.
The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes
bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.
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 civilizational clashes
-cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society
and civilization should be like (usually dominated by religious
dogma), and 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.
Some say we went to Iraq without the needed troop numbers. Indeed, one
senior general was forcibly retired because he claimed we needed more
troops. 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.
That we went to Iraq with too little planning 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.
That we proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security
is also 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 Brit's 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. Again, 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.
The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least 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 which estimates you accept.
The US has taken a little more than 2,000 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.
But 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 America does not grasp this.
They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but
evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.
300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem. The
U.S. 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 U.S. veterans.
Why don't we see Peace Activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq,
Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world that really need peace
activism the most?
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.

who do you think is gonna read your novel?

TL;DR

no you said it all and a little more than
Dude...this is way too long to read.

had it have been shorter and had a point, I may have argued it.
Not me...too long to read it. I just want two points! Thanks
I started to read it, then got bored.

If you could cull it down to something readable, maybe an answer will be forthcoming.