One man who has a better grasp of the issue (see previous post) than most of the jaw flappers I’ve seen on TV today is Newt Gingrich. He gave a major speech today, trying to call for a discussion and restating of the whole Iraq war/Islamic threat.
..Six years after the attack of 9/11/2001 we are having the wrong debate about the wrong report.
We need to see the Iraq war as a piece of a much larger conflict. The Democrats want to compartmentalize everything, keeping 9/11 separate from Iraq, Iraq separate from Afghanistan, Israel and the Middle East separate from all of it, and the threat of terror separate from Islam. With the willing acceptance of the media to go along with that, and the leaderlessness of the current GOP, this country is missing the big picture. Did you hear the assessment of CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden last Friday, September 7, before the Council on Foreign Relations? Oh, right, nobody said anything about it on the news.
..We who study and target the enemy see a danger more real than anything our citizens at home have confronted since our Civil War….
This war is different. In a very real sense, anybody who lives or works in a major city is just as much a potential target as the victims of 9/11, or the London subway bombings, or the strikes in Madrid, or any of the other operations we’ve seen in Morocco, Jordan, Indonesia, Algeria, Pakistan, Kenya, and elsewhere.
Newt’s speech today talks about General Petraeus and Iraq, as a campaign in this much broader war, and I believe he has it right.
..Iraq has to be analyzed as only one campaign in this larger war. It is a very important campaign and it deserves thorough consideration but it should not be confused with the larger war.
As to Iraq, General Petraeus is as good an expert on counterinsurgency as America has produced in our lifetime.
The American team in Iraq has done an extraordinary job in the last few months in finally establishing the right approach and implementing the right tactics.
The results are impressive and worthy of our continued support.
Furthermore, on both moral and practical grounds it would be extraordinarily destructive for the American Congress to impose surrender and defeat on the United States by legislation which the enemy has been unable to impose by combat against our armed forces.
Right on, right on, right on (my emphasis). But Iraq is not the whole picture. In one respect, the Leftists in this country have it right, and that is that Iraq (itself) is no threat to America. They aren’t paying attention though. The real threat is from the spread of true and literal belief in the teachings of Islam. And it is this threat that Gingrich takes up in a large piece of his speech. In true “Newt the College Professor” style (which I happen to like) he gives us a history lesson about strong American leaders, the war challenges they faced, and how they came through. He goes on to envision a set of “what if” happenings for the aftermath of 9/11. I think he’s on the right track, and I’m not going to slam him with the old ‘hindsight is 20/20′ crap, because in this context it is useful. Where are we today, how did we get here, what could we have done better, and does that give us clues to how to proceed? That is a tried and true formula for getting on the right track, and I can hear the Leftists screeching about it already. Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d had this scenerio 6 years ago?
..an all out effort would have to be made to educate them about the dangers (nuclear and biological attacks, large scale civilian attacks) and the motivating forces behind those dangers.
As a result, the history of terrorism and violence in Lebanon, Algeria and against Israel became major topics for congressional hearings, for news media specials and for textbooks for high school and college. There were a series of Hollywood films and made for television films explaining the enemy and the scale of hatred and planning for violence against civilians. The Algerian experience of 100,000 killed in the 1990s was especially studied for its lessons about Muslim versus Muslim violence, which sharply curtailed the claims of those who typically blamed Israel as so many American and European elites tended to do in the 1990s. The Syrian and Iranian involvement in terrorism in Lebanon was highlighted to emphasize the duration of attacks on Americans going back to 1979 and the ruthless intervention against efforts to create democracy.
Our enemies’ religious-political motivation leading to the repression of women, the killing of homosexuals, the violent repression of religious liberty, the elimination of free speech and a free press, and the replacement of a just civil law with unjust religious law were all emphatically placed before the American public. A special effort was made to reach out to the advocacy groups of the Left for whom in many ways these threats were the most intense.
We could have used some of that. We could use it today. Instead we get “religion of peace” and “General Betray Us” from our Leftists and our media… a pox on you all! The rest of Newt’s speech goes over so many things, and makes such great sense, especially considering that he seems to be one of the few grown ups trying to make himself heard here. Regardless your thoughts on the man, here is another must read for the day. This conversation is one that we as a Nation MUST have, before we lose anything else precious to us ALL.
..We still need a clear understanding of how much our enemies hate us, how hard they are working to defeat us, how serious and real their strategies are, and how much they rejoice when they find ways to attack us.
If they could acquire them, our enemies would not hesitate to use nuclear or biological weapons to kill millions of Americans. We fought for survival in the Civil War and World War Two. Our enemies have not yet made the situation dangerous enough so that most people understand that this is a battle of survival.
The question then for our generation is whether we can learn the lessons of history and understand that this is a battle for survival before we lose millions of Americans or whether we reject the lessons of history and only respond after the disaster.
The next year or two will be one of the most critical times in American history, not because of the possibilities of having a woman or a black man as President (America is smaller because some still sees things that way), but because we face a worldwide enemy that wants to eliminate all of us and our entire culture, and will use any means to accomplish that because they believe Allah has told them they must.
..At the end of the day are free people celebrating because the American people have sustained freedom against evil. Or, are violent, evil enemies of freedom celebrating because the Americans have been defeated?
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