Commander-In-Defeat?

American soldiers fight and die in Afghanistan because they believe they’re defending our country and our way of life. It’s disturbing to read in Bob Woodward’s recently-published book “Obama’s War” that their commander-in-chief doesn’t see it the way they do. Woodward’s account leaves the impression that President Obama only wants to appear that he shares our soldiers’ beliefs, but that he really sees the war as a political problem to rid himself of before reelection time.

As a US senator and presidential candidate, Obama said over and over that President Bush’s Iraq War was a distraction and that the important was was in Afghanistan. Enough Americans believed him to put him in charge as president. His generals believed him too, so when the newly-elected Obama asked them at strategy meetings what his options were, they laid out various plans to win. Obama got exasperated because he didn’t really want to win. He wanted to get out.

As Woodward puts it:

President Obama was on edge. For two exhausting months, [Obama] had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan. He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were "really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted."

If Obama’s generals were wrong about anything, it was believing what their commander-in-chief said. It’s clear after almost two years in office that although he was great at campaigning, he has little idea about how to govern. It would be one thing if he believed a ground war in Afghanistan wasn’t the way to defeat our enemies and was looking for a different strategy. There’s enough historical precedent given England’s and the former Soviet Union’s experience in Afghanistan to support a re-thinking. If he asked for ideas about a covert, unconventional, low-intensity conflict together with a world-wide anti-jihad propaganda campaign that might be more effective at defeating our enemies, people might understand. But he’s not doing that. He just wants out.

Obama refuses even to define our enemy as Radical Islam. What does he think might be a common factor with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah? Why is he eliminating references to “Islamic Radicalism” and “jihad” from key national security documents? What’s going on? Does President Obama think he can bring his teleprompter over there and charm them out of their intentions to bring down western civilization?

Key military advisors Woodward mentions in “Obama’s Wars” are resigning, including Obama’s National Security Advisor James Jones, a retired Marine General who is quoted in an interview with Der Spiegel on Obama’s approach to the war: “Hope is not a strategy.”

That we have men and women willing to die in combat assures the survival of our way of life. They’re not suicidal as our enemies are, but they’re willing to risk their lives to defend our country against those enemies. Their ideals are among the greatest any of us possess and they deserve our highest respect. Because, after all, it’s all about ideals. It’s about their belief that America is exceptional. It’s the best country in the world and the last best hope on earth, as Abraham Lincoln described the United States of America. It’s about believing that our country is greater than we are, that what it represents is worth dying for. The men who volunteer for combat are proud of their country, and that’s why they do what they do. It’s becoming painfully apparent, however, that their commander-in-chief who orders them into battle doesn’t share their ideals. That’s bad. That’s very bad for all of us.

I wonder how our combat soldiers felt when, only after her husband won presidential primaries, they heard Michelle Obama declare: “And let me tell you something -- for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” The first time? Was that a clue that the man who went on to become their commander-in-chief might have similar feelings? It would seem so given that he sat in the pew of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church listening to his anti-American rants for twenty years and launched his political career in the living room of left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers who attempted to violently overthrow the US government.

It’s consoling for families who lose loved ones in combat to believe they died defending their country. How will those fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, and children feel when they read evidence in Woodward’s book that their president is only using our soldiers for his personal political purposes?

Remembering September 11th, Or Not

For eight years, I’ve started the school year asking my eighth graders where they were when they first heard about the tragic events of September 11, 2001, but I didn’t do that when school started last week for two reasons:

First, this year’s students were pre-schoolers when the twin towers were hit - they were four years old. Some may have noticed the adults around them becoming upset, but it’s not likely they would have had much understanding of why. For them, September 11, 2001 isn’t the burned-in emotional experience it has been for students who are now college age. For most in kindergarten through twelfth grade, September 11th isn’t that big a deal. Unless they sat through my class, or had a teacher like me somewhere else, my guess is that few would be able to identify who our enemies are and why they want to kill us.

Second, media coverage of September 11th has diminished each year to the point where it doesn’t make sense to continue. We no longer have saturation coverage in the weeks leading up to the anniversary. Last year there was so little so I decided to abandon my ritual. Later this year, I’ll still deliver my lessons about our enemies being followers of Radical Islam, but not in September unless something else happens to capture the media’s attention.

This year will be different in one other very important way: what I teach will be in direct conflict with what our commander-in-chief - our president - apparently believes, or says he does at least, about who we’re fighting. I’m quite mindful of this and it greatly disturbs me. I’ve had to question myself because I’m an ordinary public school history teacher and he’s the leader of the free world who hears daily intelligence briefings from expert advisors. However, according to Raymond Ibrahim, writing in The Middle East Forum on April 9th of this year:

The Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all words that allude to Islam from important national security documents. Put differently, the Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all knowledge and context necessary to confront and defeat radical Islam.

I’ll have to point this out to my students. I’ll have to explain to them that the experts now running our war do not see our enemies as I do. Last month, the Pentagon issued it’s report on the Fort Hood massacre in which Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen fellow American soldiers and wounded thirty-one others while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” which is what our enemies do just before they destroy themselves to kill infidels like us. There was no mention, however, of his radical Islamist beliefs in the report. The massacre was described as “workplace violence” and not motivated by his infection with the wacky jihadist ideas of our enemies, though it clearly was.

For more than nine years, I’ve been helping my students understand that their fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends who have served our country in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fighting Radical Islam. When my principal poked his head into my classroom at about 9:15 AM on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I had just written “jihad” on the blackboard and was explaining how it was understood by two Radical Islamists who had just killed or wounded dozens of Israelis by blowing themselves up on September 9th. When he told me what happened that morning in New York City, I knew right away who was behind it.One of the reasons I became a teacher was that I wanted to do a better job than my teachers had done for me and my peers back in the 1960s. I went to high school between 1965 and 1969 when graduates who didn’t go to college were drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. None of my teachers, however, were covering the war in class. Graduates (and dropouts) were heading to southeast Asia with very little idea of what that war was about. I was determined to do a better job.

As a US History teacher with responsibility to teach current events, it’s been my job to understand the conflicts in which our country is engaged - and I’ve studied them intensely. That my teaching is now at odds with both the president and the Pentagon makes me very uneasy, but I’ll continue to teach what I believe to be the truth until someone can show me how President Obama and his Pentagon advisors are right and I am wrong.

Peace Through Strength

It’s beautiful where I live and peaceful too, most of the time. I like to sit on my back porch, smell the woods, hear the birds and animals, feel the wind, and watch the sun light everything from different angles as it moves across the sky each day and sets over the mountains. But then I’ll hear coyotes yipping and howling as they chase down some other animal to eat. I’ll see an owl and listen to the other birds cry in distress at its presence. I’m reminded that it’s a struggle to survive out there and if you’re not careful, you might be eaten up. Keeping strong, wary, and ready to fight enhances survival. Most predators are smart, preying on the weak and avoiding the strong. Strong is good.

Late one night I was woken by screams outside my bedroom window and it took several seconds to realize they weren’t human. Animals were struggling violently, but I didn’t know what kind and I still don’t. I got up and peered through the screen into the darkness, but I couldn’t see anything except movement. They were screams fear, panic, and pain as the fight moved into the woods on the other side of the road. After a minute or so, it ended and I went back to bed wondering what had happened. The next morning, I saw smears of blood on the road and leading into the woods where ferns were trampled. There were no tracks I could discern, and no remains. Either the victim got away, or it was killed and eaten somewhere deeper into the woods.

Months later, a couple of young thugs tried to invade the house across the street about fifty yards from where the animals had been fighting. One said later under interrogation that they intended to kill the elderly couple living there and take their vehicle for a joy ride. They had knocked on the door, demanded keys at gunpoint, cut the telephone wires, and then fled after the man slammed the door on them and they heard him yell: “Get the gun!” to his wife. They were arrested later for attempted home invasion and conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to prison.

Most people are harmless and many are kind, but we mustn’t forget there are predators everywhere - always have been - and the human variety is the most dangerous. Thank God these two young men happened to be stupid predators or my elderly neighbors would have died. Ever since, I’ve kept a loaded pistol within reach and encouraged my wife to learn to shoot with it. I’ve always had rifles and a shotgun around, but they’re bulky and not well suited to handle something like a home invasion. People have to be ready to defend themselves because police can’t be everywhere.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” as Thomas Jefferson said, and that applies to us as individuals as well as nations. Our freedom and our very existence depend on readiness to fight whenever necessary. What troubles me lately is that most Americans seem to have forgotten this, if they ever knew it. Our country has changed. We’ve elected a President and a Congress who believe it’s possible to discuss our way out of any potential conflict. They believe criminal predators among us are victims of poverty, poor childhoods, severe toilet training, or whatever, and that police and the courts should be the only ones to deal with them and citizens should be disarmed. They apply similar skewed logic to international relations, believing the United States has oppressed other countries and that’s why they hate us and attack us. They think that if we just make nice, conflict can be avoided.

They place more confidence in United Nations resolutions than the United States military, and the human predators out there in the wide world know this very well. They don’t understand that we must be strong and ready to fight at all times, and if we are, it’s less likely that we’ll have to do so. However, our president goes around the world apologizing for our past use of force and promising to set limits on how we’ll use it in the future. Our military wants to pass out medals for not shooting the enemy instead of killing them. We still have by far the strongest military the world has ever known but we seem to lack the will to use it, and our enemies sense that. Violent conflict therefore becomes more likely, rather than less.

Should these trends continue, we’ll have to again learn the hard way that weakness, real or perceived, is a bigger threat to peace and freedom than strength.

Jews Will Not Go Meekly To Slaughter Again

While I was in Israel three years ago, Hamas took over control of the Gaza Strip. Israel had pulled out two years earlier, and the fight was between two Palestinian terrorist groups: Fatah and Hamas. Our Palestinian guides advised us to call home and tell relatives we were okay because there was widespread media coverage of the fighting and they would be worried about us. We were about thirty miles from the fighting at the time and safe enough. Every since, Hamas has been shooting rockets into Israel from Gaza daily. Israel sends fuel and electricity into Gaza, yet Israel is the villain and Hamas the victim in the eyes of the world. It’s Theatre of the Absurd in the mainstream media.

There are 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel and 5.5 million Jews and I was struck by contrasts. Jewish towns and cities are orderly, blooming and booming. Arab towns and cities are strewn with trash, graffiti and idleness.Palestinian Town in Israel

The contrast is even sharper in the mostly-Muslim West Bank. It’s a microcosm for the entire Arab Middle East. With huge deposits of oil and the trillions of petrodollars for Arab countries, they remain primitive. Yet, with no oil, industrious Jews from around world have made the desert bloom in Israel. They’ve built a thriving economy, and fought off three invasions by much larger, fanatic, Arab-Muslim neighbors. It’s the ultimate humiliation to have tiny Israel existing in their midst and providing a constant contrast to their backwardness. Rather than taking lessons for their own improvement, they hate Israel with a passion and rabidly plot its destruction.Arab East Jerusalem

When I’m teaching about the Arab Muslim invasions of 1948, 1967 and 1973 to my US History classes, I tell students to imagine a kindergarten kid waiting alone at a bus stop and being jumped three times by several large, high-school boys. Imagine how the big boys feel after the kindergarten kid thrashes them single-handedly all three times. Their humiliation is unbearable and it’s their own fault.

There can be no such thing as a peace process in Israel without the destruction of Israel’s enemies. Neither Fatah nor Hamas wants a Palestinian State. Palestinians want Israel gone and they’re willing to play victim poster-children for the wider Islamic world’s propaganda against Israel and the United States.After the 1967 invasion, Israel took territory from Egypt, Syria and Jordan as buffers against future invasions - including the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In the Camp David agreement, Egypt took back the Sinai in return for recognizing Israel’s right to exist, but didn’t really want Gaza. Nobody does. It’s an insane asylum full of Palestinians who have been indoctrinated since infancy with hatred of Jews and groomed to become “shahids”: suicide bombers. Israel pulled out in 2005 but terrorism increased. So much for leftist claims that Israel’s occupation is the cause of Palestinian terrorism.

After years of daily rocket attacks against its civilian population, Israel went back into Gaza to take out launch sites, which Hamas puts in or near schools and hospitals. Palestinian terrorists hide behind children, but the UN ignores this and instead investigates Israel for war crimes if civilians are killed.Hamas is a terrorist proxy for Iran, who supplies the rockets raining on Israel, and who promises to wipe Israel off the map. The United Nations does nothing as Iran builds the nuclear weapons with which to perpetrate a second Holocaust while denying the first ever happened. Under the noses of UN “peacekeeping” forces, Iran supplies Hezbollah with rockets and other weapons in southern Lebanon that are periodically shot at northern Israeli civilians. Why we continue to support an inept and corrupt organization like the United Nations, I cannot fathom.

Israel’s strategy now is to blockade Gaza to prevent Hamas from importing more Iranian rockets but Turkey, which had hitherto been the most supportive of Muslim countries toward Israel, is now leading the effort to break the blockade. There’s been a profound policy shift in Turkey’s relations with Israel. Looks like the Turks have stopped westernizing and, by demonizing Israel, are allying with Syria and Iran. Not good for regional stability.

According to its own charter, Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and killing all Jews, yet Turkey’s President Erdogan insists Hamas is not a terrorist organization. The man has no credibility, but he’s a hero in the eyes of the American and European left and their media sycophants. Meanwhile, President Obama has shined up to Hamas. He’s obsequious with Iran, and he’s distancing himself from Israel.

Israel has faced existential threats since its birth in 1948 and met them head on. It will meet today’s threats and tomorrow’s as well. Israel will do what it must to survive. A preemptive strike against Iran - with nuclear weapons - is a very real possibility. This is a nation founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. Israel’s Jews will not submit meekly to slaughter again.

Deadly Infection

Only recently have I become aware of the depths to which political correctness has permeated our culture. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad. It’ll be the ruin of us if we don’t kill it and comb its nits out of our hair.
I began to get a clue at a private reception for Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders in Washington last February. After Wilders was escorted out by his bodyguards (radical Muslims ordered him killed for making a movie called “Fitna.”), I found myself in extended conversation with a young Defense Department analyst who had been tasked by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to research and report on the ideology of our radical Muslim enemies. He immersed himself in Islamic law and came to the conclusion that it’s the radical Muslims who appear to have the doctrinal base in Islam, not the moderates.

He said that most of the highest officials at the Pentagon rejected his brief. Then they rejected the young man himself - and that was during the Bush Administration. The Pentagon, he said, “as an institution,” wanted to believe that the Radical Muslim interpretation of jihad, which is holy war against infidels worldwide - convert them or kill them, was an aberration.

I had hitherto believed that our National Security planners knew the threat, but were just being polite in their public statements. Not so, according to my young friend. Radical Muslims posing as moderates had more influence with Pentagon planners than he did, he told me. It was their advice the Pentagon was heeding. I’m withholding his name because that’s how he apparently wants it at this point. Last week he was interviewed by Bill Whittle of Pajamas TV (Go here, then click on "The Islamic Infiltration, Part 1") and appeared only in silhouette as he told his story.

Next, Whittle interviewed a former FBI special agent (also a silhouette) who spent most of his fifteen-year career working on the Islamic movement in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic doctrine. He said our Department of Homeland Security is being advised by people from the Council for American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The trouble is, he claims they’re a front for Hamas - a Radical Islamic organization. The Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America - ISNA - a huge financial entity for Hamas in the United States.”

A little background for readers: The Muslim Brotherhood, according to author Robert Spencer, spawned both Hamas and al Qaeda. Khalid Sheik Muhammed, who planned the September 11th attacks for al Qaeda and goes on trial in New York City soon, belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now back to the anonymous FBI agent in Whittle’s interview: “CAIR and ISNA (both closely affiliated with Hamas),” he said, “are the two groups that DOD, DHS, the State Department all use to do their Muslim outreach in North America. “They sit in on brainstorming about investigative techniques that our agents are using in the field.”

“I have to stop you,” said Whittle, “because, frankly, that sounds so absurd that I have to really make sure I’m understanding you correctly. Are you saying that the radicalized Muslim groups are invited in to learn our investigative techniques, that they’re invited in to get their feedback on how we’re going to fight against them. Is that what I understood you to say?”

“Yes,” he answered. “The General Counsel of the FBI invites them in as well as the ACLU and other groups in [to make sure that whatever our government agencies did] was okay and not offensive to these organizations.  . . . that’s nothing short of outrageous.”

“So you’re giving away the farm in order to make sure their feelings don’t get hurt,” said Whittle.

Evidently, political correctness could be fatal.

“There’s no training for local law enforcement officials about the real nature of the threat,” said the agent. “The training they get is given by agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“How did this happen?” asked Whittle. “How did [it] get this far?”

“The Muslim Brotherhood has a long-term strategy,” said the agent. “They’re well organized with hundreds of front groups that support their public relations, their research arms, they have insinuated themselves into our largest universities. They have Muslim Student Associations (MSA), which is [sic] the first Muslim Brotherhood organization that formed in the United States in 1963. MSA is on every major college campus in the United States recruiting people to the Brotherhood on our own campuses.”

No wonder we haven’t captured Osama Bin Laden after eight years.

When we know how closely foxes are consulted on the design our National Security chicken coop, we can begin to understand why our Commander-in-chief said he wasn’t sure Fort Hood’s Major Hasan was a radical Muslim after he shot more than forty of our soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar!” or why he said the Christmas Pantybomber was “an isolated extremist.” We can understand why he won’t call this a war with Radical Islam and instead refers to it as “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

Radical Muslims are fanatic, yes, but they understand us better than we understand ourselves. They know we’re so infected with political correctness that we’re more afraid of offending them than we are of losing a war to them.

Too Late?

A guy I know - a former soldier with several tours in the Middle East - told me he didn’t want his son to fight over there, and that surprised me. I asked if it was the military’s rules of engagement and he just smirked. “Well why then?” He was silent again, looking into space while he thought about it. Finally he said he wasn’t sure Americans wanted to win. “Hmm,” I said. It was time for me to pause. He stated what I had been thinking lately, but was afraid to say out loud.

Some of us want to win, but a lot of us don’t. “Our leaders are a reflection of our culture,” my friend said, “and our culture wants our soldiers to fight without hurting anybody.” That’s impossible, of course, but it does seem to be what too many Americans want - and our elected leaders are willing to pretend it’s possible. So we send our finest young men to fight with one arm tied behind their backs because of our asinine rules of engagement. Our soldiers cannot shoot until the bad guys shoot at them first.

Fifty-three percent of us elected a president last fall who thinks he can talk our enemies into liking us. Since his inauguration, he’s traveled the world bowing to foreign leaders and apologizing for America when there’s nothing to apologize for. He says the War on Terror is over and what we’ve got now are “Overseas Contingency Operations,” whatever the hell that means.

His interview with ABC News last July is instructive:

ABC’S TERRY MORAN: Define victory in Afghanistan, or maybe that’s not the right word.
OBAMA: I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

What would be wrong with that? If you ask me, it would be wonderful to see Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashir Assad, Mullah Omar, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of our enemies lined up to sign unconditional surrenders. Is President Obama forgetting that he’s our Commander-in-Chief? We have a C in C who doesn’t want to even say victory? I want one who’ll settle for nothing less.

Meanwhile, all that bowing and groveling doesn’t seem to be working very well. Iran - the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism - burned Obama in effigy during their annual “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” festival. One of our own army officers shot dozens of American infidels at Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and our president wasn’t even sure he was a terrorist. A wealthy, British-educated, young Nigerian tried to blow up an American passenger plane with 289 people, Obama called him a “suspect” and an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly” tried to set off a device, as if the terrorist were entitled to the same rights American citizens are. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said: “the system has worked really very, very smoothly” and there was “no indication of a larger terror plot.” As if there were no connection between all the RADICAL MUSLIM terrorists who’ve been attacking Americans, Israelis, British, Spanish, Russians, and others for decades.

So many of us are so infected with political correctness, we go to astonishing lengths to avoid calling our enemy by its name. So indoctrinated with self-hating, leftist propaganda about the evils of western civilization are we that we think it’s no wonder they hate us and want to kill us.

An increasing number of Americans don’t want to do what it takes to win because they don’t believe our way of life is worth fighting for. They don’t believe America is unique. Their brains are so addled with multicultural malarkey, they think all countries and all cultures are equal - even if they enslave women, kill homosexuals, execute anyone who converts to another religion, and continually promise to kill anyone who isn’t like them - it doesn’t make them bad people. They’re just another part of the wonderfully diverse human family and should be celebrated like any other part, including ours.

And now we’ve installed an entire national government with that world view. How do you like the way they’re functioning so far America? Do you feel safe?

Just as the leaders we elect are a reflection of us, so are our children. A fellow teacher asked his writing students recently if the America was the best country in the world and most didn’t think so. I teach the same kids, and when I asked them which country was better they looked at me blankly. They couldn’t name one. They just parroted the diversity doo-doo they were raised with.

This is what America is becoming. Is it too late for us? Are we going to lose?

Question Reality?

“I wasn’t talking.”

“Hmm. Your lips were moving. Sound was coming out. The person you were facing was looking at you and nodding, but you weren’t talking?”

“No.”

“So, I should believe you, and not my own eyes and ears?”

“Whatever.”

That word is telling. It’s what we’re left with when we deny objective reality. Anyone can talk in my class, but only one at a time and only on the subject. Using the Socratic method, that’s how it has to be. I gave him a consequence and moved on, but I was troubled by his nonchalant denial of the obvious because I’m seeing it around me more and more. Either the world is getting crazy or I am. Once I saw a bumper sticker saying “Question Reality” and I laughed, but I don't think it's funny anymore.

Objective reality hard to perceive exactly sometimes, but we have to believe it exists or we can’t function. It can be fun to question it and consider that everything is relative during late-night bull sessions, but if we pretend objective reality doesn’t exist, we’ll suffer painful consequences. General Custer discovered this when he ignored reports that thousands of warriors could be just over the hill. “Whatever,” he thought, and ordered an attack. Denial of objective reality is most dangerous during wartime and that’s exactly what our president, his party, and the mainstream media are doing by denying the obvious: that the Fort Hood massacre was an act of Radical Muslim terrorism. After September 11th and all that’s happened since, it astonishes me to see Americans are nodding at their ludicrous claims that Major Hasan was really suffering from vicarious PTSD while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as he mowed down our soldiers. That he contacted al Qaeda twenty times and asked what he could do to further the jihad and told fellow doctors: “Infidels should have their throats cut,” and “non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats” is not evidence of Islamofascism, but symptomatic of second-hand stress from counseling returning soldiers.

Whatever.

In education, I’m accustomed to the constant drone of “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” but in our military too? According to Army Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters, “A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers' promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don't call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn't hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It's almost impossible for the Army's politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician. Sen. Joe Lieberman . . . needs to call the officers who sat on Hasan's promotion board before the Senate, put them under oath, then ask if Hasan made major because of minority-quota requirements.”

According to Obama’s Army Chief of Staff General Casey, however: “[A]s horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Incredible.

We are most definitely at war, but it’s not like World Wars I & II. It’s not like Korea or Vietnam either. It’s unique. According to some analysts, we’ve been at it since Iran took over our embassy in 1979. That was the first offensive action by Radical Muslims against us, and there have been many since. We were broken out of our denial by the September 11th attacks, but we’re crawling right back into it by pretending our enemies are nothing but common criminals to be handled in the court system. Khalid Sheik Muhammad and the other defendants who planned and carried out September 11th have already admitted their culpability and asked to be executed, but President Obama insists they be tried in a New York City courtroom instead of being lined up and shot as many of us would wish.

President Clinton treated the 1993 World Trade Center attack, killing six, as a criminal matter instead of an act of war and that was a big mistake. It was attacked again in 2001, killing 3000. In the interim, there were attacks on our embassies in Africa, killing twelve, on American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen, and on the USS Cole in 2000, killing nineteen. Rather than learn from Clinton’s blunders, though, Obama is repeating them.

Radical Islam resurrected itself with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and it’s goal has been to reunite Islam with government. There had been a separation of church and state (or church and mosque) in the countries of the Muslim world after years of European influence in the region and the Muslim Brotherhood would reunite the two. By 1979, Iran had declared itself an Islamic Republic and started attacking the west immediately, especially the United States. Osama Bin Laden declared war on us in 1996. Then Iran did in 2006. Both have attacked and killed Americans by the hundreds in the case of Iran and in the thousands in the case of Bin Laden.

Bush called it the “War on Terror.” That’s a misnomer because terror is a tactic, not an entity, but Bush was reticent about calling our enemy by its name: Radical Islam. That was bad enough, but the linguistic contortions the Obama government is willing to make are astounding. It dropped “War on Terror” in favor of “Overseas Contingency Operations,” whatever the hell that means, and his Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, now calls attacks of Islamic terrorism like September 11th “Man-caused Disasters.”

Whatever.

After President Obama suspends our “Overseas Contingency Operations” as he seems about to do, the next “Man-caused disaster” we experience at the hands of these “criminals” could produce not only political and economic fall-out, but also the radioactive variety.

What's In A Name?

“Maine.” It’s the answer I give when traveling and people ask where I come from. If they know Maine, they ask “What part?”

“Lovell,” I answer, then wait for signs of recognition that almost never come. “Near Fryeburg?” Some have heard of Fryeburg. “Near the New Hampshire border in the mountains,” I add.“Ah,” they respond and let it drop.

We don’t know for sure where the word “Maine” comes from, but “Lovell” and “Fryeburg” (where I teach) originate in conflict between English and French colonists and Indian tribes allied to each. Lovell is named for Captain John Lovewell of Dunstable, Massachusetts, who led a group of English colonists to what is now Fryeburg in 1725 to kill Pequawket Indians living there - in retaliation for their raids on Massachusetts towns. “Fryeburg” is named for Colonel Joseph Frye of Andover, Massachusetts. He was another militiaman who fought Indians, French colonists, and regular units of the French Army. One battle was in 1745 at Fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where I visited two weeks ago.It was one of only two walled cities on the continent of North America, the other being Quebec, and 20% of it has been rebuilt by the Canadian government. Begun in 1961, Fortress Louisbourg’s reconstruction is the meticulous result of extensive archaeological and historical research. Visitors are challenged by an armed sentry at Dauphin Gate, the landward entrance. He, like everyone else who works there, speaks in the character of an actual individual living there in 1744. All have extensive knowledge of life there, in that year, from his/her character’s point of view. Every building on the site is a full-scale model of the one it replaced in situ. It’s a very impressive national, historic park and I advise anyone visiting the area to take it in if you can. A tour takes at least a full day, and I could easily have spent a week.There are three operating restaurants - two lower-class and one upper-class - and advertise themselves as such. Being a lower-class person, I naturally visited my appropriate eating establishment although the only utensil we got was a large tablespoon - no knife and no fork. Only the upper-class restaurant supplied those. The menu is also from 1744 and I ordered French toast. My wife ordered vegetable soup and both were delicious.

Although Fortress Louisbourg rivaled Gibraltar in its heyday, it was taken by New England militiamen who, like Frye, were mostly from Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a part. Louisbourg was a threat militarily and economically. France was encouraging its Abenaki (of which tribe Fryeburg’s Pequawkets were a part) Indian allies to attack British colonists and they did so savagely - killing, carrying off captives, and taking scalps. Portland, Scarborough, York, Andover, Dunstable and Deerfield were all attacked. Settlers were reluctant to venture any further into the interior as a result. There were wider-world influences on these local events too: France and England were struggling for control of the North American continent, and the Reformation played a part also. France and its Indian allies were Roman Catholic while the British were protestant.

Control of the codfishing industry was the primary economic factor. I had little idea how lucrative that fishery was until my visit. Cod can be preserved by drying and salting more readily than other species and Louisbourg’s location was strategic as the northernmost ice-free harbor near the best fishing grounds. Many of Boston’s richest families made their fortunes in the cod fishery and were rivals with the French for its control. More than 70% of the European fish diet was cod - mostly because of the Catholic ban against eating meat on Fridays or during Lent.

Louisbourg guarded the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence where France’s principal colonies were, as well as the primary cod-fishing grounds. So, Massachusetts colonists were doubly determined to take it. This was accomplished by attacking it from the landward side where it was weakest because the fortress was designed to prevent attack by sea.

Joseph Frye’s cousin Benjamin was shot and killed during the 1745 siege, one of about a hundred men lost. The French lost 53. Another 800 Massachusetts colonials died the following winter from sickness, however, and there’s a lonely mass grave further out on the point commemorating them. Their survivors were appalled when the British gave the fortress back to the French three years later. In 1758, Louisbourg was taken again by General James Wolfe, then totally destroyed.

Effects of the protracted struggle between France and England, played out here in western Maine and all of northeastern North America, are felt profoundly to this day. Indeed, it led directly to the American Revolution only twelve years after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763 to end it. I’ve come to believe we don’t understand ourselves as Americans well enough unless we understand something about that conflict.

Taking the Pulse

The first I ever heard of “Electro-Magnetic Pulse” or EMP was twenty years ago when the Pentagon wanted to build a series of low-frequency AM radio towers - one of them a few miles from my house in the cornfields of North Fryeburg, Maine. In case our enemies exploded a nuclear device high in our atmosphere and fried all electronic communications, the towers would survive and allow our forces to orchestrate a counterattack. The Pentagon called the system “GWEN,” or Ground Wave Emergency Network.

At the time, I was still transitioning from liberal to conservative and reflexively questioned the wisdom of expenditures on anything related to nuclear warfare. I knew nothing about AM radio waves except that they faded out while driving under a bridge. Twenty years hence, that’s still about the extent of my knowledge, except that I now listen regularly to conservative talk radio on that band. No tower went up in North Fryeburg, but the GWEN system was built in the rest of the country.

In an informative article about the EMP threat, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy quoted a congressionally-mandated report that a small nuke, detonated high above the USA, would have a “high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation.”

Catastrophic. They didn’t overstate it. Right now, I’m near the end of a novel by William R. Forstchen called “One Second After,” and it’s scaring me. Forstchen specializes in military history and the history of technology, and he paints a bleak picture of a post-EMP America.

There would be no electronic communication. Information would travel by word of mouth, just like in the 18th century. There would be no electricity. Cars, trucks, trains would just stop. Only antique vehicles would run - those built before electronic ignition systems. Planes would fall out of the sky. There would be no refrigeration, no freezers. After a week or so, food not canned or dried would spoil. Animals dependent on grain trucked in would starve too. America’s abundant food supply could not be distributed without trucks or trains. People would have to make due with what they had stored up. Hog farms without grain shipments would have a lot of dead hogs or the surrounding area would have a lot of wild ones.

Pacemakers would stop. Diabetics would run out of insulin. People on anti-depressants or anti-psychotics would run out of meds. Hospitals and nursing homes couldn’t function. Within a couple of months, there would be huge die-offs. Refugees would roam and compete for dwindling food supplies. State and federal government could not function. Prisons would have to either execute their inmates or release them. All government would be local, and would likely rule by martial law if there were any law at all.

With a forward by former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “One Second After” makes the plausible case that, after an EMP, America would be sent back to the Middle Ages. How vulnerable is the United States to EMP? The present nuclear nations would be unlikely to attack this way because we would hit right back and they’re as vulnerable as we are. So where would a threat likely come from?

Let’s see. There are at least two whack-jobs running countries today, and they both hate the United States. Both are developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them. The first is Kim Jong Il of North Korea. According to a Salon.com article from 2003:

Kim Jong Il likes Daffy Duck and fast cars, and before he became North Korea's dictator he wanted to be a film producer. He was born on the peak of a sacred mountain, he says, and his birth was attended by thunder and lightning. . . . While his famine-starved people eat tree bark to ease their hunger, he dines on steak and cognac in the company of the "Pleasure Squad" -- a variety pack of imported blondes and Asian beauties.

A 2000 Time article echoes those claims. Last week Kim successfully tested a nuke bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, and he’s been regularly test-firing missiles capable of delivering it.

The second whack-job is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. At two speeches to the UN General Assembly, he invoked the “Mahdi” whom Allah has been keeping alive in an Iranian well for over a 1000 years. Radical Shiites believe Ahmadinejad can bring the Mahdi out of the well by causing chaos on earth, and that’s what he’s planning to do. While we have Fourth of July parades here, in Iran they chant “Death to America” and flog themselves bloody with chains.

Meanwhile, President Obama spends trillions on social welfare and “infrastructure,” much of it electronic. Then he cut funding for anti-missile defense systems which could prevent just such an EMP attack by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. Soon, each will have the capability of wiping out all that new infrastructure, and more, in one second - if they don’t have it already.

Defiance

We’re all going to die. Yup, it’s true. And before we die, we’re going to pay taxes. Those realities haven’t changed since Benjamin Franklin pointed them out more than two centuries ago. We’re all going to die of something, but it probably won’t be swine flu, or H1N1, or whatever you want to call it. And it won’t be global warming, or climate change, or whatever Al Gore or the New York Times are calling it lately either. The only uncertainties about dying are the when and the how. I don’t want to know those things for myself, any more than I wanted to know the sex of my children before they were born. I can wait. Given my druthers though, I’d prefer to eat a well-prepared dinner, drink good wine, make love, go to sleep, and then wake up dead when I’m in my eighties and in otherwise good shape. If that kind of demise isn’t fated for me, then I’d just hope to live my own way - do and say whatever I believe to be right until the day comes. Then I want to die defiantly. Meanwhile, I want to see, smell, hear, feel, taste, and try to understand why everything is the way it is. I never will, of course, but it’s great when I get a clue here and there.

One clue I’m getting is that there are genuine threats out there, but it baffles me that we instead become obsessed about nebulous ones like avian flu, swine flu, and global warming. The two most glaring examples of real threats would have to be Radical Muslims and nuclear weapons. The two are about to come together in both Pakistan and Iran. If they’re not stopped, their first targets are likely to be Israel, the US, Europe, or India. Only the US would be out of missile range, but that our enemies could smuggle a nuclear weapon into one of our cities and detonate it is a distinct possibility - a likelihood even - according to former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former UN Ambassador John Bolton. Even if most of us here in the United States are oblivious to these threats, the citizens of Israel are anything but.

Real threats of mass death are quite real to them, and have been for millennia. Israel’s re-creation as a nation-state in 1948 is direct result of the biggest mass murder in recorded history. I’m speaking of the Holocaust, of course. Recognizing this, Iran is doing everything it can to de-legitimize Israel as a country before destroying it. Hence the conferences sponsored by President Ahmadinejad inviting anti-Semites from around the world to argue that the Holocaust never happened.

After several years with the wussy Ehud Olmert, Israel just elected a Prime Minister with fortitude. Benjamin Netanyahu understands clearly that Iran will destroy his country and kill its citizens if he doesn’t strike first, so he will. For years, his country has been rocketed nearly every day by Iran-sponsored terrorists. To Israel’s north, there’s Hezbollah in Lebanon. To the southwest, there’s Hamas in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Olmert made half-hearted attempts to deal with those threats during his tenure, but he lacked the resolve to do what Israel must do if it’s going to survive - attack Iran’s nuclear facilities directly.

The Muslim countries around it want Israel gone. They’ve invaded three times in Israel’s sixty-year history and President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that he will wipe Israel off the map. The lessons of history are not lost on Israel. It exists as a nation so it can field a military capable of defending itself against those who would destroy it and Adolph Hitler taught them they must take such threatening rhetoric seriously.

Iran said it will block the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf if either the US or Israel strikes. If we think the world economy is in bad shape now, wait until the Persian Gulf is shut down for even a few months. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline will seem cheap. Those of us who remember the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s know that, at times, it won’t be available at any price. Would that precipitate a world depression? Indeed, but even that would the least of our difficulties. A wider war in the Middle East with mushroom clouds is the worst case scenario.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, we wring our hands about carbon emissions and gay “marriage,” believing our smooth-talking president will diffuse it all by schmoozing Radical Muslim dictators the way he did the American electorate. Israelis, however, know better. If there’s to be another Holocaust with mushroom clouds,they’re not going to go as lambs to the slaughter like they did in the first one.

No. They’ll go defiantly this time.