By John Mark Hancock
Copyrighted - All Rights Reserved

KNOXVILLE - Dangerous, radical Islamic fascists either have, want, or may soon have, the ability to deliver nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world. These militant Muslims are basically the 21^st Century Nazis. They truly believe that Islam should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, and then the world, including America, of course.

To them, all who do not bow to their way of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish what the Holocaust started, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. Make no mistake that this is their mantra and ultimate goal.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East, not, for the most part, the so-called civil war that exists only in the minds of the mainstream media in Iraq between Sunnis and Shias, but a war of ideas. This war is for control of Islam. If the militants win this war, the Jihadists will control the Middle East, OPEC oil, and the USA, European, and Asian economies.

Basically, our techno-industrial world will be at the mercy of an OPEC not dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the barbaric revolutionaries. Do you want gasoline in your automobile? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything at all? Then you had better hope the Jihadists are defeated.

If moderate, respectful, tolerant Muslims win, they will try to live in peace with the rest of the world, and move their region out of the 10th Century into the 21^st. Only then will the troubles in the Middle East eventually fade away for awhile. A moderate and prosperous Middle East might emerge for a time, rather than the Armageddon that is sure to result otherwise.

We Americans have to help these moderates win, and to do that we have to fight the Jihadists, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorists. We have to do it somewhere specific. We can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing, in Iraq, not in New York, not in London or Paris or Berlin, but in Baghdad, where we did two important things:

(1) Deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam had been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. He himself was a terrorist! Saddam was a human weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000,000 Iraqis and also 2,000,000 Iranians.

(2) Created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we kill there, we won't have to hunt down and kill here. We also have a chance at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence there for as long as it is needed.

World War II, the war with the Japanese and German Nazis over a half century ago, really began with a whimper in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. That was only the catalyst that got the US involved. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for 14 years before the US joined that war. It officially ended in 1945, making it a 17-year war, and it was followed by another decade of US occupation of Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again, making it 27-year endeavor.

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP. Adjusted for inflation, that would equal $12 trillion today. World War II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and 100,000 more still listed as missing in action and also presumed dead.

The Iraq war has so far cost the United States only about $160 billion, barely over ONE PERCENT of the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II. The total cost of the Iraqi war is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York City. We have also lost 3,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to the number of Americans that the terrorists killed in their 9/11 attack, but again, not even ONE PERCENT of the number we lost in World War II.

The cost of not fighting and winning World War II would have been unimaginably greater to us and the rest of the free world. We would now be living in a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism had we failed to fight in or lost that war.

This is not a TV show or a feature movie we’re engaged in, in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is a messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly war for our freedom. It always has been that way and probably always will be. The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is, if ever. It will not go away if we simply ignore it or disengage from fighting it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like Great Britain is now, in the Middle East, a platform from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is one of the clashes between the forces of relative civility and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world. The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war.

Now however, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons with which to fight…unless somebody prevents them from getting them. We all know that the US is the only nation capable of preventing that from happening.

We have four options open to us:

1. Defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. Fight the terrorists later, after they get nuclear weapons, which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on developing them is what they claim it is.

3. Surrender to the barbarians and accept their dominance in the Middle East now, in Europe and Asia in the next few years, and ultimately in America.

4. Stand down now, bring our troops home, and pick up the fight later when the fascist extremists are more widespread and better armed, after they have obtained control of France, Germany, and most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be much more dangerous, extremely expensive, and horribly bloodier to choose this option.

If you oppose this war, you must like the idea that your children or grandchildren will live in an Islamic America, an America that resembles Iran today, run by Islamic fanatics. Again, the history of the world is one of clashes between civilizations and cultures. All wars are about ideas, about what society should be like, and the most determined side always wins. Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the warmongers kill them.

Remember that perspective is everything. America’s schools teach too little history for our perspective to be clear, especially in the young, naive American mind. The Cold War lasted from 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 under President Reagan’s leadership, over 40 years! Some believe it has begun all over again with the chilling of US-Russian relations.

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany! In the aftermath of the 27-year World War II campaign, the US still has troops in Germany and Japan more than a half century later. World War II resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million people worldwide, according to most reliable estimates.

The USA’s 3,000 soldiers that have been killed in action in Iraq in the entire war there don’t even equal the 4,000 Americans killed in one morning of World War II, June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In World War II, the US averaged 2,000 killed in action a week…for four years. Most of the individual battles of World War II resulted in more lost Americans than the entire Iraq war has lost so far.

The stakes are at least as high for America and the free world in Iraq as they were in World War II. Will we wind up with a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms, or a world dominated by a radical Islamic movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the their barbaric Islamic law?

It's difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp these truths. Those who protest the war claim to favor human rights, civil rights, liberty, and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis, and evidently they wish to quit fighting for those rights and freedoms anywhere.

Peace activists always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe to do so. Why don't we, however, see any peace activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and North Korea, the places that really need peace activism the most? Why not? Because they would be killed if they dared to protest there!

Liberals and Democrats in Congress and the media and throughout the nation supposedly favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, and diversity, but if the Jihad wins, wherever they win, all civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, and diversity ends. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy! If we don’t win there, we will have lost our own way of life forever.

President Bush understands history. He understands the stakes in this war. He has been vilified and reviled for his stands and his views. However, as Commander in Chief of our armed forces, he has a Constitutional duty to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to provide for the defense of our freedoms, and to stand up to those who would end those freedoms. It’s a shame he has to fight those who hate him at home as much as he does those who seek to destroy us abroad.