Those who would raise the white flag

How the Mullahs won

Or, why we may as well throw up the white flag and surrender.

It is true. The terrorists have won. Sorry George (W). Where you stood resolutely against the insidious monsters who unleashed a volley of death and destruction on the capitol of capital (New York) and the capitol of power (Washington), today’s wussy-footed leaders are much more content taking a relaxed approach to dealing with the unending threats from the mullahs, imams and lone wolves taking their orders from Allah against liberal, educated, free societies. And frankly, Dubya, you were also a great disappointment when it came to prosecuting this war, in how you let your iron-clad guarantee to “bring justice to the terrorists”, get muddied and watered down into “bring a half-baked strategy into an area where time is on the side of the bad guys, and poor policies will hand them the victory without doing anything aside from surviving.”

And the almost-but-not-entirely-ironic thing is that, as so often it happens, the underdog won this fight, not by their great skill and puissance, but rather by the incompetence and poor management skills of the nations and leaders which they hated.

That’s right. I said it. America has officially lost the War on Terror.

And let me assure you, as someone who is proud to have been born in the USA, this is nothing I am proud of.

I remember on 9/11, telling my then business-partner, that the “terrorists of al-Qaida have just announced their retirement and inevitable demise” because they had so boldly attacked the headquarters of America’s military arsenal, and the people who finance their operations.

I was sure, like so many, that America and its leaders would never sit around and take it up the backside like a cheap chattle; that President George W. Bush would live up to the family dynasty, and go kick some butt in the desert. I was sure that America and her allies would support this war on terror. I was sure that the free world did not want to live under the constant threat of Islamist terror, anywhere, anytime, and for no good reason.

It was evident to me that Israel, whose very existence has been constantly challenged by this sort of insane hatred by blood-lusting cultures following in the murderous footsteps of Mohamed, would be a bastion of freedom and an island of sanity, peace, democracy and freedom in the Middle East, taking down the enemy one evil actor at a time.

How bloody wrong I was.

If, as they say, all that evil needs to win is for good men to do nothing, then in this particularly long and wide-reaching conflict, evil got a booster shot from all of the faux friends and allies who not only did nothing to help, they in fact did everything they could to hinder and hurt the West’s chances of success in fighting and winning this unholiest of holy wars.

Rather than rally behind the war effort, the political opposition party at the time (the Democratic Party, as it were) chose to go immediately on the offensive against its own national leader and his foreign policy.

Instead of supporting operations and the troops who served in them, the Democratics demonized their own people serving in the armed forces, even as they whipped out their old yellow ribbons and started banging away at the old, predictable drums of war and peace.

When America did anything less than perfectly, Americans were the first and loudest critics of its flaws, even highlighting some errors which would otherwise have gone unnoticed by the enemies in the field.

When America did things perfectly, they could get no credit from the critics.

When the terrorists did the most awful things; cruelly beheading random people it captured on video, bombing people for no good reason, stoning men and women to death in public for daring to learn anything aside from the Koran, they were excused and apologized for, by the bottomless pool of apologists who will quite literally bend over any which way they can, to take one for the team that hates America. This, despite using America and all of its great freedoms to attack its very being. Try spouting off some insane religious hatred of Sunni Muslims in an ISIS-controlled part of Syria or Iraq, and see what happens. Go to Afghanistan and start talking trash about al-Qaida in one of their strongholds … let’s see how long you last.

And even the Republicans who supported the war the most, were awful supporters of it, often making their supportive statements sound more damaging to the President’s policies than the vile attacks from the angry old men in turbans, sitting in caves or homes thousands of miles away from America.

The fact is, the people who defend these “exotic” cultures are doing nothing other than to excuse the barbarism of the Dark Age of Islam in the 21st century. And these self-hating people, whoever they are, wherever they are, and whatever political stripes one may ascribe to them, are the hamstring that ultimately caused America to lose its will to fight and its ability to win in the war whose enemy is not only taking orders from an invisible fantasy, but is getting closer and closer to having the bomb at its disposal, and therefore beginning to impose its will, by force majeure, on other nations, whether they accept that fact presently, or not.

And so the plague of accepting terrorists and their ilk went viral, on YouTube, AlJazeera, facebook and elsewhere on the web, and their cells divided and multiplied, until all of the Middle East, and other nations too, were subsumed to this horrible disease, that could not be won by the sick patient whose doctor refused to treat him appropriately.

Now, to be sure, I’m not saying that all Americans, Israelis and British people will be reading the Koran five times a day starting tomorrow morning. However, if you look at the latest round of “insurgency” taking place in Iraq, the outcome is evident.

Mostly due to weak-kneed internal pressures against winning the damn war, America pulled out of Iraq, and the long-predicted massive power vaccuum ensued.

Never mind that we left behind untold amounts of equipment for the bad guys to grab when the troops we left behind deserted at the first sight of serious fighting by the ISIS thugs. What did we expect? That regular Iraqi soldiers, who are almost more famous for surrendering than the French, would somehow use their paltry US-managed military basic training experience, to stand up to the divinely-driven radicals who want to die in the name of Allah and jihad?

Never mind that Iran is now leveraging the war between Sunnis (from which al-Qaida and ISIS are born) and Shiites (from which Iran’s autocrats come from) in a strategic move that will give them more influence in their nuclear talks and other regional politics and other international diplomacy with the United States and other nations.

By any metrics, that is no way to run a war, and it is no way to declar victory and depart the field. Patton would surely have bitch-slapped the entire Pentagon and … dare I say it? (yes), the President himself for such a girlish approach to killing the enemy and accepting nothing less than unconditional surrendder.

Given all of this great news, aren’t you glad we’re about to pull out of Afghanistan in just about the same abrupt and ill-planned manner that we pulled out of Iraq?

Of course, I could be wrong. Frankly, I’d love to be wrong about this. Until someone shows me otherwise, however, I think we’d all be a little wiser to accept that the mullahs have managed to use their patience against American impatience for poorly executed, long wars. To boot, they’ve also successfully used Western freedom and dissent against itself in such a way, that frankly, they have won.

Full disclosure: When not skewering politicians and the insanities of war, Yasha Harari has composed music and written songs of war, peace and love, performed for millions of people, built and torn down homes in Jerusalem and contributed to music, the internet, media and political organizations in the U.S., Europe and Israel.