World War 3 (my first journal)

[NewJeffCT]

Urged on by ethically disgraced neoconservative Newt Gingrich, the latest spin from Team Bush and the Republican Congress, and their supporting cast of thousands in the media, is that we are in the middle of World War 3. Iraq, they claim, is the central front in this war, with the future of America, and freedom itself, at risk before the greatest enemy in history.

If this is true, I have some questions for the thrice-married Gingrich and his fellow neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Lieberman:

If we truly are in the middle of World War 3, why has President Bush not fully mobilized our nation for this epic clash of civilizations these past five years? Why are we trying to fight World War 3 on the cheap with only 130,000 soldiers in Iraq? Where is this generation's Harry Truman to lead Congressional investigations into war profiteering? And, why does Paris Hilton need an estate tax cut in the midst of this confrontation?

If George Bush were truly serious about winning what neocons are now branding World War 3, we should: Bring back the draft to increase the size of our military; turn whole industries over to the war effort so our soldiers won't be without bullets and body armor like they too often are now; raise the top tax rates up to the World War 2 level of 90% so we can pay for the war and not leave our military $50 billion short in equipment like they are now; and start investigations into anti-American war profiteering at companies like Halliburton. Rationing critical items like gasoline and steel is in order as well.

Short of this full mobilization, anybody selling the Iraqi civil war as World War 3 is just trying to scare us into forgetting the lies, cronyism and utterly incompetent bumbling that have become the hallmarks of our Middle East policy. Today, we are a superpower in name only, with less credibility around the world than Baghdad Bob, not even able to defeat a “few dead-enders” in the “last throes” of an insurgency, despite the loss of nearly 2,700 soldiers and having spent hundreds of billions.

(I was writing it in LTTE format, but found out that I'm not eligible to submit a LTTE for a few weeks, as I too recently had one published!)

[NewJeffCT]

1. wow, not one response yet?

shameless self-kick.

[Spearman87]

2. Waiting for replies? Just one second, I'm about to

......stir some up :)

[Spearman87]

3. In fact, Newt seems to agree with your contention

.....That if this is WWIII, we need to do much more, and Bush is not doing enough. He addressed some of your questions in his 9/11 speech. Too bad the byline says “Gingrich” and not Clarke, Clinton or Berger, b/c some of the points, though scary, are correct, and there needs to be more consideration and debate from both sides of the aisle. He’s identified some real problems, and proposed some solutions (even if poor ones, unrealistic, misguided). But there can be no debate about better solutions or any solutions if there’s no real discussion of the problem by our leaders.

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24891,filter.all/pub_detail.asp


(Quoting from the Speech):


President Bush……..must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.

1. They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be.

2. They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized.

3. They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.”


We must confront the reality that we are not where we wanted to be nor where we need to be. We have not stopped the recruitment of young fanatics into terrorism. We have not stopped either the Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs. We do not have a stable democratic Pakistan capable of securing its own nuclear weapons. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is stable and secure. The United Nations is unreformed and we have failed to convince the people of America and of our fellow democracies of the correctness and necessity of what we are doing. We have vastly more to do than we have even begun to imagine.


Are our enemies prepared to kill us?

---the London Telegraph reports that “a husband and wife arrested in the British terror raids allegedly planned to take their six-month-old baby on a mid-air suicide mission.” Imagine an enemy willing to kill their own six-month old baby as long as we die too. It is the very horror which makes it difficult for most civilized people to understand the depth of our enemies’ ferocity.

---Iranian television on October 28, 2005 broadcast an animated movie for children designed to recruit them to be suicide bombers. Imagine a society which believes that indoctrinating ten year olds in the joys of martyrdom is a positive action. That is the kind of enemy we face.

Pakistan has a lot of nuclear weapons and while the current dictatorship is favorable to the United States there is a very strong extremist component of Pakistani society and……nuclear weapons could eventually be transferred from Pakistan to other states or to terrorists.

Our enemies have to be seen in a global context. It is fundamentally misleading to try to isolate Afghanistan without understanding the role of sanctuaries in northwest Pakistan. It is misleading to try to understand Iraq without understanding the role of resources, sanctuaries and leadership in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. It is impossible to understand the role of Hezbollah in South Lebanon without examining the resources and support from Iran and Syria. Hugo Chavez has been in more than a dozen countries in the last few months. He is actively seeking an anti-American seat on the UN Security Council. He and Ahmadinejad of Iran will jointly be in Cuba for the meeting of the 116 nations of the “Non-Aligned Movement”. There is growing collaboration among our enemies and we have to design global responses to defeat that collaboration. Unless we see the global patterns in the terrorist efforts and the collaboration among the anti-American dictatorships we cannot appreciate how great the threat is and how large the challenge of achieving victory will be.


Consider some recent statements for their clarity, boldness and directness.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

“To those who doubt, to those who ask is it possible, or those who do not believe, I say accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible.<2>
“Such people are using words like ‘it’s not possible’. They say how could we have a world without America and Zionism? But you know well that this slogan and goal can be achieved and can definitely be realized.<3>


Hassan Abbassi, Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Advisor to the Iranian President

“We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization…. we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites, and we know how we are going to attack them.<8>

Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini

“If the objective circumstances materialize, and subjective there are soldiers, weapons, and money - even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial weapons - we will conquer the world, so that "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah" will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris.<11>

Much of our elite and much of our news media simply do not accept that we are at great risk……given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the ‘day that changed everything.’
The American people do not yet believe their cities and their own lives are at risk. They do not believe that anything truly horrifying could happen. For the moment the terrorist threat has become an ‘over there’ problem which only impinges on our lives when we go through security at an airport. The success……in stopping further terrorist attacks after 9/11 has made it possible for people to relax and ignore the threat.

we have a young British- born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally……you can't beat it simply by security or military means. This is an ideological battle..

In Iraq
The number one metric for stopping violent opposition is the number of unemployed young males. Our number one goal should be an all out effort to revitalize the Iraqi economy in the next six months. One step would be a White House conference on purchasing where very large corporations would be asked to begin purchasing modest amounts of light manufacturing from Iraq. This step alone could lead to a 20% improvement in the economy. A second step would be to create an Iraqi Civil Conservation Corps and an Iraqi Works Projects Administration and simply get young men working
Four hundred years ago next May the first people who spoke English and believed their rights came from God landed in Jamestown. For four hundred years we have been extending their values and concepts across a continent and to people of every background speaking every language. We are on the edge of an era of scientific change which will enable the most entrepreneurial country in the world to have an explosion of new productivity, new solutions, new health, and new freedom. We owe it to those who worked and fought for freedom, safety and prosperity in the past and to our parents and grandparents who did so much for our lives. We owe it to our children and grandchildren who deserve an even safer, freer and more prosperous American future.
We owe it to our own self respect. We who love life and revere freedom will defeat those who love death and seek dictatorship. We have done it before. We will do it again.

(END of Excerpts)

There’s no official WWIII declared by the US or the West.

But there has been a one-sided WWIII declaration by the Muslim radicals. Whether it remains that way probably depends on how our leaders and the public reacts when we get hit with an attack that kills the greater portion of a major city(ies).

[NewJeffCT]

4. The problem is

That it was the Bush administration that turned Iran from a nation that was slowly moving towards become a more open society to one that now has a radical as president. First, with labeling Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" and then by invading Iran's neighbor, Iraq, despite Iraq having no WMD. The message to Iran is seemingly - if you have nukes, we won't invade.

The same with Venezuela. If the people that led a coup against Hugo Chavez were in the White House only days before... I'd be stupid not to think Team Bush didn't have some sort of hand in the coup if I were Chavez.

North Korea has done the same as Iran after being labeled part of the Axis... and, have only been further emboldened when Team Bush drew down our presence in the DMZ there.

And, I'm still trying to figure out the logic behind doing business with the repressive Communist regime in China, and not the one in Cuba?

My point is that while I have heard Team Bush, Fox News, etc already follow Newt’s lead and start calling this World War 3, their actions have not come close to matching the rhetoric.

There has been no call for sacrifice
The draft has not been re-implemented
Tax rates have not been raised to help fund the war

Newt is delusional. If Bush said tomorrow that we were going to triple our troop commitment in Iraq to 400,000 and also send another 100,000 to Afghanistan, then re-implement the draft...Congress would be in open rebellion and even the American people might get off their duffs & do something.

[Spearman87]

5. I agree with most of those points

Except maybe on Korea. Because I don’t think they suddenly started on the road to wanting nukes, or even acceralated any more than they would have, b/c of Bush. I think they’ve had a goal of becoming a regional power and a global player for quite some time, combined with a philosophy of deception and secretly acquiring those weapons, even while publicly soliciting aid with promises not to do so. Their current leader is not to be trusted IMO; I’m glad we at least went through the motions of setting up some kind of roundtable talks with him. But roundtable, bilateral, face to face, whatever, I don’t think it matters with that guy. He’s going to try and acquire more power no matter who is in office in the US and regardless of what they do. True, their public posturing might have been different if treated differently by us, but I suspect they’d have just as many nukes if Kerry was in the White House; they probably just wouldn’t feel the need to posture so much.

I might disagree slightly on the last part, b/c to me it IS asking for a national sacrifice to continually ask the American people to stay the course in supporting our presence in Iraq, to fund that mission as well as the Afghan one, to endure higher gas and transportable goods prices, and longer tours of duty for our soldiers. Even if you or your family aren’t fighting yourself, it still is a weight on the national psyche. But I’m quibbling over minutia…..I get your points---they’re well made and I mostly agree.


On the war question, I do think there is a rather amorphous, difficult- to-define conflict, or “war” if you must, between the Western world and radical Islam. And I do think it will eventually be “won”, by one side or the other**, though not so much in a military sense. It won’t be won through the heavy-handed approach of using guns and troops any more than we already have. It’s a war of ideas, and it’ll be won when radicalism becomes marginalized. To that end, the best parts of his speech were the ideas of getting corporations involved in Iraq, doing some of their light manufacturuing over there to alleviate the unemployment situation with young males (I don’t think it will happen mind you, I’m just saying it’s the KIND of solution we need to be investing in—all over that part of the world--instead of simply more smart bombs and more accurate rifles.....although I like a good smart bomb as much the next guy), and the idea of getting back to more cooperative relationships with Europe, instead these adversarial ones. I don’t think that will happen much under this administration. There is probably blame on both sides of that Atlantic for that, but at any rate things are too polarized right now between the US govt and many European ones.

This board is slipping! I expected to have been attacked 5 times already over that earlier post :)


(**Some dire pundits on the Right say that Europe has reached a tipping point and is already on the way to losing in this ideological competition. They point out that birth rates among the secular and the Christians are far below replacement levels. While Muslim immigration and high birth rates make them well on the way to becoming the majority, and that their current road of asking for more Muslim laws and consessions will eventually end with majority Muslim nations converting to some modernized version of Sharia law--or at least something palatable to the revolutionaries in Tehran. It's an interesting theory, and one I think the radicals who are busy exporting their belief system from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be happy to see come to pass. That would be a major victory towards their dream of converting to a region-wide Islamic state, without firing a shot)