What Must Be Done: Thoughts on the 4th Anniversary of the Current Hostilities in Iraq

By Garry J. Moes

If there was any good in the Islamic attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 (and many good and noble things did happen on and around that day), one of the highest was this: for one brief, glorious moment, Americans and much of the rest of the world East and West knew what had to be done.

For more than 30 years before that fateful day, the maniacs of imperialist Islam had been on the attack, mostly with impunity. Airliners were hijacked and blown out of the sky. Cruise liners were commandeered and old men in wheelchairs were thrown overboard. International games were disrupted and athletes murdered. Journalists, ambassadors, embassy workers, businessmen and tourists were kidnapped, held captive for months on end, and/or murdered. Novelists were marked for death and were forced into years of seclusion. Barracks, airbases and warships were bombed, and soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors were slaughtered. Servicemen on humanitarian missions were brutalized, murdered, and burned and their corpses were dragged through the streets. Embassies abroad were blown up and skyscrapers at home were shaken. Suicide bombers quietly penetrated supermarkets, cafes, buses, night clubs and schools, bloodying the landscape with the dismembered bodies of ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Jihadist organizations with nothing but violence on their programs proliferated, while some of their leaders won Nobel peace prizes. Whole nations were subverted into terrorist states. Literally thousands of such incidents could be cited.

Save for a few successful precision air raids (President Ronald Reagan's retaliatory strike on Libya) and some ill-fated rescue attempts (President Jimmy Carter's helicopter fiasco in the Iranian desert) and off-target retaliations (President Bill Clinton's inept missile attack on an aspirin factory) over the years, America responded to the incessant succession of Muslim attacks with hand-wringing, head shaking, regrets, sadness, resignation and apathy.

But on September 11, 2001, and for a brief season thereafter, that all changed. Americans and much of a sympathetic world saw with great moral clarity what had to be done. This clarity was distilled in President George W. Bush, a plain-spoken man who almost instantly put it forth in a sweeping Doctrine that promised a dark destiny for all individuals, organizations, enterprises and nations whose purposes were to bring the world to heel through terror.

The impulse to do what had to be done was so powerful and instinctively clear that few at the time heard the president's warning that the civilized world's necessity would be a struggle spanning decades and generations. Few thought to consider whether what had to be done could, in fact, feasibly be done at all -- whether the armies of civilized nations could ever secure a victory against a million fanatics making a million unpredictable and undetectable little but deadly forays at any moment at any place. It is likely that few contemplated, beyond their instincts, the nuances or harsh future realities that would accompany the doing of what we knew in our hearts (but not so much in our heads) had to be done.

The breathtaking truth we knew on 9/11 was that what had to be done was this: We must return to war and stay at war for as long as this implacable enemy insists on pursuing its vicious vision of subjecting ("Islam" means "submission") the world to the demands of Allah and rule by his people. This pan-Islamic vision has always existed among the Mohammedans, who have, ironically, almost constantly warred among themselves over which of their religious factions or dynasties will control and implement the vision.

And so this nation went back to war. I say "went back" because it had launched a major campaign in this war just over a decade earlier when the patriarch of the Bush dynasty saw what had to be done in the face of a bold move by one of the most brazen of the modern antagonists to establish a dominant position in the renewal of the pan-Islamist imperialistic vision, namely Saddam Hussein. Whether President George H. W. Bush (the elder) had a full understanding of the need to stand against this historic broad Islamist vision is unclear; he spoke only of the need for a "new world order" of powers partnered under the United Nations to stand against international aggression. (His son seemed to labor under a less grandiose and morally simpler assumption; namely, that any person, organization or nation who uses terror to accomplish any end must be stopped by any reasonable means necessary.) Not long after Bush the Elder left office, there was a blatant terrorist attack on our home soil, the first in 50 years. The enemy attempted to bring down one of the centers of our economic life, the World Trade Center, in 1993. But our new playboy president at the time was too busy with his perversions and the country was having too much fun mimicking or watching the antics of President Goodtime Charlie to give the attack a second thought.

The renewed campaigns which began shortly after 9/11 proved spectacularly successful. Within weeks of the start of retaliatory hostilities on two fronts, two enemy regimes were easily toppled. In the case of Iraq, the conquest was so swift that our forces outpaced their own supply lines occasionally. The leaders of the fallen regimes and many of their organizational allies and terror masterminds fled for the safety of spider holes, caves and cross-border sanctuaries. Successful generals retired, and one aircraft-carrier captain allowed his ship to be festooned with a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished" as his commander-in-chief landed a jet on deck to offer thanks to his accomplished warriors. Though many later scoffed at that slogan, the fact was that the mission of the campaigns to which the slogan applied had indeed been accomplished.

What many failed to realize at the time was the fact that new campaigns were about to be launched by the enemy. There seems to be evidence that our war planners had not fully prepared for this fact. The regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq had created two more "Israels," and the hit-and-run terrorists who had always plagued the original Israel now took their tactics to the new fronts.

But by now, the memories of that fateful day in 2001 had begun to fade among the Western masses whose earlier instincts had led them to pursue what had to be done. Patriotic country singer Darryl Worley wondered in song: "Have you forgotten how it felt that day?" Perhaps one of the reasons the memories had faded can be found in the words of that very question. We had been remembering for a time how we "felt" on that day, when what we should have been remembering were the cold, hard facts about what led to that day. It is natural for most normal people in the West to find it hard to sustain powerful emotions for a long period of time -- unlike the enemy, whose anger and commitment never seem to fade. We, the people of a rational civilization, must understand historical and ontological realities if we are to succeed in the defense of our world and way of life. The problem is that in recent generations, owing to our crumbling educational system and moral/philosophical foundations, we are quickly losing our ability to reason, especially to morally reason, and to see clearly what has to be done. We may respond to our latent instincts for a time, but these are not enough to see us through to the necessary end in the long haul.

And so, like the circus-goers of ancient Rome, we have turned our attention to what furthers our enjoyments: the fun of singing competitions and flesh-flashing dance contests, acquiring the latest gadgets and downloading music and zippy ringtones to them, fixating on the "tragic" death or head-shaving meltdowns of celebrity harlots and the paternity of their offspring, awarding gold statuettes to goofball former politicians turned pseudo-scientists, endlessly debating sexy social issues which once were sensibly undebatable, following virtually every hedonistic opportunity available to us -- the very corruptions which lead our enemies to so deeply despise us.

Our lagging interest in pursuing what has to be done is exacerbated by the devilish efforts of some of our own number and of countries abroad who had been strategically silent in the instinctive moments following 9/11 but who had never forgotten what the madman Hitler-Bush had pledged to do back then. These sanity-challenged anarchists and revolutionaries, and their useful idiots in major political parties, realized at the time that what the rest of us knew had to be done could only be done through the leadership of the world's only remaining superpower, a global military-industrialist power which they hate with a burning passion. Many of these secretly or openly work to stop us from doing what must be done and would be delighted to see our enemy succeed against us -- forgetting, of course, that the enemy will also come for them. They desperately need to see the 4,000-year-old Hebrew-Christian civilization fall, because they cannot abide its claims on their lives. The problem is that if this civilization falls, all the world will be forced to abide the claims of a barbaric system of religious and societal horrors too terrible to contemplate. Too terrible to contemplate...but very easy to examine, for this system has operated in plain view for centuries and does so still in myriad and diverse places in our contemporary world. Still its civilized rival, incredibly, is viewed by some in the West as the greater terror.

The evident horrors of today's Islam are only the modern manifestations of a centuries-old imperialistic holy war by the practitioners of a malevolent and malicious religion sworn, bound and determined to persevere till all the world falls under the dominion of their "merciful" god.

"History confirms with great clarity that Muslims, beginning with Muhammad, launched their conquest of Christendom one-thousand years before the Europeans responded rather feebly with their Crusades. Yet today, Muslim propagandists want the world to believe that the West stole Islamic lands and that Christians alone are imperialistic. This mindset is used to fool fools into believing that Muslims fight Christians because Christians have fought Muslims. Those who deceive don’t want you to know that Christians were victims, not villains in this affair or that Islam alone is why Muslims kill," writes one chronicler of this reign of terror.

"And yet, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Islam is presented as innocent and passive. The religion is seldom if ever held accountable for the terrorism it inspires. Even when so-called experts discuss terror in the context of the religion they universally apply the qualifier 'radical' to Islam, suggesting that a corrupted form of the doctrine is to blame for its carnage when the opposite is true. But to have access to the media and to sell books one must be willing to lie. This suicidal pathology is born out of Socialist Secular Humanism and its campaign against Christian values.

And make no mistake: the present opposition to any Western war on Islamism is a "suicidal pathology." In the face of the certain destruction which the do-nothing position will bring about, the opposition advocates doing nothing. To these opponents -- from the terminally naive to the political opportunists to the flat-out traitors who work for our destruction -- the thing that must be done is nothing. For the traitors, Western capitulation is a desired strategy -- suicidal and pathological though it may be. The naive and the opportunists, if they consider at all the practice of terrorism in the 40 years before 9/11, apparently believe that the thing that must be done is simply to endure the troublesomeness of it all. We survived the nettlesome irritation of terror before; we can survive it some more, miserable as things may be from time to time.

But they have forgotten. They have forgotten 9/11, the day we knew for a moment what really, truly had to be done. For that moment, we knew this was more than nettlesome irritation; this had the nature of history's ultimate showdown.

Indeed, that is how the enemy sees it. The visionary leaders of of al Qaeda and Iran have made it repeatedly and abundantly clear: a conflagration must occur to usher in history's climax -- the eternal golden age of Islamic triumphalism -- and they are sworn to fulfill their perceived destinies to bring it to pass in their (our) lifetimes. This is why the present opposition to the war is so utterly and profoundly and stupidly wrong.

To those who argue that the "war against terror" may be necessary but the "war in Iraq" is not, we submit again that this is a terminal case of ignorance. Whatever rationale may have been given by the American administration and its allies four years ago for returning to the Iraq theater, the place of Iraq in the enemy's grand understanding of history's progress and end must be considered. At the heart of the pan-Islamic vision for the world is the restoration of the caliphate -- abandoned by the corrupt Ottoman Turks in 1924 and seemingly lost for good with the defeat of the Axis Powers, which included the (by then disheveled) Ottoman Empire, in World War II. For certain factions within Islam, Iraq is central to the vision. (Thankfully, this is and always has been a factious matter within Islam and the internecine struggles on such issues have frequently weakened the movement from within. One of the West's most promising strategies would be to exploit this factionalism in every way possible. Saddam's aggressions were more than bravado but his effort to position himself in the forefront of the coming Islamic world dominion, and it is why he could not capitulate to the pre-war demands of the West despite the impossibility of his situation.)

The tactics now being employed by the Democrats in the U.S. Congress completely ignore the centrality of Iraq in the pan-Islamic vision, and their shamefulness is outweighed only by their dangerousness. For if the present West-accommodating Iraqi regime or some similar successor of it falls, there will be little to stand in the way of a vast renewal of the imperial push of greater Islam. Again, whatever rationale may have been publicly given for U.S. action in Iraq, our presence in the strategic heart of the Middle East -- if for no other reason than to be a hedge against the vicious rivalry between Arab and Persian Islam, which could produce chaos on a colossal scale -- is critical to our national interests and the peace and safety of the world.

The opportunistic Democrats have been idiotically clear on what they think should not be done, despite the realities of the present world and the remembrance of their own instincts on 9/11 of what had to be done. To them we ask, "What do you propose to do to accomplish what still must be done?"

"Nothing" is not good enough. A pox on your house if you allow your thirst for partisan power to so blind yourself to what you must do that our national house and the civilization that it still barely nurtures is forced to fall to the House of Islam.