Recently I found myself arguing with some woman who asked me to sign a “Stop the War” petition while I was in the village area of my hometown. On every corner the anti-war folks were staked out trying to collect signatures. When I told her I couldn’t wait for the war to begin, she asked, “So you want innocent people to die?”
“More than 3,000 innocent people have already died. Or have you forgotten September 11, 2001?” I replied. I resented her accusation that I was indifferent to the lives that surely will be lost when we attack Iraq. I resented that she was so indifferent to the many American and other lives that have already been lost to the fully declared holy war of Osama bin Laden, the Iranian ayatollahs, and others like Hamas.
She ignored the loss of the seventeen sailors aboard the USS Cole and the lives of those in US embassies that were blown up and our Marines who were killed with a car bomb in Lebanon. There are the lives lost when terrorists destroyed a barracks for our military in Saudi Arabia. There are the lives of innocent tourists, mostly Australians, in a Bali nightclub. There are the lives of Iranians pressed into war with Iraq for eight years. There are the lives of the Kuwaitis who died resisting Iraq’s invasion and brief control of that nation. There are the lives of those in India, Indonesia and the Philippines who have died as the result of the continuing Islamic terrorism in those nations.
“These people,” I said, referring to the Islamists, “want to kill us all.” She remained insistent that I was a bloodthirsty warmonger who only wanted revenge. She remained resistant to the fact that some wars must be fought to liberate people enslaved by tyrants and to resist others who will inflict death and suffering in the name of Islam. Or Communism. I want a world in which there is no place for the holy warriors of Islam or the carriers of the Communist cancer that makes individuals slaves of the state.
To those who say this war is only about oil, my reply is that oil is the very lifeblood of our economy and that its flow must be protected at all costs. This nation would shut down overnight without adequate supplies of oil and Iraq sits atop the world’s second largest known reservoir of this vital source of energy. If oil only serves to provide Saddam Hussein billions of dollars with which to create nuclear bombs or huge amounts of biological and chemical weapons, then that must end.
Decades of American pacifism in the face of the growing threat of Islamism have encouraged continued attacks on American embassies, our troops, and on 9-11, our homeland. America has been perceived as lacking the will to oppose nations for whom we have become an “imperialistic” whipping boy.
The day of all dictators must be declared over. We cannot sit by and allow the likes of Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and others like Muammar al-Qaddafi to dictate to the United States and the rest of the world with the threat of nuclear annihilation or other weapons of mass destruction. First we rid ourselves of the dictators, then we find a way for every nation to back away from these horrible weapons.
It will not be the United Nations that brings this about. The world has witnessed its inability and even its refusal to address this and other threats in the world. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this threat has been the realization by ordinary people that the so-called Security Council only offers the security of slavery, appeasement, and accommodation with the likes of Saddam Hussein and far too many of the other UN members in good standing. Syria, Iran, Libya and Cuba come to mind. The notion that Iraq is in line to chair the UN conference on disarmament tells you everything you need to know about this vile institution.
We are at a crossroads of history in which only the will and the might of the United States of American stands between the dictators and the rest of the world. I spent most of my life in the last half of the last century. I grew up under the threat from the Hitler’s, the Mussolini’s, the Tojo’s and the Stalin’s whose only interest was their megalomaniac dreams of enslaving the world. Scores of millions died because of them. I witnessed the fall of Soviet Russia because of the willingness of the United States to oppose its tyrannical dreams of world domination.
We are faced with a decision to try to kill the terrorist mosquitoes individually or with draining the swamp in which they thrive. Right now, the Middle East is that swamp. Others await our future attention.
Death to the dictators!
