Refusing to Learn from Our Mistakes as Iran's Ahmadinejad Acquires Nuclear Weapons
By Mary Mostert (06/20/08)
A symposium entitled 'The Place of the Surge in the War on Terror' was held at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Santa Barbara May 30-June 1. It needs to be read by every American, regardless of your current view about the war in Iraq. A transcript, which is 17 pages, is available in the June 19th edition of Front Page Magazine. In effect it is a report from a military perspective of the amazing success of the surge that took place in Iraq since last year and the almost totally unreported or understood threat we face from the ongoing threats of fascist governments we buy our oil from in the Middle East.
Caroline Glick, one speaker at the symposium, who has been working as a lecturer at the Israeli War Colleges in tactical warfare for the past five years grabbed my attention in her first sentence when she said:"Everybody's going to say the same thing, which is that one of the problems with the war in Iraq is that we're treating it as a war, as opposed to as a campaign in a larger war."
That is exactly what happened in the 1920s and 1930s when no one wanted to address the real situation facing the world due to Adolf Hitler and his philosophy and goals for Fascism and world domination which he outlined in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf. He wrote that " By no means" did he believe " in an equality of races, but along with their differences" he recognized "their higher or lesser value" and felt "obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe."
Hitler justified his the slaughter of Jews, Poles, Slavic races such as Serbs and Russians, and eventually Christians with that philosophy. Today we are currently buying 22% of the oil and gas we use in the USA from Middle Eastern nations with active terrorist campaigns directed against civilians in Israel, the USA and other nations, while the US Congress blocks access to our own vast resources in offshore and ANWAR oil and oil shale in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Think about that as you read the following from the symposium, and contemplate Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with nuclear weapons or check out Rep. Chris Cannon's (R-UT) recently introduced Oil Shale bill, HR 6211:
Caroline Glick: "I'm just going to give my perspective on it (the success of the Surge) from where I'm sitting, which is in Jerusalem, which is in my view, my informed view, the central front of this war, and the one that's been most ignored, and to our detriment -- and just talk for a second about what the situation is in Israel on the eve of the end of the surge in Iraq, which is that Israel is today surrounded by Iranian proxies on its southern and its northern border -- it's northern border both with Lebanon and with Syria.
"Iran itself, of course, is arming itself now with nuclear weapons that the head of Mossad thinks that it will have by next year. And Hezbollah and Syria both have missiles that are capable of reaching every spot in Israel. Syria has chemical weapons and biological weapons. And as we saw from last September, they also were developing nuclear capabilities with North Korean and Iranian assistance. Gaza is run by Hamas, which is also an Iranian proxy. And it's gaining force as well on the West Bank, which is run by the Israeli military.
"So Israel is probably in one of the worst military situations we've seen in recent years. Because of the way that the second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006 ended, Israel effectively lost its deterrent capacity against its enemies. Because it was unable to defeat Hezbollah -- which is simply an Iranian foreign legion in Lebanon -- or to prevent missiles from raining down on Northern Israel for the duration of that war.
"So Israel itself faces a very, very difficult situation. Every single day in Gaza that the Hamas regime is allowed to remain in power, the border between Hamas' Gaza and Egypt in the Sinai is being used as one of the main highways of terror traffic in the world. We see the armament going on inside of Gaza as something that is unprecedented.
"And we also have to remind ourselves that this was going on before Hamas took charge of Gaza, when it was under Fatah terror control until June of last year. Also, the Gaza-Egypt border was an active border for international terrorists and terror material.
"Hamas itself has built up an army. It has called it the Executive Force, but essentially it's an army to all intents and purposes. It has units that are formed up to -- I think it's now brigade level. And they're organized and trained by Iran, which also arms and finances them.
"So this is a new situation that we hadn't seen before in Gaza. Southern Israel is, as you know, daily attacked with missiles and mortars and rockets from Gaza. And the Israeli government is essentially doing nothing.
"So that's Israel's strategic situation -- the end of the surge. But to the military situation, you also have to add the diplomatic situation.
"From a diplomatic perspective, since the Palestinians began their jihad against Israel in September of 2000, Israel has never been in a worse situation diplomatically. We see that not only in Europe, but even here in the United States, you have educated, otherwise intelligent people discussing as a real possibility the prospect of America recognizing Hamas as a legitimate player, and having direct contact with Hamas, and accepting them as a legitimate player in Palestinian politics, such as they are. And this is in the United States.
"And of course in Israel, our radical Left also is saying, Well, since we can't make a deal with Fatah, because they're essentially been rejected by the Palestinians, we should be trying to cut a deal with Hamas.
"So we have both diplomatically, internationally, Israel is becoming more and more of a pariah state. You hear it accepted that, oh, it's okay to kill Jews, or, well, they just kill Jews, so it's not that big of a deal; they're not going after Americans, they're not going after Europeans, they're not even going after other Arabs. They're just killing Jews, and therefore they're not a terrorist organization.
"The EU, for instance, has never recognized Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and it is in fact a genocidal proxy of Iran, with a stated objective of annihilating the Jews and also calling for the death of the United States. But they're not a terrorist organization.
"And so we see this diplomatic isolation of Israel. We see this noxious form of anti-Semitism, of demonizing the Jewish state -- and essentially saying that it doesn't have any right to exist, and certainly not to defend itself -- being widely accepted in international circles, and also in widening circles in the United States, and not only on college campuses -- we were discussing this morning with the college kids -- but in general.
"We have demonization of Jews going on in this country, the likes of which I had never imagined could happen, with people not even blinking when they say that the media is controlled by Zionists, or Washington is controlled by Zionists. This is something that was not part of my experience growing up in this country. But it's much more prevalent now, and we all know that neo-conservativism is just another word for Judaism. So this is the situation in Israel and about Israel, regarding Israel, throughout the world.
"Now Gordon said correctly that one of the biggest problems that we've been having, what makes the surge so unique, is that since 2001 -- and in Israel's case, since 1993 -- we have simply not been willing to learn from our mistakes. We have simply not been able to learn from our experience. And that's why the surge is such a bright spot, because it is the only place in Iraq where the allies in this war have actually learned from their mis-moves in the past and moved on to essentially victory in that area of operations.
"But as regards Israel specifically, we see that people who, again, we generally consider to be smart, or to be authorities on international security or on the Middle East, or even on jihad -- people who write good books -- Lawrence Wright, for instance, who wrote "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" and others like that, who essentially, one would think, have got it pretty much right -- refuse to acknowledge Israel's position as a central front in this war. They insist on saying that the war against the Jews is sui generis, that it has nothing to do with anything happening to the United States, that terrorists who commit atrocities of mass murder against Jewish civilians in Israel are not really terrorists the way that we look at them. Because when we define terrorists, we're only referring to people who kill people who aren't Jews, or at least not specifically Jews.
"And this of course is, aside from being morally atrocious, is also strategically blind. Because the refusal to acknowledge Israel's central role in the war, for the jihadists themselves as they see it, is part and parcel with the overall denial, both, by the way, in Israel as well as outside of Israel of the nature of the war.
"And we just saw in the Financial Times this past week that one of the chief counter-terror officials in the Department of Homeland Security, I think it is, has railed against not the use of the term "jihad" or "radical Islam" to define the enemy, but actually he thinks that it's wrong to call the war a war on terrorism, because everybody knows that we're talking about Muslims, and they feel really bad about that.
"And so, you know, I suggested that perhaps we're supposed to be fighting a war against meanies, or something like that, but -- you know, people with bad table manners. But the problem is that when we look at this sea of denial, we understand that the refusal to acknowledge how vital Israel is as an ally in this war stands central to the entire denial. Because the minute that people acknowledge that the people who are attacking American forces abroad, that are attacking American civilians in the United States, that are trying to undermine the basis of the foundations of Western civilization, whether it's here or in Europe, are the exact same people who are trying to destroy Israel. The minute that we recognize that, we're going to actually have to acknowledge the nature of this war.
"That is, we're going to admitting that the people who are targeting Israel for annihilation are not doing it because you got 15 Jews living on an empty hillside in Samaria, but they're doing it because you have a million Jews who live in Tel Aviv and surrounding areas, or five million Jews in all of the state of Israel. The minute we acknowledge that they are part of the larger jihad, we're going to have to acknowledge that there is a jihad. And the minute that you acknowledge that, you actually have to put together a strategy for fighting and winning it.
"And since we don't want to do that, the most important thing of all for everybody who is preaching denial as a national security strategy for the United States, or for Europe or for Israel, is to pretend that the genocidal campaign that is being carried out against the Jewish state is all about the division, the proper division of the land of Israel between Arabs and Jews, when in fact it has never been about that. And it never will be about that. It is about the Arab world's rejection of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and to sovereignty in our homeland. And we refuse to recognize this because we don't want to fight.
"And so when I look ahead at where we're going, I'm not optimistic as I would like to be, simply because it never occurred to me that it could get this far along without the people who are in charge in Washington and in Israel and in other places saying to themselves, Gee, this isn't working anymore. And we have to stop pretending that we can attribute genocidal terrorism and ideologies to a lack of Palestinian statehood.
"It never occurred to me that we would be seven years out beyond 9/11, or eight years almost, without any acknowledgement of the central truth. So I think that things are just going to get worse until somebody finally wizens up. I simply hope that we wizen up before Iran has a chance to test their nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv."
The world had the same problem in the 1930s when they thought giving Hitler a bit of land here and there that he said he wanted would pacify him. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.
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