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We Shall Not Sleep Diane Alden
In the late 1930s, a young man with journalistic aspirations wrote a senior thesis at Harvard that became a best-selling book. The information and analysis contained therein caused a huge debate in the U.S. and Europe. The book he wrote related the historical and practical reasons why a certain European country had failed to recognize the obvious signs of the ascendance of a cruel and inhumane tyranny. Even worse, that country failed to do anything significant to stop it. The triumph of that evil tyranny led to the deaths of 50 million people and shattered entire continents for decades.
The country that ignored the warning signs and loved peace too much was England. The journalist/student who wrote the book was John F. Kennedy. The book was titled "Why England Slept." An excerpt from that book may apply to the U.S. at this crossroad in its history. With few exceptions, as a nation we stand alone to face international tyranny and cruelty in the person of Saddam Hussein and the rest of the thugs in the "Axis of Evil."
The feeling [in England] was very similar to that in the United States during 1937 and 1938 when most of our opposition to Nazism was based on its injustices to its own people rather than on any potential menace which it might be to us. Like England's, ours was a detached criticism of a form of government, rather than a realistic grasp of the implications of that form of government on the welfare of the world. And this is not the sort of feeling that calls for building up armaments for defense, but rather for speeches pointing out how fortunate we are not living in Germany. This was the great advantage Hitler had over England. He could build his war machine and plan to have it ready to strike in a definite period of time. Sixty years later, a professor of history and classics at Yale by the name of Donald Kagan wrote a book titled “While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today.” (St. Martin's Press, 2000) His co-author was his son Frederick, a ‘95 Ph.D. from Yale and a professor of history at West Point. The book offers a warning that the U.S. is vulnerable to a new generation of unconventional warfare and terror which had not even begun to be addressed. The Kagans explain that in the 1990s and early 21st century, America is similar to Great Britain after the First World War. As in two other works – “While England Slept,” by Winston Churchill, and “Why England Slept,” by John F. Kennedy – it analyzes the implications of Great Britain's failure to play the role of peacekeeper in the 1920s and 1930s. The failure, Churchill and Kennedy argued, led to the Second World War. In his book Professor Kagan believes that this country is on the same road. "If there was one word we meant to communicate in our book it was worry," says Kagan. "People might think of us as alarmists, but we think there's something to be alarmed about. The peace does not keep itself, and though it may be intellectually unfashionable to say so, the world needs a policeman." (1) They Slept On Oct. 31, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which states that the United States "should ... support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein." On Nov. 15, 1998, Clinton affirmed that the best way to deter Iraqi threats "over the long term" was through the emergence of "a new government" in Baghdad. Over $97 million in aid was attached to ILA. However, the Clinton administration used very little of it to support the Iraqi opposition. Hundreds of Iraqi freedom fighters were killed by Saddam's troops, while others fled to the U.S. and were granted political asylum. Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger paid lip service to "intensifying" U.S. cooperation with the forces of change in Iraq, i.e., the Iraqi opposition. Berger pledged to "do all we can to strengthen the Iraqi opposition so that it can seek change inside Iraq." Instead, they chose to leave it to its own devices. One of the U.S. operatives, CIA agent Robert Baer, wrote a book about that episode and the many other failures of U.S. intelligence under various presidents. In “See No Evil,” Baer relates some hard truths. In the middle of trying to help the opposition in Iraq overturn Saddam, Baer was called home, taken into custody by the FBI as the Clinton regime decided it didn't want to help the Iraqi opposition after all – in effect, pretending that Baer was somehow a loose cannon with no mission assigned by the Clinton administration. Baer concludes: The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The oceans on either side of us were all the protection we needed. Afloat on this sea of self-absorption, the White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see. While We Slept It is a tragedy, but for over two decades America has been asleep. We slept when hostages were taken in Iran in 1979. We slept when over 200 Marines were blown to bits in Beirut in 1984. We slept when airline hijackers dumped the lifeless body of a Navy enlisted man onto the tarmac as a flight crew watched in abject horror. We slept when Americans were killed in various countries around the world. We slept when they were kidnapped, tortured or murdered. We slept when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. We slept when the Khobar Towers and Pan Am Flight 103 bombings took place. All were perpetrated by Muslim terrorist organizations with implicit, if not tacit, support from extremist Muslim countries like Iraq. We slept when the USS Cole was attacked, killing 17 U.S. Navy personnel. We slept when the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed in August 1998, killing at least 301 persons and injuring more than 5,000 others. We awoke on September 11, 2001, from the same kind of slumber that plagued England and the United States in the 1930s. The Iraqi Connection On a recent MSNBC talk show, journalist Mike Barnicle interviewed two players in the current war on terrorism. One was Special Ops and Green Beret Jack Idema. Along with former Green Beret, author Robin Moore, they wrote an excellent chronicle of the war in Afghanistan called "The Hunt for Bin Laden." The other interviewee was former CIA Director James Woolsey. BARNICLE: Jack [Idema], on the ground in Afghanistan, for the months that you were there, fighting alongside the Northern Alliance, picking up all sorts of intelligence, engaged in all sorts of firefights, did you ever come across any link that you could establish, in your own mind, between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network? IDEMA: Oh, absolutely. That was like such common knowledge, it was unbelievable, not only common knowledge for us, but common knowledge for the Afghan intelligence agencies. There was one thing that was clear – that our friends, like Pakistan, were not our friends, that they were helping al-Qaeda, but even more importantly, that our enemies were clearly helping al-Qaeda: Iranian weapons, Iranian documents, Iraqi weapons, Iraqi documents, Iraqi false passports, Iraqi money, letters and contacts and information, computer programs and computers that would link them to Iraq and to the Iraqi intelligence agencies. [End of excerpt] When Barnicle asked James Woolsey about the Iraq and al-Qaeda connection, Woolsey stated: "Oh, I think clearly it exists. George Tenet, director of central intelligence, wrote to the Senate back in October, saying that there were contacts going back 10 years, and some of them high-level, and that al-Qaeda had been trained by Iraq in poisons, gases and explosives. I think, in terms of what we all really ought to focus on, which is whether there is enough connection, that it would be plausible that al-Qaeda could be given weapons of mass destruction, say, biological weapons, by Iraq. That level of contact, I think, is quite clear." The problem with Iraq, however, is not so much whether there is a direct link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in the September 11 attack on the U.S., but rather that over decades, Iraq and Saddam, Iran, Syria, Libya and others have given aid and comfort, money and supplies, weapons and information, while acting as a home base to terrorists who attacked the United States and its allies. September 11, 2001, was just one more date in the long list of attacks and atrocities committed by Islamo-fascists supported by states like Iraq. It would be remiss to mention the fact that the U.S. has often turned a blind eye as tyrants and terrorists inflicted the cruelest kinds of torture and terror on the inhabitants of their own countries and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the terrorist states continue to build up their infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons and amass biological and chemical agents to use at some point in the future. If we choose to ignore these facts and go back to sleep, the next awakening may be one from which we will not recover. The evidence of Iraqi complicity in terrorism over the years is overwhelming. Unfortunately, the Bush administration finds it difficult to put it together in comprehensible form for the general public to digest. The following should be helpful to those who wonder why we have reasons to war with Iraq. Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). On August 28, 2002, a U.S. federal grand jury issued a new indictment against five terrorists from the Fatah Revolutionary Council. ANO, aka Fatah Revolutionary Council, Arab Revolutionary Brigades, Black September, and Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims. The leader of the ANO, the infamous Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna), died violently in Baghdad. Abu Nidal could have provided extraordinarily damaging testimony with regard to Saddam's involvement in international terrorism, even beyond Iraqi support of ANO activities in the 1970s and 1980s. Contrary to the official Iraqi story about suicide, the Iraqis murdered him to shut him up. From 1974 to 1983 the ANO waged an intensive terrorist war against its perceived enemies from its headquarters in Baghdad. Abu Nidal was known to be living in Iraq in 2001, when Jordan's state security court sentenced him to death by hanging, along with four of his followers, for his role in the January 1994 assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut. Iraqi authorities refused to extradite him to Jordan. Nor has Iraq made any attempt to punish Abu Nidal for the numerous American, British and French citizens and other nationals injured or killed in ANO attacks over the years. Iraqi authorities granted permission for CBS reporter Lesley Stahl to interview the only participant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing not in prison. Abdul Rahman Yasin was indicted for the bombing, but later escaped to Iraq. Iraq's providing safe haven to a known terrorist leader is the case of Abu al-Abbas (Mahmoud Abbas), secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Abbas was responsible for the October 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the killing of elderly disabled passenger Leon Klinghoffer, an American citizen. Israel permitted Abbas to return to the Gaza Strip. Fearing an extradition request by the United States, he chose the confines of Baghdad instead. In October 2000, with the outbreak of the current Palestinian intifada, Abbas announced on Iraqi television that the PLF would resume confrontations with Israel; this, following the "call made by President Saddam Hussein to open the door for volunteering [which] is an order to fight for us." Iraq recruited and trained PLF activists in Iraqi camps and equipped them with weapons, which they then used to carry out terrorist attacks in Haifa (April 2001) and the West Bank (July 2001). In July 2001, Mohammed Kandil, a Palestinian from the West Bank, was arrested upon the discovery that he was recruited by Iraqi intelligence in order to build a terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank. Iraq has also revived its proxy organization, the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), with the specific mission of encouraging suicide operations against Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. One of ALF's leaders, al-Hajj Rateb al-Amleh, is responsible for providing material support to the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists. This support has included public events at which the presentation of $25,000 Iraqi checks payable to the families of "martyrs" is used to glorify Saddam Hussein and encourage solidarity between the Iraqi regime and the Palestinian people against their common "Zionist" and "imperialist" enemies. (2) Abu Nidal conducted much of its operations against the United States, its ally Israel, Jordan, and African and European nations from a safe haven in Iraq. For the sake of brevity I left out the foreign victims of Iraq complicity in Islamo-fascist murder and mayhem around the world. A partial list of American victims include:
In 1984 in a Paris Café:
1985 bombing of British Airways office in Rome (in addition to 61 killed from other nations):
El-Al checkout counter in Rome,1985 (12 Americans were wounded): Terrorist expert Yossef Bodansky warned America and the world about Saddam Hussein's support of al-Qaeda because Saddam had done so for over a decade. In "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America,” published in 2000, Bodansky lays out the data and documentation that link Saddam and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Saddam Hussein's fingerprints were all over the earlier effort to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Two of those involved found a protected sanctuary in Iraq. The Heart of Darkness While Americans have been dying for decades at the hands of Islamo-fascist groups like Islamic Jihad and Abu Nidal, the peoples of the Arab world, especially in Iraq, have been living under a regime every bit as bad and dangerous as the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Amnesty International reports the documented forms of torture used by Saddam Hussein and his son Uday and the cabal that surrounds him. They would make Josef Mengele proud. They include:
Widespread disappearances are prevalent and occur regularly among Kurdish minorities. In 2001, Amnesty International claimed that Saddam Hussein’s government was responsible for the majority of the hundreds of thousands of persons that have disappeared in the Middle East and North Africa in recent decades. Just like the Taliban and the Wahhabi of Saudi Arabia, Saddam's form of Sunni Islam reflects his hatred of women. The daily newspaper "Babel" owned by Uday, the eldest son of Saddam Hussein, contained a public admission on February 13, 2001, of beheading women who are suspected of prostitution. "Under the pretext of fighting prostitution, units of ‘Feda’iyee Saddam,’ the paramilitary organization led by Uday, have beheaded in public more than two hundred women all over the country, dumping their severed heads at their families’ doorsteps. Many of the victims were innocent professional women, including some who were suspected of being dissidents. Such barbaric acts were carried out in the total absence of any proper judicial procedures, even under Iraq’s own Penal Code." (Policy Watch, March 3, 2001). The U.N. Special Report on Iraq to the Commission on Human Rights has specifically documented 16,496 cases of disappearances but states that the number of Kurds alone missing from the 1988 Anfal Campaign could reach tens of thousands. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International place the number of the vanished between 70,000 and 150,000. According to the U.N. Special Report, the second-largest targeted group for disappearances were the Shi’a Muslims. The numbers of missing far surpass the 9,000 who disappeared under the Argentine junta or the 3,000 in Pinochet's Chile, or the 10,000 Albanian dead in Kosovo. In just one month in 1991, the regime killed 30,000 civilians during the uprisings that followed the Gulf War. To ensure the loyalty of the rest, Saddam has killed 20,000 members of his ruling Ba'ath party during his years in power. Total membership is 400,000: He's killed 5 percent of his closest supporters. (3) Gwynne Roberts, a reporter for the London-based Independent, describes her experience in a torture center in Northern Iraq: In one cell pieces of human flesh – ear lobes – were nailed to the wall, and blood spattered the ceiling. A large metal fan hung from the ceiling and my guide told me prisoners were attached to the fan and beaten with clubs as they twirled. There were hooks in the ceiling used to suspend victims. A torture victim told me that prisoners were also crucified, nails driven through their hands into the wall. A favorite technique was to hang men from the hooks and attach a heavy weight to their testicles. (Independent, March 29, 1991) (4) Meanwhile, our elites, especially those on the left, and they include mainstream church leaders, do not rage against Saddam Hussein and his barbarism. No, they would rather suggest that the United States is evil for attempting to end the regimes and the barbarism in the worldwide terror system, which includes Iraq. Joseph Laconte of the Heritage Institute writes: "The U.S. Catholic Bishops have made a perfunctory call on Iraq to ‘cease its internal repression,’ but said nothing about how that might happen with Saddam in power. Christian leaders in America and Britain who sermonize endlessly about ‘economic justice’ are mostly mute about the demands of political justice when it comes to Iraq." Laconte recounts that the famous theologian Karl Barth, writing to Christians in Britain, then under siege from Hitler's Germany, agreed: "The State would lose all meaning and would be failing in its duty as an appointed minister of God ... if it failed to defend the bounds between Right and Wrong by threat, and by the actual use, of the sword." His contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr flogged American theologians for invoking Jesus' command to "love thy neighbor" in order to justify U.S. inaction. "This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel," he wrote. "It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence." Obviously, the Catholic bishops have forgotten the condemnation that Pius XII and the Catholic Church endured because they were accused of not doing enough to stop Hitler or prevent the annihilation of millions during the 1930s and '40s. But our Western elites, as they did in the slumbering '30s, reveal a selective self-absorbed blindness and hatred of those who challenge or confront evil and barbarism where they find it. It is typical in the same actions of elites in the 1930s. From Hollywood to academe, from mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups to isolationists on the right, they all want to believe that the evil in the world will go away if we just ignore it or appease it or pretend it is capable of rational thought. In that regard, historian and scholar Professor Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote:
Western Europe has almost gone the way of Weimar. Amoral, disarmed, and socialist, it seeks ephemeral peace at all costs, never long-term security, and much less justice. Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide. ... As in the past we see ideals in the militarily weak but spiritually strong leaders of Eastern Europe, as the Czechs and Poles once more reveal themselves to be far more moral men and women than any in Germany and France – the historic duet that so often either started or lost wars. So it is America that considers going to war, on its own, with few allies. In that context we must realize that the Old Country nations of Europe and tired elites on both sides of the Atlantic have lost faith with themselves and with what is best about Western civilization. Their antipathy toward their own societies and systems blinds them to reality. As in the past, they prefer surrender or accommodation with evil than confronting it or ending it. In any event, ours is not a perfect civilization, nor is America a perfect country. Our internal problems and divisions mount even as we consider liberating a region where a cruel and inhumane reality is personified by men like Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Momar Quaddafi, Ayatollah Khatami and Osama bin Laden. But if their pernicious brand of evil is allowed to thrive unchallenged, our current problems will be pale reflections of the horror that will be inflicted on the world in the future. No, we didn't want to be the world's policemen. How pleasant it would be to shake our fists and tell the world a pox on all your houses. Close our borders, remove our military from around the world, and never give any nation another dime or help in time of trouble. But America is one of the few nations left that can prevent barbarism from successfully engulfing the world. To fail in that endeavor will eventually lead to our own destruction and the loss of our national soul. We cannot – we must not – go back to sleep. We Shall Not Sleep America has never shirked from great sacrifices. In the name of just causes we lost hundreds of thousands in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and various smaller wars in the 20th century. One of the greatest commemorations of sacrifice, and a remembrance that greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends, comes from a Canadian doctor who fought in World War I. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, M.D. (1872-1918) was a Canadian army surgeon who helped take care of the wounded and dying at the World War I battle in France in the Ypres Salient in the spring of 1915. One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2, 1915. Lt. Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain. In his memory and that of all the others who died in the "Great War." The first verse of "In Flanders Fields" reflects the moment in time in which McCrae writes about what he saw.
In Flander Fields the poppies blow
We are the Dead. Short days ago
Take up our quarrel with the foe: We shall not sleep, because on September 11, 2001, evil was loosed upon America and we were attacked directly. Saddam Hussein didn’t fly the aircraft into the Pentagon or World Trade Center, but he and the leaders of barbaric nations like Iran and Libya or the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are co-conspirators with those who did. This kind of evil is as old as time. It has been called many names, but it produces the same kinds of horrors wherever it is found. It never stops until it is totally defeated. The attack on the United States was a wake-up call for all of us. It tells us that our enemies care for nothing except our destruction. Because of that reality, if we are wise we will remember the words of President John F. Kennedy at his inauguration on January 20, 1961: "And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe ... the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. "Let the word go forth from this time and place ... to friend and foe alike ... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ... born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage ... and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today ... at home and around the world. "Let every nation know ... whether it wishes us well or ill ... that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty." His words echo those of Lt. Col. McCrae: "We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields." Part V on Immigration Reform next time To comment, write alden@newsmax.com or visit my Web site at www.aldenchronicles.com Diane may be heard every Friday on American Breakfast Radio Show with Phil Paleogolas at 8:30 EST, and every Wednesday with Marc Bernier when she puts on her military and terrorism expert hat.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Editor's note: References 1. Yale Alumni Magazine Return 2. International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism Return 3. Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State Return 4. Washington Institute Return
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