Iraq no longer exists, not in any essential sense. The fall of Ramadi is a sign of impending ruin. With the Islamic state rising, spreading and rallying Moslems to arms for jihad, which still means holy war, the Middle East is near total war. The aimless war for nothing that George W. Bush started for the wrong reasons in the wrong country, which was continued and scaled back for the wrong reasons by Barack Obama, comes to this: pure barbarism. As an American government official, choosing to remain nameless, tells today’s edition of the New York Times: “We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened [in Iraq].”
Any honest man can see what happened, as any thinking adult could have seen that Islamic terrorists would be motivated to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands despite what the foolish Condoleezza Rice said to the contrary. Bush refused to declare, wage and win war against state sponsors of 9/11 and other Islamic terrorism. This is what happened to end Iraq. Instead, Bush chose to praise the ideology of the enemy, Islam, refuse to bomb mosques (like his predecessor Bill Clinton), order the Marines to stand down at Fallujah, put the lives of others above the lives of Americans, time and time and time and time again like his father, and wipe out thousands and thousands of Americans for absolutely nothing of value for the United States of America. Nihilistic Obama, also time and again, lied and went back on his word and did the same as Bush only with more explicit endorsement of the enemy’s ideology. The end of Iraq makes plain what some of us have been saying since 2004: American soldiers who died in Iraq, as painfully depicted in American Sniper, died in vain. This is what Americans should think about on Memorial Day.
That and the fact that they, the Americans, sanctioned the sacrifice and collapse. They did so by electing and re-electing Bush and Obama. They did so by tuning into cynicism or, worse, nihilism, and choosing not to think about Iraq, Syria, and the major state sponsors of death to the West, Iran and Saudi Arabia. They did so by ignoring Libya, Afghanistan, and attacks by Moslems on Americans at Benghazi, Boston and Fort Hood. They did so by regarding 9/11 as a crime, not as an act of war; as a tragedy to mourn rather than as an atrocity to avenge. They did so by going along with America’s submission to those waging war for Islam. They did so by evading that the war between religious savage and civilized man and its corollary, the rise of the U.S. police state such as the NSA, TSA and censorship, is a victory for jihad and an imminent threat to life. Americans all but made, chose and commissioned the end of Iraq and the meaningless deaths of thousands of their soldiers and countrymen—by refusing to think and demand the end of jihad without mercy—and the end of Iraq is the bloody forewarning that, until they do, Americans act by default to end America.
This Memorial Day weekend, I urge Americans to think, or re-think, and think twice about the men and women who fought and died, the unending war and the fact of doom and dictatorship that threatens to destroy freedom in America. Read this interview with my late friend and teacher, war and history professor John David Lewis, who studied the essentials of liberty and victory. Read, think and check your premises, as Ayn Rand wrote. If you, too, regard Memorial Day as the proper time to think about liberty and victory, and reflect on those who gave their lives for your freedom, with life as the ultimate value, pledge to honor the fallen, especially the one who once said: “Let’s roll”. Let the end of Iraq be the start of a renewed, radical American ideal.