World

Bill Collier- The objective of the Islamic terror organizations that waged war on America from its inception, culminating in the 9-11 attacks on New York and DC, was to weaken the US and install Islamist regimes in as many places as possible. The effort to lure in the US to a ground fight on the home turf of the Islamists and bleed that country into weakness and retreat.

Meanwhile, the fear lest in fighting the terrorists we ourselves become intolerant has also led to a paradoxically more friendly and accepted, even protected, status for Islam in the US which has allowed for the ease of recruiting Americans themselves into the ranks of radical Islamism.

While the “war on terror” has spanned the globe and has turned its prying gaze inward toward innocent Americans, thanks to the misnamed “Patriot Act”, in no places was it more violent and concentrated than Iraq and Afghanistan. In these two lands, tens of thousands of US troops came to grips with the enemy and found him to be tough, merciless, and smart. The trauma experienced by hundreds of thousands of young Americans has left a massive scar on more than one generations: 20 years of constant war have meant that the children of the first soldiers who started this war were equally traumatized by it.

The enemy isn’t and wasn’t a tactic of lateral warfare, it was and remains an ideology and those who promote it, a form of imperialistic, totalitarian, and cultish Islam whose goal is world destruction in uhersing in the end of the age. Whether the particular brand is Shia, as from Iran, or Sunni, as from Afghanistan, the common belief is that the state should control the population in a totalitarian manner to produce loyal and faithful Muslims while rooting out any unfaithful persons and punishing them or killing them.

The even deeper root of the core ideology is totalitarian control by the state in service of the ideas and beliefs of the rulers. The fellow travelers of this enemy include right and left wing ideologues, ranging from the right-wing Putin to the left-wing Chinese Communist Party, and in the US includes some leading Democrats and far right antisemites. Totalitarians have a certain solidarity against those who reject totalitarianism on principle and without compromise.

The “war on terror” became an authoritarian overstep both at home and abroad by a government that was becoming increasingly corrupted by parochial self-interest, moral depravity, and greed. The lust for power and control, almost sexual in its feeling, began to infect rank and file and topmost political and corporate leaders who, through the Patriot Act, were less and less accountable to anyone but their own whims. The US became an authoritarian and abusive occupation force whose reign was as abusive to average people as the Islamic totalitarians they had temporarily displaced.

A recent initiative announced by the Biden Administration against “domestic terrorism” seems to see US forces coming home even as all the powers of the Patriot Act which were focused on Islamic terror are focused on opponents, whether of the left or right, of the Democratic Party. The war on terror has been lost and is now morphing into a war on freedom in the name of a new war on “domestic terrorism.”

The loss of this war is seen in the precipitous withdrawal of the US from the heartlands of Islamic Totalitariamism, leaving the field to the likes of the Taliban and Iran. While the Freedomist has never supported this foreign adventurism, the manner of the withdrawal exposes the true depth of the defeat. Put simply, the fields of battle are now left to the Islamic totalitarians whom the US tried to defeat.

With all our military might and modern technology, the US was unable to subdue the enemy or win the population over to a more enlightened way. Small cells and bands of under-armed and untrained irregular forces bled out the US and its allies through a thousand cuts every day. Every “battle” saw the enemy leave the field, but the real strategy wasn’t to occupy lands the US could not enter, the enemy became like water, flowing away from strong force pouring into the surrounding population, who remained sympathetic to them and hostile to the Americans.

The count of dead was not like other wars, mostly because of advances is battlefield medicine. But the toll on the psychology of the troops in these far-flung fields became ever more immense. The cost of materials and supplies, and of “nation building” efforts, has accounted for almost $4 trillion dollars. This comes out to around $12,200 for every single human being living in the United States.

The enemy did not have overt support from major powers, like the Viet Cong did in our last lost war. True, some powers did back the enemy, sporadically, and Iran certainly did all it could, but if the US had wanted to punish these powers, it could have without too much risk to itself.

The constant fighting in essentially hit and run ambushes with plenty of IED’s and terrorist attacks kept US forces on constant guard, a psychological burden few can endure without lasting effects, and it caused many injuries and deaths.

The enemy won on three fronts:

1. Radical Islamic ideology is protected and promoted in the US itself and the overall atmosphere for Islamic recruitment in the US is far more favorable than it has ever been

2. US forces have left the field to the enemy who is now re-occupying ground and gainig global recognition for having defeated “the great satan”

3. The “war on terror” has turned inward and now the enemy of the Islamic totalitarians is itself being torn apart by the growing totalitarianism of its ruling class

After 20 years, the US has lost the war on terror. Totalitarian Islamic ideology is on the march abroad, free to recruit within the US, and content in the knowledge Americans are now the target of the “Patriot Act”, not them!

We lost this war as soon as we decided to wage war on a tactic, liberate people who didn’t want to liberate themselves, and resort to the same kinds of totalitarian methods as our enemies.