Quoted article below based on a recent speech by Newt Gingrich:
read the full original article:
Why America Needs To Get Ready For A ‘100-Year War’ With Radical Islam
at the Daily Caller, by Russ Read, Jan. 16, 2016:
The war against radical Islamic terrorism could go on much longer than anyone is expecting, and the enemy may not give the U.S. any choice but to fight it.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was quite sober in his address Wednesday on the subject of the politics of dealing with radical Islam. Speaking to a room of people packed to the brim on Capitol Hill, Gingrich outlined in a clear and concise manner his belief that combating the terrorist forces within radical Islam will take as many as 100 years. He noted that the choice to go to war had already been made by the enemy, and the U.S. will eventually have no choice but to respond in a massive way.
Though he certainly had ample criticism for President Barack Obama’s current strategies for countering terrorism, calling the President “delusional,” he was willing to point blame for the current situation in multiple directions. “You have to look seriously at why did we fail in Iraq … in Afghanistan.” Gingrich believes that the commission set up to investigate the attacks on September 11, 2001, failed. So too did both Bush and Clinton, and especially Paul Bremer, Bush’s envoy to Iraq after the initial 2003 invasion.
He opened his remarks with a comparison of today’s time to that of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain just before the outset of World War II. Unlike others who have attempted to draw the comparison as a slight, the former history professor took a different tack.
“Chamberlain was not weak” he explained, referring to the former prime minister crushing his opposition in parliament at the outset of the war, “[he believed] almost any future was worth getting to that did not involve World War II.”
Gingrich said Chamberlain certainly had a point, highlighting the massive death and destruction left in the wake of the conflict. “Look at the scale of World War II, you cant argue that it was successful,” he explained.
He outlined the point that people knew then that another war was going to be bloody, much like those who look at the war on terrorism realize its going to be bloody now.
“It’s not irrational to ask how to avoid that,” said Gingrich, “we could be involved in a 70 to 100 year war … this is going to be hard to communicate,” he continued.
Reality, though, sometimes trumps one’s preferences, and Gingrich believes that the reality of the threat posed by Islamic radicalism and the terrorism it spawns requires a very difficult, and bloody, form of vigilance.
“We are having a difficult time coming to grips with how large this problem is … this is a clash of civilizations,” he said.
Despite current disagreements over how to confront radical Islamic terrorism, Gingrich is optimistic that leaders will come to his point of view, if only because things will get to a point where they have no choice but to do so. He outlined three points that he predicts will occur in the process that will eventually lead to people acknowledging the severity of the problem:
“One. This is going to be a very hard to win the argument about, because if you do win the argument, you’ve now undertaken a project of historic depth involving an enormous amount of blood.”
“Two. It will happen eventually because the enemy won’t give you any choice … the threat is so obvious, that people will say, just as they did with World War II … OK, we have no choice. The challenge for those of us who are trying to win this is to shorten the amount of time it takes … for us to get there.”
“Three. You have several different blocs engaged in this [argument].”
Gingrich believes those camps run across a spectrum. On one end you have those “who want the enemy to win.” You also have “an entire academic left which is so anti-Western … that they can’t really imagine there is a threat to us that we haven’t earned.”
Read more at the link at the top. Or my theory on why an Apocalyptic war will soon wrap up what could otherwise last for a century.
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