Jack Wheeler
Freedom Research Foundation
Friday, Oct. 26, 2001

Blindingly obvious yet still politically incorrect to point out, America and Western civilization are not engaged in a War on Terrorism. It is rather a War on Moslem* Terrorism that we are conducting [see note at end].

We are not at war with every group of terrorists in the world. We are not at war, for example, with Irish terrorists, Basque terrorists, Tamil terrorists, or Hutu terrorists. Instead, America is at war with one specific, identifiable species of terrorism: Moslem terrorism. The only terrorists America is at war with are Moslem terrorists.

Every single individual who planned and participated in the atrocity of Sept. 11, every single individual on President Bush's 22 Most Wanted List are Moslems, adherents to the religion of Islam.

Does this mean that America and Western Civilization are at war with all Moslems, at war with Islam? No. It means that there is a particular pathology confined to believers in Islam, a moral disease within the body of the world Moslem community that is especially acute in Arab Moslems, and it is this with which America is now at war.

It is the moral disease that Nazism, Communism and Moslem terrorism all have in common: criminally pathological envy. Yet we do not need to figure out how to cure Moslem terrorists of their envy of the West, any more than we needed to cure Nazis of their envy of the Jews or Communists of their envy of the bourgeois.

We only need to figure out – as we did with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – how to defeat them. What such a strategy of victory over Moslem terrorism requires is a sequential war.

This is a war fought in a particular sequence of stages, securing success in one before proceeding to the next. Victory in the War on Moslem Terrorism will require sequential success in four stages.

Stage One: Afghanistan. Success here means the Taliban out of power and Osama bin Laden dead. In the aftermath, it is not our job to nation-rebuild Afghanistan, which it must be understood is a country that cannot be governed and cannot be ruled.

Indeed, it is not clear why there should be an Afghanistan at all, given that it is a 19th century artifact as a buffer between the Russian and British Empires. Perhaps the best solution would be to let the place break apart, with the Tajik area going to Tajikistan, the Uzbek area going to Uzbekistan, and south of the Hindu Kush the de-Talibanized Pushtuns getting their area of regional autonomy within an expanded Pakistan.

In exchange, Pakistan would have to achieve a genuine peace with India over Kashmir, shut down the jihadist medressahs (schools of Islamic fanaticism), and destroy the poppy fields of southern Afghanistan, which supply 60% of the world's heroin.

Stage Two: Iraq. Success here means Saddam Hussein dead. The world will not be safe until he is. No massive ground troop invasion is necessary, just 5,000-pound bunker busters dropped on his presidential palaces or sleeping quarters (identified with Mossad or Iraq National Congress resistance intel) until we get him or his own people who can't take it any more get him.

Again, we shouldn't try in the aftermath to pick up the pieces. Iraq is a make-believe country, an artificial construct of the British composed of three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.

Mosul in the north, with its Kirkuk oilfields, should be given to Turkey, on the condition that Ankara grant regional autonomy to the Kurds and the Kurds make peace with Ankara. Basra in the south, with its Shi'ite Arab (non-Sunni, non-Persian) population should be independent. Baghdad in the middle can sink or swim – reinvent itself as a peaceful Islamic trading center plugged into the global economy, or become another abandoned ruin like Babylon or Nineveh.

Stage Three: Iran. Success here means the replacement of the current mullah regime with a new pro-West government. This will be neither easy nor quick. The mullahs know they are hated, particularly by the young (over 50 percent of Iran's population of approximately 60 million are under 25); their regime is fragile and ripe for destabilization.

Yet Iran, or Persia, is a real country, having been in existence for 2,500 years; it is not going to fall apart. The solution here is not military, as in the previous two stages. It lies in a stick/carrot combination of covert activity accelerating public anti-mullah protests and other forms of regime destabilization, with diplomatic persuasion for the mullahs to cease their support of Hezbollah and other terrorist movements, and let go of their stranglehold on democratic elections.

Iranian voters have shown their clear preference for pro-freedom, anti-mullah candidates. If an actual democracy can be established in Iran, free of mullah control, it would be a lynchpin shifting the entire dynamics of the Moslem world away from jihadist radicalism and toward a rapprochement with the West. As a consequence, Iran would flourish, with all the Caspian landlocked oil having sea access via its pipelines. A flourishing Democratic Iran sets the stage for:

Stage Four: Saudi Arabia. Here we come to the crux of the matter. An interwoven nest of pestilential problems – lack of peace between Israel and its neighbors, Arab countries as fascist poverty pits, Moslem terrorism – has been built through desperate and ceaseless efforts to continue the corrupt rule of the Saudi royal family.

We advocate democracy everywhere from Serbia to Burma, yet never for the Arabs – for talk of Arab democracy leads to the great unmentionable, Saudi democracy. As long as the world insists on remaining hostage to Saudi oil, these problems will not end. Thus success here means securing other major supplies of oil while launching a full effort to democratize the Arab world, thereby converting Saudi Arabia into a democratically free constitutional monarchy.

A worldwide strategy for independence from Saudi oil would include:

(1) A free Iran as an outlet for Caspian oil as per Stage Three;

(2) The stabilization of Nigeria, with President Olesegun Obasanjo assisted in truly ending rapacious corruption, instituting the rule of law, providing regional autonomy, and shutting down anti-Christian Islamic fanaticism;

(3) The termination of Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez's rule in Venezuela (the U.S. imports more oil from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia, and Chavez is destroying not only Venezuela's economy but also its political institutions);

(4) A joint military task force from the armies of Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru formed with U.S. cooperation to militarily eradicate the FARC and other narco-marxist guerrillas from Colombia (this would secure 1 million barrels per day);

(5) The drilling of ANWR in Alaska, and a crash program to develop methods to safely and efficiently extract the 2 trillion barrels of oil presently locked into tar sand deposits in the U.S. and Canada (my company, Energeia, Inc., is working on just such a process).

The ultimate goal of Osama bin Laden is to become the Ayatollah Khomeini of Saudi Arabia. Should he try to escape from Afghanistan ahead of his American pursuers, it would not be to Sudan or Somalia, but to Saudi Arabia where he expects to be welcomed as the next Mahdi (messiah) by his myriad of followers and financial supporters.

Bin Laden hates America for supporting what he hates even more, the corrupt Saudi royals polluting his sacred land – exactly as Khomeini hated America for supporting the shah. He will, of course, be hunted down and shot well before he gets the chance to become the Saudi Ayatollah.

The Moslem world is nonetheless at a fork in the road determining its future. Down one way bin Laden beckons Islam to remain in its medieval Dark Ages, rejecting and fighting the civilized world. Down the other lies the promise of democratic Islam with political freedom and women treated as human beings, with economic freedom allowing people to prosper instead of enviously desiring to destroy.

Waging a Sequential War on Moslem Terrorism is the only way to ensure that the first path is a dead end and that taking the second path is the Moslem world's solitary option.

Copyright 2001 Dr. Jack Wheeler and the Freedom Research Foundation.

*Note on Spelling of Moslem

Have you noticed that there is a politically correct way to transliterate the spelling of adherents to Islam? All my life it was normally "Moslem." All of a sudden, P.C. types get very upset if you spell it this way. Now the politically correct way is m-u-s-l-i-m, pronounced "moose limb."

Since Arabic does not have a true alphabet – vowels are not written down, only consonants – what is being transliterated from the Arabic is "Mslm." So why does the traditional transliteration of Moslem drive certain folks into fits of P.C. frenzy? Take a look at every newspaper and magazine article – you will see now it's always m-u-s-l-i-m. I have even been huffily chastised by a prominent conservative Republican activist in Washington, who sniffed, "You should at least know how to spell it right."

Well, that settles it. I will never spell Moslem as Moose Limb as long as I live. For me, it will remain Moslem forevermore. For anyone who does not knee-jerk comply with political correctness, I suggest they might consider doing the same.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
War on Terrorism