Identifying the real global enemy
By John David Powell (12/02/06)
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell this week found an ally in the War of Terminology. Powell believes a state of civil war exists in Iraq. NBC News stamped its imprimatur on the subject by declaring, after considerable research and consideration, that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.
The announcement looked every bit like an election-night declaration. “We can now say with certainty that Civil War has defeated Insurgency in the state of Iraq.†The only thing missing was a throw to a live shot from a Baghdad hotel for Insurgency’s concession speech.
President George W. Bush continues to call the violence an insurgency to justify our continued military presence. Recognizing civil war means a complete reevaluation of our mission with the immediate goal being to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible, ‘cause it ain’t our fight anymore.
Some will argue this is not a civil war, in the technical sense, because there is no struggle for political power, no organized military fighting one another, and no shadow governments. This is a naïve argument, at best. Radical factions among the Sunnis and Shiites constitute the warring political and military powers and the shadow(y) governments.
If political realities are not convincing, then the piles of dead, headless, or smoldering bodies should do the trick. The United Nations recently released a report that put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths in October at 3,709, compared to 3,590 in July. A BBC study said the number of civilian deaths between July 1, 2004, and Jan. 1, 2005, was around 6,500.
Sunnis and Shiites, back in Saddam's heyday, did not engage in the kind of carnage we see today. Saddam took their minds off killing each other because the Shiites and Kurds were too busy fending off his murdering goons.
Sunnis and Shiites started going at it with each other over who would succeed Muhammad. Sunnis took over governments and suppressed Shiites. Other than taking control of Iran about 500 years ago, Shiites have been out of the political or economic mainstream of the Arab world.
The West, and particularly the United States, finds itself in the middle of this centuries-old, religiously twisted version of a blood feud for the control of Islam, and, later, the world. Our presence gives both sides a common enemy and a great recruitment tool. It is easy to hate and to murder blindly when told God sanctions such acts against all infidels. One can imagine the imams and others telling their gullible followers that the biggest of all infidels wears red, white, and blue, and points his finger at them.
Psychopathic Sunni and Shiite thugs have no trouble identifying their enemies, which is why they are so good at murder and, yes, terror. It is because they have put faces on their enemies that they stand a very good chance of winning their wars.
Putting a face on the enemy is the key to winning any war. The West cannot even get its war right, much less identify its enemy. Make no mistake about it; we are not at war with terrorism. Terrorism is a means, a tool, a method used in a war of ideologies. Ideologies using terror range from white supremacy to anti-abortion to national independence to religious radical fundamentalism. Adherents to radical Islam use airplanes, car bombs, and beheadings as their tools of terrorism. Declaring a war on terrorism today makes as much sense as declaring a war on aviation after Pearl Harbor or declaring a war on fertilizer after Oklahoma City.
Our nation put a face on evil during the Second World War. It was a German face, it was an Italian face, and it was a Japanese face. This did not mean all Germans, Italians, and Japanese were evil or our enemies; only those who were killing us and other innocent people around the world in their attempts at world domination.
Today, millions of people in this country do not want to put a face on the evil that threatens them for fear they may offend someone. It is wrong to paint with the broad brush of blame members of a race, a political affiliation, an ethnicity, or a religion; but it is suicidal not to unmask the enemy who has sworn to kill you simply because of an unreasonable fear that an innocent person might get offended.
In many ways, we find ourselves in the middle of a twenty-first century knife fight, only instead of knives, the enemy wields weapons of mass destruction. There is a line from the film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" just before Butch kicks in the groin fellow Hole-in-the-Wall gang member Harvey Logan (in a fight for control of the gang). Right before he feels the tip of Butch's boot, Logan responds to Butch's comments about getting the knife-fight rules straightened out. Said Logan: "Rules? In a knife fight? No rules."
Only one rule exists in the war against radical Islam’s global hegemony: unveil the face of evil, or die.
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