Bush not aggressive enough in war on terror?

A new Fox News Opinion Poll shows that 41% of Americans think President George W. Bush has NOT been aggressive enough in fighting terrorists,, while 24% think he has been too aggressive. Just over half (51 percent) support the U.S. war in Iraq and 44 percent oppose it. 'There is a 58-point gap between the level of support for the war among Republicans (84 percent) and Democrats (26 percent).' source

I want to provide some opinion pieces for you on Iraq, the overall war on terror, war in general, and the history of world war and the United States.

Weaponizing Civilization: The New Way of War, by Raymond Kraft

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

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

The soft underbelly of America in particular and Western Civilization in general is that it has become so excessively nice and decent and civilized that it is now loathe to rise to its own self-defense, loathe to kill civilians when necessary, loath to cause "collateral damages," loathe to fight and defeat other countries, even when its own survival is at stake.

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

Historical Review Of Iraq Situation by Raymond S. Kraft

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs. They believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world; that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say. [snip]

We have to help the Reformation win. To do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it everywhere at once ,so we have created a focal point for the battle. Now. At the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin. In Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is or was a terrorist, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad guys there. The ones we kill there we won't have to kill here, or somewhere else. We have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed. (more)

Why We Are In Iraq Part II, By Raymond S. Kraft

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

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

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

We must learn to think like an Arab Muslim (if we are going to win the war on terror)

Know your emeny has long been a rule of winning any conflict, so we must ask ourselves "do we really understand Muslim Arabs?" Edward V. Badolato, a retired U.S. Marine Colonel, tries to help with that understanding in a 'white paper' he wrote titled, "Learning to Think like an Arab Muslim: a Short Guide to Understanding the Arab Mentality".

As Americans we share Col. Badolato's question of, "Why would people who believe they have the one, true religion, not hesitate to blow up mosques and other holy places? Why would they attack weddings and funerals? Why is beheading so popular among terrorists? Why would a few cartoons set off rioting and killing? And what does all this mean to us in terms of the threat it represents?" He attempts to answer this question with a little background. [snip]

Arab Muslims and presumably others because Islam has more than a billion adherents, divide the world between themselves and what they call Dar al Harb, literally, “the world of war.” So, you are either a Muslim or you are an infidel and, by definition, a threat to Islam until you convert or are killed. source by Alan Caruba

An Unnecessary War?

Lessons
World War II offers invaluable lessons for those who profess to love liberty. A few of them are:

1. Treaties—unless the enforcing nations are willing to step up and pay the price of enforcement when treaties (or UN resolution) are violated, they should not enter into them. This must be a long-lasting commitment.
2. Sanctions—are useful only in the short term and are nearly impossible to enforce over the long haul. They cannot be counted on to keep dictators and tyrants in check.
3. Diplomacy—is useless without backing of sufficient force and the resolve to use it, despite the risks that such action may bring . Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” principle applies.
4. Military force—must be available in sufficient quantity and quality (especially in terms of readiness and flexibility). The idea that a democracy should disarm after a war ends is tantamount to disaster, because peace is, in reality, only the time between wars in which the enemies of liberty re-arm to threaten again.
5. Pacifism—specifically, the unwillingness to fight for liberty—does not stem aggression. On the contrary, as history has shown, it invites aggression. Whether or not one lives in harmony with family, neighbors and co-workers has no influence over tyrants who want us subservient or dead.
6. Security threats—much has been made to the effect that we acted prematurely against Saddam because he did not pose an imminent threat. But history shows that waiting until a threat is imminent is tantamount to surrender.. (more) --Theodore L. Reinhart, 01 September 2006

We report, you decide.
__________________________________________________________________
Linked with
123Beta

Comments

[Debbie]

Yes guys, what a missed opportunity. All those dictators together in one spot, and not a an armed drone in site, heh.

[Butch]

tb's still not working.

But you know me, I'll keep on trying!

And I'm with Mass repub...We could have 'neutralized' a whole bunch of 'em while they were in Cuba.

[massachusetts republican]

I guess that I am an American Extremist. I think we should blow up all our enemies.