After a good start,
the West is faltering, notably in the face of a coming nuclear Iran,
and notably in America electing the apparent appeaser Obama.
The defeat of the Iraqi jihadi resistance
shows that in the long war,
if the West keeps its resolve,
the jihad will just give up,
as it eventually did in Algeria in the 1990s,
and in Israel
in the Arafat Intifada.
Eventually the jihad runs out of fools willing to die for a lost cause.
The question is whether America's turn towards Obama and the left
will throw it all away.
It certainly looks like a weakening of western resolve,
which will encourage the jihad to keep going.
Afghanistan, which seemed won,
got much worse once Obama arrived.
His rhetoric is the rhetoric of appeasement and withdrawal.
On the other hand, Obama's welcome and ruthless use of drones
has decimated the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership.
He is not as bad as his awful rhetoric.
Iran's nuclear weapons program
is the most imminent threat to the West.
Iran for years sponsored the jihad
against American and British troops
in Iraq, with no consequence.
Iran now talks openly of its coming genocide of Israel.
Bush failed to topple the enemy regimes of Iran and Syria after 2003.
Obama failed to support the rebels against Iran when he had a chance
in 2009.
Now it seems Israel faces Iran alone.
Assad's Syria, like Saddam's Iraq, has been part-secular
and yet also a leading state sponsor of Islamic jihad terror.
Syria is now facing its own rebels, and while Assad's fall must be celebrated,
the new government -
like the new government of Egypt
- may just be a new enemy of the West.
Dictators like Saddam and Assad come and go,
but the appeal of Islamic tyranny (sharia) and violence and terror (jihad) is timeless.
And globalisation has brought these savage ideas to the western world,
and they will not go away.
Even if the Middle East is contained,
the struggle between Islamists and free people
will continue in western cities.
The culture war,
with abuse and ridicule of Islam,
may play the most important role.
It may be a century long struggle before jihad and sharia join fascism and communism
on the scrapheap of history.
There's a long way to go.
Victims of Islamism:
A mother weeps for her baby,
killed by the Islamists at
Beslan, 2004.
Lebanon war, 2006.
I used to think this was a loss for Israel,
since they were forced to stop before destroying Hezbollah.
But Hezbollah has been quiet since, afraid of provoking Israel again.
So this looks more and more like a win.
It may be that it is impossible
to build proper free societies in these countries.
It was a brave and noble effort, and it might work in a later generation,
but right now it may be impossible.
North Korea explodes nuclear bomb, 2006.
The Pakistan, North Korea and Iran nuclear weapons programs
are ultimately the means by which Islamist terrorists will get nukes.
Pakistan, already a repressive Islamic state with nukes,
threatens to become a fully-fledged
Islamic terrorist state with nukes.
Pakistan becomes world headquarters of Al Qaeda.
Pakistan agrees to allow terrorist state
be set up in
Waziristan, Sept 2006.
Pakistan agrees to allow terrorist state
be set up in
Swat, Feb 2009.
President Obama,
60 minutes, 22 Mar 2009,
dismisses Dick Cheney's record in stopping any homeland attack for 7 long years.
Will Obama stop a homeland attack for 7 more years?
He better hope he does,
otherwise this interview comes across as the height of arrogance.
As
Victor Davis Hanson, May 13, 2009,
says,
Obama seems not to recognise the achievement of Bush and Cheney:
"We seem to think that not being attacked since 9/11 was some sort of natural occurrence".
Is the killing of random infidels a victory for the Islamists?
They would think so,
but it is hard to see how killing random civilians progresses their goals.
Islamists have certainly killed a lot of infidels and Muslims since 9/11.
They have achieved no mega-attacks like 9/11,
but rather smaller attacks
such as:
The list is quite distorted because
I have excluded all Islamist attacks in
Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
since 2001,
since there are simply so many of them.
The ones with more than 100 deaths are highlighted.
The Islamist Iraqi "resistance"
has killed thousands of people in Iraq,
mostly Muslims,
with many
attacks killing hundreds at a time,
but it is hard to see anything it has achieved.
Its support has not risen, and remains below 10 percent.
It holds no territory. Elections went ahead anyway.
So far, the resistance seems to have achieved nothing.
Its vicious war against fellow Muslims,
including the suicide bombing of mosques, weddings, funerals and religious processions,
may even be reducing
the support for Islamist terror among Muslims worldwide.
See also the unprecedented protests after
the Jordan bombings
of Muslims.
The Islamist Palestinian intifada
has also killed hundreds of infidels,
bringing a rain of death, destruction and poverty onto the heads of the Palestinian people.
Its main goal of destroying Israel has not progressed,
and the
Israeli wall
is making it increasingly impossible to hit Israel at all.
However, it does have the Gaza pull-out to show for it.
Maybe Gaza was untenable anyway, but it looks like a victory for Islamism.
The statistics are in, and
the Afghan war reduced, not increased,
Islamic fundamentalist terror.
Terrorist incidents fell
from 355 in 2001 to 199 in 2002,
a 30 year low.
This could change, but it looks promising so far.
After Sept 11th people agonised over
the best way to end Islamofascist attacks.
To address their supposed "grievances"?
To "solve" the "Israel problem"?
To give them money?
So far it seems that
the best way to end Islamofascist attacks
is to aggressively attack them in their home countries.
The statistics are in, and
the Afghan and Iraqi wars reduced, not increased,
Islamic fundamentalist terror.
Nothing succeeds like success.
Contrary to the claims that these wars would "inflame" the
Arab world, and breed a new generation of hatred and suicide bombers,
the opposite has happened.
The Arab world is either: (a) afraid of the west,
or: (b) silently hoping that the west wins,
or: (c) the militants of course
still hate the west and want to fight it, like they did before,
but the difference is they
are now being killed in vast numbers.
307 persons were killed in terrorist attacks in 2003,
a huge drop on the 725 killed in
2002.
The number of separate terrorist incidents also fell,
to the lowest level recorded since 1969.
Things got worse in 2004.
Madrid and Beslan happened,
and the Iraqi "resistance" escalated into a full-scale jihadi war.
(The only bright spot is that the Palestinian intifada was defeated.)
The Afghanistan and Iraq wars shattered the jihad.
But then, after victory in Iraq, America sat on its laurels
and did not take the war to Iran and Syria
(as many neo-cons had hoped).
The jihad has re-grouped, and the front line is now Iraq.
Yes, it does seem that the war is protecting America - 4 years now and there has been no
follow-up at all to 9/11.
And no mega-attack on Britain - only the pathetic London bombings.
But the cost is that the jihad war has to be fought in poor suffering Iraq.
Iran and Syria are now the main terror states supporting the jihad,
and the Islamist war will never end
until there is a reckoning with these two states.
If we want to win this war,
the West needs to seize the initiative again.
It needs to surprise our enemies, put them under pressure,
attack them in unexpected ways,
cause them great expenditure,
start rebellions in their countries
and mount up endless problems for them,
in the way that Reagan caused endless trouble for the Soviets.
The West needs to push the Iranian and Syrian regimes to the wall,
by hot war, cold war, and a combination of both.
The West needs to take the war to the enemy again.
The West falters, yet Al Qaeda have failed to follow up 9/11
Despite the faltering of the West, Al Qaeda has not recovered its former strength.
It has failed to follow up 9/11.
It has failed to attack the West in the way that was feared.
It has failed to rouse the Muslim world to join it.
Its global revolution remains postponed.
Instead it is dying in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The correct response is to escalate.
To win, to destroy the jihadis' world.
To demoralise them, humiliate them, and make them lose all hope.
No one wants their stupid state.
They are dying for nothing, and should give up now
and go home.
"Five years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden waits in vain for a Muslim 'awakening'.
The lure of the West is just too powerful a force."
"Yes, there is a small, if growing, number of Muslims who are attracted to 'al-Qaedaism' in its largest sense. But the truth is that out of a total of 1.6 billion Muslims, very few have joined terrorist organisations.
In countries that have suffered violence, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, there has been a strong counter-reaction to the atrocities of recent years. The number of young men attracted by violence in the UK is larger than it was a decade ago, but is still statistically insignificant.
If bin Laden's 'awakening' has started, it is taking a long time."
In a century's time, Islamism will be gone. And the West will still be here.
Jihadis fight (and die in large numbers) in Iraq,
not in the streets of America:
Angels and Intelligence Estimates
by Charles Krauthammer,
October 6, 2006
-
Al-Qaeda says
4,000 of its recruits have been killed in Iraq since
liberation in 2003.
Yet at the same time there has been not a single large terror attack in the US.
In fact, in 5 years now there has been no major attack in the US.
"It is clear that one of the reasons we have gone an astonishing five years without a second attack on the American homeland is that the most dedicated and virulent jihadists have gone to Iraq to fight us,
as was said during World War I, 'over there'."
I wouldn't want to give the jihadi scum any ideas, but:
Maybe the jihadis are wasting their time in Iraq.
Maybe they have allowed themselves be distracted by a pointless war
(Iraqis hate them and will fight them forever,
even after the Americans leave).
Maybe the jihad should have ignored Iraq
and concentrated on following up 9/11.
All that jihadi energy wasted.
All those young jihadi lives lost - for nothing.
Maybe the enemy is just being stupid, like Hitler invading the Soviet Union.
Let's hope so.
Victor Davis Hanson
on the debate as to whether Iraq is creating more terrorists,
or whether it is drawing in all the world's terrorists to fight in theatre and die:
"We have taken apart two-thirds of al-Qaeda
and forced it to spend its youth and treasure in Iraq, not here.
At the same time, al-Qaeda finds itself in the unenviable position of fighting Iraqi Muslims
to stop democracy. Who accomplished that? The diabolic George Bush?
...
Genocide existed before we invaded Saddam's Iraq, a regime without any chance of reform.
Now terrorists like moths to a searing flame are flocking there and in most cases being incinerated.
They show their true colors in trying to destroy a government voted in by the people.
When rats flock to a tray of
D-Con,
few say that the poison created rats out of thin air and made the problem worse."
"Right now about the only place in the world - not in Egypt, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia -
where large number of Muslim fanatics and terrorists are being killed is in Afghanistan
and, yes, Iraq. I am not of the persuasion that
D-Con trays
create, rather than merely draw out, rats,
although the results are often messy and smelly,
and reveal a seemingly endless supply of such pests
that we scarcely knew were deep within our walls."
On the fact that no second 9/11 has yet taken place:
"Tragically few will credit the US military in the next decade
should we not have another 9-11 attack or something far worse.
We know Islamic fascists and their autocratic supporters wished such slaughter;
their only problem, once the US military took the offensive,
was an increasing inability to carry it out.
It is my belief that our soldiers in both Afghanistan and Iraq
have saved tens of thousands of American lives,
by routing the Taliban and scattering al Qaeda, and by removing Saddam Hussein and changing the entire landscape of the Middle East"
Hope keeps the jihad alive:
Michael Novak,
22 Nov 2006,
points out the incredible military weakness of the Iraqi "resistance".
After nearly 4 years, they hold no territory.
They have taken no allied strongholds.
They have no public support.
No one votes for them.
Their numbers are few:
"Even if you can muster only 10,000 soldiers over the entire countryside of Iraq".
They can hardly even engage in combat:
"Even though our own forces (for nearly two whole years now) can no longer afford to fight
in a single operation lasting longer than a few hours".
And yet they may win because America may defeat itself.
They may win simply because Americans get fed up seeing
a steady drip of atrocities on the news:
"the more stomach-turning the better".
"To defeat the United States, then, it suffices to demonstrate that their vaunted military,
for all its awesome power and tactical bravery in the field, cannot halt daily "chaos."
To achieve this victory over America, it is not even necessary to create actual "chaos,"
but only its appearance.
...
the shadowy existence of this "chaos" in Iraq is projected by a steady stream of stomach-churning,
atavistic, destructive acts, staged day by day where the cameras of the U.S. press cannot resist them."
It is rarely recognised that almost all of the killings in Iraq
achieve nothing militarily.
They contribute nothing towards defeating the enemy
- if the enemy is determined to stay.
It is as if, as the allies surged through Normandy in 1944,
the Nazis thought killing French civilians would stop the allies.
If the allies are determined to stay in Iraq,
the "resistance" killings cannot stop it.
Rather, the killings are aimed at the psychological war,
not the military war.
As I have said many times, it is hope that keeps the Iraqi jihad alive.
They cannot win militarily.
What keeps them going is the hope that America will give up,
and they are encouraged in this almost every day by the west.
Every leftist marching to "end the occupation" gives the jihad that hope
and keeps them going.
Every Democrat and "realist" Republican
looking for an "exit strategy" gives the jihad that hope
and keeps them going.
What Bush needs to do, what the West needs to do, is to crush that hope,
destroy it.
Make them despair that the West will ever give up,
and then (and only then)
they will stop, and they will leave Iraq alone.
Ayman al Zawahiri, Nov 2012, issues an implied compliment to Bush.
He declares that America will never carry out such daring actions as it did under Bush:
"Their awe is lost and their might is gone and they don't dare to carry out a new campaign like their past ones in Iraq and Afghanistan."
George Friedman
of Stratfor is
optimistic:
"It is debatable whether the U.S. has actually won the U.S.-jihadist war
- but it has certainly achieved its strategic goals"
- preventing another 9/11 and avoiding jihadist uprising in the Arab world -
"The U.S. has succeeded, not so much in winning the war as in preventing the Islamists from winning and, from a geopolitical perspective, that is good enough."
Al Qaeda magazine,
Inspire,
Oct 2010, admits that Bush hammered them after 9/11:
"It is no longer possible to operate by the methods of the old model, through the ‘secret regional-hierarchical’ organisations, especially after the September 11 events and the onset of the American campaigns, where the great majority of the existing secret organisations were destroyed."
Interview with
the leader of the Islamofascist massacre of
non-Muslim civilians
at Khobar,
Saudi Arabia, May 2004,
sums up the evil religious psychosis
we are up against:
"As soon as we entered, we encountered the car of
a Briton,
the investment director of the company,
whom Allah had sent to his death.
... We left him in the street.
We went out, and drove our car. We had tied the infidel by one leg [behind the car].
... The infidel's clothing was torn to shreds, and he was naked in the street. The street was full of people,
as this was during work hours, and everyone watched the infidel being dragged, praise and gratitude be to Allah.
We told [Muslims],
'Calm down, don't be afraid, we don't want you. We want only the Americans.
...
We are Mujahideen, and we want the Americans. We have not come to aim a weapon at the Muslims,
but to purge the Arabian Peninsula, according to the will of our Prophet Muhammad,
of the infidels and the polytheists'
We entered one of the companies' [offices], and found there
an American infidel
who looked like a director
of one of the companies. I went into his office and called him. When he turned to me, I shot him in the head,
and his head exploded. We entered another office and found
one infidel from South Africa,
and our brother Hussein slit his throat.
We entered and in front of us stood many people. We asked them their religion, and for identification documents.
We used this time for Da'wa [preaching Islam], and for enlightening the people about our goal.
We spoke with many of them.
At the same time, we found
a Swedish infidel.
Brother Nimr cut off his head, and put it at the gate [of the building]
so that it would be seen by all those entering and exiting.
We continued in the search for the infidels, and we slit the throats of those we found among them.
...
We found Filipino Christians. We cut their throats and dedicated them to our brothers the Mujahideen in the Philippines.
[Likewise], we found Hindu engineers and we cut their throats too, Allah be praised.
That same day, we purged Muhammad's land of many Christians and polytheists.
Afterwards, we turned to the hotel. We entered and found a restaurant, where we ate breakfast and rested a while.
Then we went up to the next floor, found several Hindu dogs, and cut their throats.
...
We utilized the time for [teaching] the Koran to the Muslims who remained. We taught them how to read
[Surat] Al-Fatiha
properly. They were amazed by us"
Since 1995.
