Why the United States Will Ultimately Lose the War Against Islam

                     Why  the United States will Ultimately Lose the War Against Islam

Introduction:  Let us say that a war breaks out and you are asked to bet on which  side will win.  On one side you have a technologically superior and well armed group who are also morally and spiritually bankrupt and believe in nothing but self-aggrandizement and transitory physical gratification.  The other side consists of people who are committed to their cause to the point of fanaticism and are absolutely implacable in their drive for victory.  Which side would you bet on?

                      Change in the Character of Americans

    

     I think this can best be illustrated by a hypothetical survey question.

“You are the president of the United States.  Your advisors, both  civilian and military, tell you that you must make a critical decision and it must be done now.  You can either announce to the public that henceforth the United States will be an “Islamic State” or you can use nuclear weapons to eliminate the Islamic threat.  The nuclear option will kill most of the terrorists along with a few hundred million “innocents”.

     Based on my knowledge of people I have known throughout my life, my estimate is that if you asked this question 100 years ago, roughly 90% of the general public would have favored the nuclear option without question.  If asked 50 years ago, the percentage in favor of the nuclear option would probably have been in the 75-85% range.  If asked today, probably only a very small majority, maybe 55% would favor the nuclear option.

Projected 50 years into the future, the overwhelming majority [75% or more] would take the view that nothing is worth the killing of millions of people.  They would take the view that if converting to Islam is the price I have to pay to save millions of lives; then so be it.

                        How the United States can win the War with Islam

     The nuclear option.  This would involve presenting all Islamic countries with an ultimatum.  They would be asked to round up and execute all terrorists and all those who actively support and finance the terrorists.  They would also be required to alter the structure of their religious teachings to a more broadly based and tolerant view of the world.  They would also be required to adopt secular governments with  modern protections for the rights of minorities and individuals. 

     After the ultimatum was refused, nuclear weaponry would be used to depopulate the “Muslim World”.  The survivors would be disarmed and informed that since they wish to think like medieval people, they can live like medieval people; without electricity or machinery.

     This is what is known as the, “kill them all and let God sort out the innocent from the guilty” option.  It is obvious that this option will never be used, but one should ask, “What would the Arabs do if they had our weaponry?”

     Conventional warfare.  As a friend of mine pointed out many years ago, the use of military force to impose one’s will on another is a two stage process.  First you must conquer, and then you must be able to govern.  (This may sound obvious, but it apparently eluded the people responsible for the war in Iraq.  Iraq was conquered with a relatively small force, but the country is now ungovernable.)  This means raising and equipping armies large enough not only to overcome enemy resistance but to impose a “friendly” government on the local population.

     Given the geographic areas and population densities involved, I would estimate that to win a conventional war against our enemies in the Islamic world we would have to raise and equip an army of at least 5,000,000 men.  In addition we would probably have to form a strategic alliance with the Russians and probably Turkey and possibly Serbia.  The Russians would require massive economic assistance in order to be able to field an army that could deal with central Asia.  Turkey would probably have to be ceded northern Iraq so that an autonomous Kurdish region could be formed under Turkish sovereignty.  This would enable us to handle our three greatest enemies in the region; Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

     Unfortunately, the United States has too many internal weaknesses for it to wage this kind of massive warfare.  These weaknesses can be broadly classified as economic, political, social and cultural.  Given our inability to wage large scale conventional warfare, it is highly likely that our future course of action will consist of inadequate attempts to deal with increasing levels of terrorism, attempts to buy time by trying to make deals with the terrorists, and delaying actions designed to shift the problem into the future.  (This will only hurt us as over time they will grow stronger and better organized while a disaffected American populace grows more and more unwilling to support a war effort designed to preserve this society.)

     Economic weaknesses.  Many years ago I watched a PBS show about how some prominent American businessmen (including a former secretary of the Treasury) went about making a few million dollars each.  They started out by buying 4 or 5 glass and/or bottle making factories.  First they combined all of the plants into one company.  Next they looted all the assets and kept the plants running by leasing back the assets that had been sold off.  The last step was to sell the company to some unsuspecting buyers.

     The end result was that the “businessmen” made a few million dollars each.  The company went broke leaving behind a number of empty shells.  The three or four thousand people who had worked at these plants were left without jobs. 

     The moral of the story is that the way to make money is not by creating new industries or companies that help the economy and employ people.  You make money by looting assets,leaving behind wrecked and stripped plants, and putting lots of people out of work.

     I included this story because it illustrates what is happening to this country as a whole.  All the industrial capital that was built up during the so-called “robber baron” era is now being looted.  What we are being left with is an economic wreckage of the highest degree

and millions of people who are under or unemployed.  It is no accident that we are rapidly  approaching the economic and social structure of a third world country.  And it probably won’t be too long before we start to develop the kind of political instability normally associated with Latin and South American dictatorships.

      Any cursory reading of economic news, trade deficits, budget deficits, price of gold, value of the dollar etc. etc. , will bring home the bad news about the current state of the American economy.  Simply put, without drastic economic reform, we  cannot afford to defend ourselves  through the use of massive conventional warfare.

  

Political Problems.  Think of the history of the United States as comparable to Lobachevskian  parallel lines.  When this country was first founded we were at the infinity where the lines meet.  At that point the interests of the governing class and the governed classes were as close as they have ever been throughout our history.  Up to the Spanish American War, these interests ran parallel to each other, but were not necessarily antithetical.  It was at this point that the governing class began moving towards an empire and away from the concept of a republic.

     The first major public revelation of the divergence of interests between the rulers and the ruled was the U-2 incident.  It must be recalled that Eisenhower’s media image was that of a man who may not be too bright, but was a bastion of integrity.  So when Eisenhower appeared on national television and admitted that he had lied, it was painfully obvious that he had lied to us, because the Russians already knew the truth.  This was quite a traumatizing event in its day.

     The real break between the two groups came with the assassination of JFK.  This marked the death of the republic and the official birth of the American Empire.  This is almost an exact historical parallel with the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Both men bought their way into power using other people’s money.  Both men were aristocrats who were hated and feared by members of their own class.  Both men were killed by multiple assassins so it is almost impossible to say who struck the fatal blow.  And both assassinations represented the final transformation of a republic  into an empire.

     We have now reached the other infinity where the lines now completely diverge from one another. The people now running this country no  longer even try to pretend that they have any interests in common with the people who live in this country.

     Perhaps the greatest political problem is that real politics have been removed from public view.  What the media labels politics is now really part of the entertainment industry.  We still go through the motions of elections even though no issues of substance are ever brought to the fore.  Also, the people running for office have no discernable constituencies.  They are strictly media creations.  What politics does take place, is conducted by people who are completely removed from the public eye.  Consequently they are unknown to, and unaccountable to, the public at large.

     Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on one’s point of view.  Which proposition do you consider more frightening:

1. The notion that buffoons like Willie Clinton and George Bush Jr. actually have the power to affect your life.
2. The idea that our office holders take their marching orders from people not subject to public scrutiny.

Social Weaknesses.  The great social weaknesses of American society can be distilled into a single word: “loyalty”.  We live in a country where a substantial part of the population (maybe as high as 35-40%) feels little or no loyalty towards it.  Many of these people consider the governing classes of the United States to be no better than, or worse than, the terrorists.  This is a direct result of the assassination of JFK and the Viet Nam war.

     The people who went to public schools from the late 40’s to the early sixties were probably the best educated and most idealistic generation this country has ever produced.  They were all taught about the wonders of democracy and the greatness of the “republic”.

Unfortunately, they came of age at that moment in history when the U.S. was making its final transformation from a republic into an empire.  The result was an incredible amount of disillusionment.  And there is nothing more destructive than a disillusioned idealist.

( Witness Iran.  The Iranians were so disillusioned with the Shah, they thought that anything would be an improvement, so they welcomed the advent of the Ayatollahs.My guess is that they now look upon the time of the Shah as, “the good old days.)

     A grave miscalculation made by the forces who wanted the war in Viet Nam is that conscripts will not fight for an empire.  No-one has ever fixed a bayonet and gone charging across no man’s land screaming, “Mobilgas  Forever”. That is why we now have an “all-volunteer” army composed strictly of professional soldiers.  The reason why we cannot reinstitute the draft to raise the size armies we need to fight our Islamic enemies is because such a substantial part of the population considers the U.S. to be as bad as the terrorists and will defeat and obstruct any effort to do so. 

     What happened in Iran can most definitely happen here.  When you have such a substantial part of the population that feels  totally marginalized and alienated from the society as a whole, they may very well develop the attitude that anything is better than this.

Cultural Weaknesses.  As a culture we now celebrate and glorify the depraved and the degenerate.  If you have even a shred of doubt as to the truth of this statement turn on your television set.  Look at South Park or any so-called reality show.  Sometimes we cross over the line into the truly despicable. (For instance, I always mute the commercials. One night I looked up to see footage of Lou Gehrig’s  speech.  I turned the sound on and after a minute or so, I saw that it was part of an automobile commercial.  This tells me that as a society and culture, we value nothing and have no respect for anything, including ourselves.  Joe DiMaggio  may well have been the last decent human being that this society will ever produce.  When he died someone should have turned out the lights and locked the door.)

     As a cultural entity, we believe in nothing, we value nothing, we have no sense of pride or shame, and we respect nothing, including ourselves.  Our lives pointlessly revolve around the accumulation of material goods and attempts to find some kind of physical gratification.

     Much of this can be traced to the destruction of the family unit.  In true newspeak fashion, we live in a world where people who call for “family friendly” values are talking about government financed abortion on demand and government financed warehouses where people can store their children when they are inconvenient to have around.

     We now live in a world where the child who lives with and is raised by both natural parents is almost an oddity.  So we now have millions of emotionally devastated people desperate to attach themselves to anything that they can identify with and which can fill at least some of the emotional void which they carry around with them.  Thus we have American pop culture, drug addiction, and mass marketing all of which are aimed at emotionally fragile people with no inner sense of self.

     Given the fragmentation and purposeless of American culture, it seems doubtful that it could support the kind of effort necessary for this society to sustain itself into the foreseeable future.

     Oddly enough, all of these problems are amenable to rational solutions.  Although theoretically possible, they could never be implemented because one of the few things that history teaches us is that people with wealth and power rarely give it up voluntarily.

     However, that does not prevent us from taking a look at what these solutions might be.

Economic.  Any solution to our economic problems must begin with a national corporate charter act.  Any corporation engaged in inter-state commerce would be required to obtain a federal charter.  At a minimum such a charter would include the following provisions:

1. Elimination of the “blue-sky” clause.  Charters would specify exactly what kind of business or businesses any given corporation could engage in.  (The chartering commission would be expected to take into account that there are some businesses that contain inherent conflicts of interest.  Investment banking and stockbrokerage for instance.  No one corporation would be allowed to engage in both businesses at the same time.  A given corporation could be in the oil business, the coal business, nuclear energy or alternative energy; but could not engage in more than one of these businesses at once.  A corporation could sell newspapers, own and operate TV stations, own radio stations, publish books, or make films.  It could not do more than one of the above.)
2. Corporations would have to make annual financial filings listing common stock holder by number of shares held, preferred stock holders by number of shares held, and bond holders by amount of debt held.  These would be public records available to any and all interested parties.
3. Common stock could only be voted by individuals.  Common stock held by other corporations, foundations, brokerage houses etc. could only be held for investment purposes only and could not be voted.  (Transfers of common stocks to individuals through non-arms length transactions for the purpose of making it “votable” would be a criminal offense. Also the individual receiving the shares would be convicted of fraud if he transferred them back for less than the full market price.)
4. Corporate officers and major stock holders could be held personally liable for criminal acts committed by their corporations.  Most notably, tax evasion.

           The second step would be a rather simple revision of the internal revenue code.  Much has been made of a “flat tax” concept.  This would be just as regressive and just as punitive to the poor and middle-class as our current tax system.  What is needed is a gross revenues tax with no deductions allowed.  The basic principles involved are,

1. Where you get your money and how you spend it is not the government’s concern;
2.  The more money you handle, the more you have that “sticks to your fingers”.

            Tax rates for individuals would probably range from say ½  of 1% for people making less than $10,000 a year to a maximum of 50% for people making in excess of $10,000,000 a year.

              Corporate rates would range from 1% to 5% per year, with the maximum rate reserved for the behemoths  who gross over 25 billion a year.  Also taxes would be on world wide revenues, not just on domestic revenues.  In addition, nothing would be tax exempt.  Instead of using separation of church and state arguments to outlaw school prayer, they would be used to outlaw tax exemptions for religious organizations.  There would be no more tax free bonds, foundations, trusts charities etc.  If you raise revenue, you will pay taxes on it.

      One adjustment that would be necessary is that inherited wealth would be taxed at personal income tax levels, no matter who it was left to.  If Joe Superrich dies and leaves $500,000,000 to charity, it would be taxed at the 50% personal rate, not the 2 or 3% corporate rate the charity might normally pay.

        Once a new tax system was in place and started collecting from all the currently tax exempt institutions, the revenue generated should allow for surpluses in the 500 billion to 1 trillion dollar a year range.  About 60% of the surplus would go towards paying down the national debt.  The rest would be divided into roughly three parts.  One part to the pentagon to begin preparing a massive build-up so we can fight and win conventional wars against Islamic countries.  One part to Russia in the form of economic and social aid . (Remember  it was the Russians, not the Americans or the British who defeated Germany in World War 2.)The third part would be reserved for a massive public works program that would involve digging tunnels between major American cities so that high-speed mag- lev trains could run through them. (This would create large numbers of well paid engineering and construction jobs, and would eventually relieve the airline industry of its burdens of trying to be a means of mass transit.)

Political solutions.  Routes will have to be reopened so that ordinary people can have access to the political process.  People with common interests and concerns will have to be encouraged to organize and find candidates to express their viewpoints.  (Currently the largest ready made constituency in this country can’t find anyone to represent them.  By the governments own figures well over half the population has either used illegal drugs, or has used legal drugs in an illegal manner.  Thus we have tens of millions of people who can only vote for candidate A, who thinks they should be put in prison, or candidate B, who thinks they should be taken out and shot.)

     In order for people to feel involved in the political process and to believe that their ideas matter, they must organize from the bottom up, and the people on top must be willing to listen and take their concerns into account.

Social problems.  Loyalty is something that starts at the bottom and works its way up.  People tend to be loyal to their families, their hometowns, states, and country in that order.  So one of the keys to reestablishing loyalty is to rebuild the family.  Before we can see how to do that, we must look at the forces that destroyed the family in the first place.

     For those not familiar with feminist philosophy, the basic premises of feminism go like this:

1. All the ills of the world are due to nasty male values.
2. If we could only get rid of the male influence, than women and children would find there own values which are sure to be superior to male values, and this would make the world into a wonderful place in which to live.
3. The means by which men transmit their values is the nuclear family.
4. Therefore, if we can get rid of the nuclear family, we can get rid of those nasty male influences and we’ll all be able to sing in the sunshine and live happily ever after.

            So how did they accomplish this?  By  changing divorce laws to “no-fault” divorce. Repealing laws against adultery. Bringing women into the work force so they can be economically independent.  And creating massive social service  agencies whose ostensible purpose is to protect children, but whose real function is to undermine and destroy parental authority by offering children ways to circumvent parental control.

            How can we reverse this process and encourage people to remain married and to raise their children in a family unit?

1. Major changes to divorce law.  If a couple has no minor children, divorce should be as simple as negotiating a property settlement and filling out a form.  If a couple has minor children, a divorce should be close to impossible to obtain.  If one spouse becomes physically aggressive, takes drugs, is an alcoholic etc., a legal separation may be granted.  The separated spouse would still be required to contribute to the support of the family.
2. Reintroduce laws against adultery and enforce them.  Legally separated spouses would still be subject to adultery laws.  (Penalties could range from 30 days for a first offense to a couple years or more for repeated offenses.  Once couples learned that they were only going to have one legally available sexual partner until their youngest child turned 18, they just might learn to get along.)
3. Bring back “common-law marriage”. If you have a child with someone, you are legally married to that person.  If you have a second child with some-one else, you will be convicted of both adultery and bigamy.  This will do wonders to reduce the out-of-wedlock birth rate.

            By forcing the reestablishment of stable family units, we would cut down a great deal of social instability.  Also, by bringing men back into the family unit, we might be able to revive a lot of those nasty male values that seem to have disappeared from our society.  Things like honesty, integrity, a sense of honor, loyalty, and a sense of commitment to one’s family and community.  (Lest anyone think I am anti-woman, I can think of two well-known women whom I would gladly vote for if they were running for president.  Oddly enough they are both named “Judith”.  One is Judith Sheindlin aka “Judge Judy”, and the other is Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners.)

American culture.  American culture has been described as being as toxic as drugs.  The question is how did we mange to sink six degrees below the level of bad taste?

Consider the following.  Picture a ten or eleven year old boy, who’s father takes no interest in him.  He makes many attempts to establish some kind of relationship, but is always put off and rejected.  Eventually he becomes overwhelmed by his feelings of resentment and alienation.  One day his rage reaches the boiling point and he goes out into the yard and sets fire to his daddy’s Mercedes.

     In America we have an entire class of pseudo-intellectuals who feel alienated and estranged from the decision making processes of this society.  They are aware being politically marginalized and react to it with resentment and anger.  One of the ways in which they lash out is by trying to convince impressionable young people and the lesser educated and thus more vulnerable members of our society that all value systems are equal.  Thus lower class values are just as good as middle-class values. A rap song by Snoop Doggy Dog is just as valuable a cultural artifact as a play by Shakespeare or a Mozart symphony.  (Even if these people are participating in some kind of group psychosis, I should think that at least some of them have lucid moments where they realize just how absurd and destructive these positions are.)

     That represents one half of the problem.  The other half comes from the collapse of public education.  (In fact, we no longer have public education, the theory behind our public schools is now “vocational training” which is the opposite of education.)

This has come about because our school administrators and teachers no longer believe in anything, so in essence they have nothing to teach when it comes to civilization and civilized values.

     These problems are not going to be fixed until people are given a better break economically; are once again allowed to have input into the political process, and are once again valued as contributing members of society.  As long as the governing classes see the populace at large as a mass of people to be manipulated through the media, and to be undereducated and politically marginalized, anger and resentment will continue to grow and our society will become more and more unstable.

                              How Islam will win

The long relatively non-violent method. 

       Every once in a while a book comes along where the author is wrong about just about everything.  Except he is right about one thing that is so important that being wrong about everything else becomes irrelevant.  Such a book is Barnett’s book on Globalization and Interconnectedness.  His premise is that terrorism comes from areas that are not connected to globalization and that the way to eliminate terrorism is to connect these areas to the global network.

     What is globalization?  Globalization comes down to two basic components; union busting and tax evasion.  Multinational corporations simply locate their factories where people are willing to work cheap.  And if anyone dares ask for a living wage, that factory will be relocated to someplace where the level of desperation is still high.

By operating in many different countries, it is not difficult to keep the money moving faster than the tax collectors can search for it.

     So when Barnett suggests that the American army be used to connect rogue states to the global grid, what he is really suggesting is that it is the job of the American army to provide multi-national corporations with an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor.

     Where Mr. Barnett is right, has to do with population statistics.  He correctly points out that both western Europe and the United States have adopted social security programs that are little more than Ponzi schemes whereby a certain number of younger workers are taxed to support one older retiree.  However, birth rates of people of European descent are declining below replacement values.  This means that in order to support their programs, both Europe and the United States are going to have to import large numbers of younger workers, and they are going to come from third world countries.  In the not too distant future, we will see a world where native Frenchmen, Germans, British etc. will be a minority population in their own countries.  Already, the United States is rapidly approaching the point where people of white, European descent will be in the minority.

     Barnett seems to be of the opinion that these imported workers will adopt the liberal values of the host society.  Unfortunately, we already have evidence that this will not be the case.  When school integration was just beginning, a number of studies were done with regard to values and value transmission.  The results were all quite similar.  If you have a school of predominantly middle and upper middle-class students and add 10% lower class students, then the lower class students will tend to adopt the middle-class values of the majority.  This will hold true for higher percentages until you reach a critical mass of about 28-30% lower class students.  At that point, the middle class students will begin to adopt the lower class values of the minority students.  In short, it is highly cunlikely that these people are going to adopt our values.

     In the United States, we have already seen massive Moslem immigration to the point where entire sections of certain cities are now Moslem neighborhoods.  If this is allowed to continue, they won’t have to conquer us.  They will simply outbreed us.

                   The shorter, more violent method.

     Previously Israel, and now Iraq is being used as a training ground for the use of massive terrorism.  Already, terrorism and the fear of terrorism is being exported to western Europe to spread fear and intimidation. Already Spain has renounced any participation in the “war on terrorism”.

     The chief  Islamic strategy will be as simple as “divide and conquer”.  Europe will be played off against the U.S. Eventually Europeans will consider the “war on terrorism” to be an American enterprise that does not concern them. (A few devastating terrorist attacks may help them along in this belief.)

     The Americans, finding themselves without support, and not even having the backing of a substantial portion of their own population, will try to ratchet down the bellicosity and make deals with the terrorists.  (Traditionally, the upper-class American establishment has always tried to make deals with the enemy in order to preserve their wealth and power.  There is an entire literature devoted to “trading with the enemy in time of war” as American corporations not only traded with Nazi Germany, they actually owned many of the factories that were making airplanes and tanks for the German army.  Think of it this way, the country is run by a small number of Dr. Smiths, and the rest of us are the Robinson family.)

     Probably the first deal they will try and make, will be to sell out Israel.  The idea that the U.S. and Israel are “friends” or “allies” is strictly for media consumption.  In fact, both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have done everything in their power to prevent the Israelis from retaliating for terrorist attacks.   They have also done their best to coerce Israel into accepting Arab positions that would make it almost impossible for Israel to defend itself if another war broke out. 

     It should be noted that the U.S. was allowed to function as a safe haven for Arab  terrorists as long as they were only active against Israel.  They were allowed to raise money to finance their terrorism campaign and the terrorists themselves were allowed to come here for R&R.  Some of these terrorists were untouchable because they were personal friends of high-ranking officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

     If the U.S. succeeds in squeezing Israel out of existence in order to placate the Arabs, this will backfire on them.  Imagine being chased by a hungry lion and deciding to slow him down by throwing him a six ounce hamburger patty.  All you are going to accomplish is to whet his appetite and make him run even faster.

     Once Israel is gone, the next step will be to flood Western Europe and the U.S. with immigrants.  By a judicious mixture of terrorism and open elections, they will eventually take control by sheer weight of numbers.

     So sometime in the foreseeable future we can look forward to having someone with the warmth, charm and humanity of a Shiite Ayatollah with his hands on our nuclear arsenal.  Unless the people who run this country wake up and realize that they need the rest of us, this is the future we have to look forward to.