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America at War Again

by Herbert Druks, Ph.D.

It seems as if there never has been peace. However much America has always tried to avoid being at war it is always in the midst of a war or helping some friend or ally. This time it is somewhat different. This time the American mainland was attacked. The American mainland was attacked for the first time since the British attacked in 1812 and torched Washington, D.C. The Americans won that second war of independence.

This time - September 11, 2001 Arab Muslims hijacked American passenger jet planes and crashed them into American cities. Two of those planes were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and one was crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth plane was to crash into another Washington target but the passengers resisted the Arab hijackers and it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside. The 19 hijackers were connected with Osama Bin Laden and his band of terrorists who reside in Afghanistan these days. Eleven were Saudi Arabians.

The George W. Bush administration spent some three weeks trying to determine the identity of the perpetrators of the attacks. Thousands of Americans were killed by this terrorist attack, this wanton act of war. It was the sixth time that Americans and their properties were attacked by the Arab terrorist forces of Bin Laden. There was an attempt to blow up the Twin Towers, two embassies in Africa, a residential building in Saudi Arabia were blown up and one ship in the Persian Gulf area was hit by the Bin Laden boys. They hate America. They hate the West. They hate Israel. They are fundamentalist Islamic Arab extremists who have little or no use for the non-Islam world of the west. They live in a world all their own. They seek to turn mankind to the 7th Century when Moslem tribes sought to conquer the Near East, Africa and the rest of the world.

When President George W. Bush decided to fight the terrorists he stressed that the fight was against the terrorists and not the world of Islam. In order to win the support of such Arab states as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt for his "Coalition" he excluded Israel. He did what his father, President George H. Bush had done in 1991. At that time George H. Bush, had a war with Iraq, and he not only excluded Israel from the so-called "Coalition" but he prevented Israel from defending itself. Before President George W. Bush launched his attack against Bin Laden's allies, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, he declared that one of his long-range goals was to see a Palestinian state established. But he qualified that statement by saying that the Palestinians should end their conflict with Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to another so-called cease-fire, but there was not a moment of cease-fire. Israelis fell to the guns and bombs of the Palestinian terrorists Hamas, Hizbullah, PA, PLO, et al. - and Israel fired back. The Arab-Israeli war continued. Sharon declared a freeze on the cease-fire, but Shimon Peres, Israel's aged foreign minister, still sought to talk peace with Arafat. Sharon declared that Israel was not Czechoslovakia of 1938, that it would defend itself against the aggressors. (In November 1938 France, Great Britain, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's endorsement, forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudentenland to Germany. Soon thereafter most of Czechoslovakia was taken over by Germany.) Sharon felt that George W. Bush's administration was appeasing the Arab world at Israel's expense in order to have such Arab-Islamic states as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan on America's side.

Bush was upset and declared that Sharon's remarks were "unacceptable." Sharon apologized: "To my regret the metaphor [of Czechoslovakia] in my speech was not understood properly," Sharon said. "And I regret it. President Bush has made a courageous decision to set as a goal the eradication of terrorism. The government of Israel welcomes this decision and will provide its full and unwavering support to the success of this commitment of the president."

Menachem Begin has used almost the same language when Israel sought to destroy the PLO in Lebanon and Reagan came forth with a peace plan in 1982. Begin said that Israel was not Chile and that he was not Allende. He spoke of how the U.S. government chose to overthrow governments it disagreed with. It was a "well known practice in the United States," said Begin, "to change a government that does not accept a certain position" of the American government "either by pressure in the press or by announcements by officials or by assistance to rival parties." "If anybody tries to use pressure against us, Israel is going to behave as the Czechs should have behaved in 1938, but didn't."

In 1991 Israel wanted to exercise its right of self-defense when Iraq bombarded Israel with Scud missiles, President George H. Bush, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now Vice President to George W. Bush), Secretary of State James Baker, and Chief of Staff Colin Powell, insisted that Israel not fight back. They argued that it would ruin the "Coalition" and its efforts to destroy Iraq's Biological-Chemical and Nuclear arsenals. Yitzhak Shamir and his government yielded to American pressures. Israel was denied its sovereign right to self defense by its "friend" and "ally" the United States of America.

Continuing in the path of his predecessors George W. Bush now called for the establishment of a Palestinian State. But no President since Jimmy Carter seemed to have realized that the Palestinian Arabs were not interested in just a so-called "Palestinian" state. They wanted and they still want all of the Land of Israel. Bin Laden and company want the "West" out of all the so-called "holy lands" of the Near East and Africa. It is their crusade. It is their holy mission. Even if there were no Israel the Arab-Islamic forces that are sometimes called Fundamentalists and sometimes defined as terrorists would not want to see any Western influence in their midst. They want to return to a time - perhaps 643 - when Islam was on the march in its plan to conquer the world. Bin Laden's folks had been planning the destruction of the World Trade Center and the American economy while President Clinton, Arafat and Barak were working on a peace agreement in Camp David.

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