Since the days of Saint Augustine, theologians, and intellectuals have debated the Just War Doctrine.  It would seem clear, simply from the fact that this discussion has lasted so long, that wars based on aggression or greed would not be considered just wars.  America has never waged an aggressive war based on greed or avarice. Prior to World War II, Franklin Roosevelt stated that America hated war. America hopes for peace. So if we go to war, we want to be sure the cause is just.  Our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq meets the criteria of a just war, a war fought for the sake of enduring human values.  This war that we have been forced to fight is about ideology … not terrain … or even oil.

Many Americans like to pretend this war on terror began on September 11, 2001. However, the Fascist Islamic Fundamentalists declared war on us way before 9/11, and they have shown us time and time again who they are and why they must be stopped.Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have been waging a war against the United States for many years.  On November 5, 1998, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were indicted in a Manhattan courthouse for conspiring to attack U.S. facilities overseas and to kill American citizens.  It was found then that he and Al-Qaeda had attempted to obtain components to nuclear weapons and chemical weapons as far back as 1993.  Contrary to the popular myths spun in our left-wing media outlets, it was also found that Al-Qaeda had forged an alliance with the government of Iran, and had also reached an agreement with Saddam Hussein himself in regards to weapons development.

Here are just a few of the many other examples to illustrate the kind of brutal and barbaric enemy we are up against:

November 4, 1979: Fifty-two American citizens were taken hostage when militant students of radical Islam stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.  After 444 days in captivity, they were released when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

December 12, 1983: Bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait by an Iranian backed group called Al Dawa or “The Call.” Six people were killed and 80 more were injured.

March 16, 1984: Islamic Jihad kidnapped and later murdered Political Officer William Buckley in Beirut, Lebanon.

December 1985: Simultaneous suicide attacks are carried out against U.S. and Israeli check-in desks at Rome and Vienna international airports. 20 people are killed in the two attacks.

April 5, 1986: A bomb destroys the LaBelle discotheque in West Berlin.  The discotheque was known to be often frequented by U.S. serviceman.  This attack killed one American and one German, and wounded 150, including 44 Americans.

August 7, 1998:  Terrorist bombs destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  In Nairobi, 12 Americans are among the 291 killed, and over 5,000 are wounded including 6 Americans. In Dar es Salaam, one U.S. citizen is injured among the 10 killed and 77 injured.

October 12, 2000:  A terrorist bomb badly damages the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39 more.

September 11, 2001: Nineteen terrorists with known ties to Al-Qaeda hijacked four U.S. airliners and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.  The fourth, also on its way toward Washington, D.C. crashed into a field near Shanksville, PA when courageous Americans tried to retake the hijacked airliner from the terrorists. Over 5,000 innocent civilians were killed in New York City, as many as 200 were killed at the Pentagon site, and 45 were killed at the Shanksville site.

January 23, 2002: Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered on video by an Islamic group in Pakistan. His grave was found near Karachi on May 16.

Tom Fox: In 2005 terrorists group in Iraq calling themselves the Swords of the Righteousness Brigade took four Western peace activists hostage. Tom Fox, a fifty-four-year-old American with a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams was tied up and shot in the head.  His body was dumped near a railroad in Baghdad. When his body was recovered, it clearly showed that this peace activist had been badly tortured before somebody put a bullet in his brain.  What is righteous about that?

Nick Berg: Nick Berg was an American contractor in his mid-thirties working to help rebuild Iraq’s telecommunications infrastructure.  Captured by terrorists, he was brought in front of a video camera and pinned him down while Abu Musab al-Zarqawi cut off is head.  This was a heinous act stemming from a brutal belief system with absolutely no redeeming qualities!

Today’s extreme Muslim fundamentalist ardently believes that Allah has all the answers; therefore, they do not need Western science. While the modern world moves forward, they remain mired in their barbaric self-imposed Dark Ages.  They are true believers. And … to an Islamic terrorist, the thought of dying for Allah and getting the chance to make it with seventy-two virgins would probably seem more appealing than real life. Especially if he takes enough infidels with him … then he will become a real hero. He will be honored, and his family will be well looked after financially by friends, neighbors and, oh yeah, Saddam Hussein … were he still around.

Fighting such a war requires that we know who we are and what we stand for.  I believe that most Americans, with the exception of a few self-loathing left-wing liberals, still know what this country stands for. Throughout our country’s history, American soldiers have fought and died around the globe to protect the basic human rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The United States did not invent these rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; these certain, unalienable rights were not granted to us by our government.  According to our Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, God granted them to us.  Yes, I know … in certain privileged politically correct circles, it has become insulting to point out the source of these rights.

Many people have argued that Iraq posed no threat to our national security. I think those people have either a very poor, or a selective, memory. I see very little difference between Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden and three of the twentieth century’s most evil and bloodiest despots, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin.  I also see little difference between Nazism, Communism and Islamic fascism.  The murderous and thankfully, now overthrown, Saddam Hussein made it very clear that he was an enemy of the United States, his neighbors, and even other Iraqis.

If we had never gone into Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and he would still be killing anyone who dared to disagree with him.  Kurds, if they didn’t tow the line, would still be gassed, their bodies left in the street where they had fallen, as a stark reminder to all the other “traitors” that the price of defiance is an ugly death. Saddam’s loyal minions would still be rounding up “troublemakers” by the hundreds … men, women, even young children … blindfolding them, executing them, and then dumping their bodies in unmarked mass graves. “Enemies of the state” would still be tortured (and not simply with water boarding) till they confessed to what ever was needed. Saddam’s “special police” would still be raping Iraqi women to extract information from their “suspect” husbands. Let us also not forget the special fund Saddam Hussein set up to support the families of martyred suicide bombers. You know, I kind of think that Saddam Hussein would qualify as a weapon of mass destruction himself.

It is hard to imagine that our liberal left-wingers, being such staunch supporters of human rights, would ever be willing to look the other way and ignore the humanitarian aspect of this war in Iraq.And rest assured, Iraq would be working hard to build a nuclear bomb.  Saddam would never sit back and allow Iran to have the only Muslim-held bomb in the Middle East.  The United States would then have not one, but two radical Muslim countries armed with nuclear weapons to contend with.  In fact, Saddam Hussein might already have had a nuclear weapon if not for the Israelis, who in 1981, had the courage to blow up the nuclear reactor France was busy building for him.

Some Democrats like to compare the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. We have heard it again and again.  Iraq is a new Vietnam. In one aspect, they may actually be right.  This may become a self-fulfilling prophecy; especially if they actually get their way.  Remember how Liberal Democrats were overjoyed when American forces were pulled out of Vietnam.  They had won their battle for peace.  However, they remained strangely silent and looked the other way while almost a million South Vietnamese were tortured and murdered, or died in “reeducation camps.” Many perished at sea in a last desperate bid to gain freedom.

I suspect that some of today’s liberal democrats will be just as silent if, on their timetable, we leave Iraq too soon, and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda turn the Middle East region into another giant killing field.  Rest assured, the liberal democrats will act as if they had nothing to do with it.  They will either pretend not to notice the bloodbath … or will conveniently blame it all on George Bush.

It is one thing to be against the war, it something else entirely to be against your own Country. I admit America is not perfect, but it is certainly not evil!  It is not “American imperialism” that sends our soldiers, sailors, and airman into harms way.  Does anyone honestly believe that our government had any plans for Afghanistan prior to 9/11.  Well, we did try to help them kick the invading Russians out of their country.

Certainly, the United States has a vast presence in the world today. People everywhere buy music and videos by new American artists.  As bad as most of them are, it still doesn’t justify suicide bombers … does it?  Nike, McDonalds, Starbucks, Time Warner and other similar multinational companies take a little bit of America with them when they open shop in other countries.  Is that American Imperialism? Don’t we have Toyota, Honda, and Nissan plants in our country! Don’t we have Chinese restaurants, Japanese steakhouses, or Italian restaurants? Is this imperialism?  Critics say that American financial institutions are merely an extension of American imperialism, but aren’t the Chinese happy to buy up American debt?  Is this American imperialism or is it merely a global economy?  Wake up and smell the twenty-first century!

Some countries export terrorism and fear.  America exports freedom and liberty.  And … sometimes we must take up arms to defend that liberty.  That is why we intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo.  That is why we tried, somewhat feebly, to intervene in Rwanda.  And that is why we would also be justified to intervene in Darfur.  We have never in our history entered a country as a conquering force, to occupy, or to colonize.  In World War II, we invaded France to end the German occupation.  All we asked for in return was a place to bury our dead servicemen.

Most American’s, I hope, realize that we are in a struggle we did not choose, against one of the most brutal enemies our nation has ever faced.  But there are always a few idiots that believe that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were something we deserved, or … the “chickens coming home to roost!”  This is a shallow, thoughtless reaction to what occurred on that day.  Suppose the United States did have a horrible foreign policy; that still does not justify hijacking civilian airliners and flying them into buildings filled with civilians. It is an intellectually bankrupt response that ignores the facts!  The terrorists who hijacked those planes on 9/11 were not downtrodden members of a society enslaved by American imperialism.  They were middle-class, well-educated Islamic religious zealots.  Osama bin Laden was a millionaire. America never colonized the Middle East.  We didn’t pull out when colonialism became unsustainable after World War I.  We didn’t leave a mess of impoverished artificially created nation-states.  Actually … we have Europe to thank for that!

Contrary to popular myth, we also did not act unilaterally.  As of August 23, 2006, there were troops from Albania, Armenia, Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, South Korea, and the United Kingdom helping in Iraq.  Some nations, like Japan, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Thailand, Ukraine, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Norway had soldiers in Iraq, but have since withdrawn them.   Spain had troops in Iraq until the terrorists scared them off by blowing up one of their trains.

What disgusts me most is the lack of support from countries like France and Germany.  France and Germany both jumped on the anti-American bandwagon saying that we, the United States, were the bad guys in the world.  They claimed that our power and our ideas are selfish and inherently evil.  Of course, the self-loathing left-wing liberals loved every minute of it.

However … it is complete disingenuous.  The French have made quite a practice of sticking it to the United States.  This is after we have saved their butts in not one, but two world wars.  This is the same France that, in 1981, was building Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor, and the same enlightened France that now has impoverished Muslims rioting in their housing projects.  I wonder how much of France and Germany’s anti-American rhetoric was actually based on real deeply-felt anti-Americanism and how much was based on the lucrative trade deals those countries had signed with Saddam Hussein.  In 2001, France was Iraq’s number one trading partner and France’s largest oil company, Total Fina Elf, had signed extensive oil contracts with Saddam Hussein worth about $650 billion.  Direct trade between Germany and Iraq amounted to about $350 million annually and Saddam Hussein had ordered Iraqi domestic business to show preference to German companies as a reward for Germany’s “firm positive stand in rejecting the launching of a military attack against Iraq.”

Who is fooling who?