Letter to Mahmoud

Earlier today, n2l pointed me to a blog called Rantings of a Sandmonkey. There was a video with Arab children in military garb, guns, and banners, one of them even dressed up as a suicide bomber. It was ghastly. It was also the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the death cult followers over the past few years.

Also on the thread was a response written by a Canadian who goes by the name of Democracy Rules. “DR” addressed his essay to Hizbollah, and other Islamic terrorists, and I thought, especially in light of this week’s open letter to America from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that it was also a very appropriate response to the Iranian’s missive.

I give you one piece of advice: Do not incite the American people to war. We in Canada know a lot about the US, and how they think, and how they live, much more than the average person in Bam, Iran, or Tyre, Lebanon, knows. You think that you can use hate as a weapon to build an attack against he US, but you know not what you do. The US has over 300 million people, and they are all soldiers. The US built its country by its own hands, and from the beginning, they all accepted that freedom, liberty, and democracy were not negotiable. If by some miracle, an invasion force of Iranians attempted a landing on US soil, every man, woman and child would be there to meet them. They would not relent until it was finished. On United Airlines Flight 93, a random assortment of 40 civilian Americans was suddenly called to arms in a miniature Middle Eastern war. The ex-policewoman air hostess, the environmentalist, the marketing executive, moved against the Islamists as one, and collectively said, “We are not afraid”. Americans did not become timorous, or afraid after 9/11, instead they “got busy on yo’ ass”. After 9/11, America did not back down, and they will not back down, because the attack incited individual Americans against every Islamist, and every person who supports Islamists, or gives comfort to them. Americans are not the same as the Russians in Afghanistan, or the French in Algeria. To defeat the US, you will have to kill every one of them, and you do not know how to do that.

You clearly do not understand how rich Americans are, how many resources they have at their disposal, how intelligent, perseverant, and creative they are. Their wealth is enormous, with massive amounts of built structure: large houses, soaring office towers, highways, schools, universities, hospitals, and military bases everywhere, spanning a continent. Honestly, if you had even an inkling of what you are up against, you would cease your pointless reverse crusade immediately.

Within the last century, Americans have become extremely interested in war. They think about it, talk about it, plan for, it and rehearse it constantly. They spend huge amounts on their military every year, building installations and weapons, many types of which you have never even heard about. Tens of millions of Americans have served, do serve, and will serve in their military. We Canadians sometimes stand back and look at the Americans bemused, because one seldom even sees any of the Canadian military presence in Canada, whereas the US National Guard units stationed near Buffalo, New York, alone, have sufficient resources at their disposal to kill every Muslim on earth. Of course the Americans are right to prepare for war, because there is always another one coming, and they know that they will probably be the main target. The US even declared a “War on Poverty” in the 1960’s, but thankfully they relented before they began bombing the slums.

People who do not understand democracies constantly underestimate them. Hitler and Stalin certainly underestimated democracies. Many of those living in non-democracies think that in the current situation in the US, with huge internal dissent, Democrats shouting misgivings about Iraq, and Republicans pontificating about treachery, and the enemy within, it may seem that the factions will cancel each other out, or with more Democrat influence, the whole tide of war will change. Instead, the US is exposing its power to the world, by thinking out loud, disagreeing publicly, and nit-picking endlessly over details in floods of political television programs. The election is over, and, the war on terror will go on, as all previous US wars have done, irrespective of the party in power. To understand US policy, look carefully at what is not said, because that is where they have reached implicit consensus. Neither side is talking about ending the war on terror — instead they are bickering about the best way to kill Islamists.

For the Middle East, the scale of this war is enormous, which is clearly evident in the reportage of Al Jazeera, which mainly features events related to the war on terror. In contrast, this war has had no real effect on the US whatsoever. It is completely trivial. The US media talks about the war a lot, but Americans are always very interested in war in general, and there are no interesting sex scandals going on at the moment. If JonBenet Ramsay’s murderer were to be found, CNN would focus completely on that, and behave for weeks as if the war on terror did not exist. So far, the war on terror has cost the US roughly 6,000 lives since 9/11, while over that same period, approximately 2,000,000 Americans have died from smoking. In the World War II epoch, spanning 1933-1945, about 70,000,000 people were killed, but only about 500,000 of them were Americans, and the US became stronger because of that war. Islamists hope to obtain nuclear weapons (in fact there really are no other weapons of mass destruction). With some luck, and perseverance, Islamists may be able to detonate a nuclear bomb in Times Square, New York, and kill 1,000,000 people, but that is 0.3% of the US population. The remaining 99.7% of the US population would then do to the Islamists what the US did to Japan. Later, in the years that followed such an event, some Americans would regret having turned several Middle Eastern countries into blowing ash, but there would be a reluctant final consensus that after the Times Square bombing, it had to be done, and they would be right.

In the meantime, the US grows stronger each day. Their economy is doing extremely well, providing levels of health and prosperity that even Ali Baba could not have dreamt about. Coca Cola is finally getting to challenge Pepsi in Afghanistan. As a bonus, the US military gets to interrupt its constant war games to practice and train in a real war in Iraq. These are almost perfect training circumstances, with lots of troop rotations, a very low casualty rate, a real but evanescent enemy, and a kill ratio of much higher than 10 to 1. It is a general’s dream, and it’s an excellent theatre to test, develop, and refine weapons and tactics, in preparation for Iran, when that battle becomes necessary.

The most powerful method the US has of defeating the Islamists is already in play, and it will ultimately succeed. We Canadians, as the constant neighbours and interlocutors of the Americans, know their secrets. Only 5% of Americans have passports, and their biggest single foreign travel destination is Canada. The Americans’ secret method is that they do not hate very well. They’re terrible at it. They don’t teach their children to hate, they constantly forget who their enemies are, and they forgive adversaries, usually before the last bullet has landed. Islamists, and so many people in the Middle East, cling to hate as an addiction, passing it on to their children, cherishing it inside themselves, using it as the centerpiece of their lives. Hate, quite simply, like other addictions, is a waste of time and energy. Americans can’t concentrate very long on hate. They lose interest, or forget what the fighting was all about, or follow up their wars with reconstruction plans for their vanquished enemies. From time to time, they get mad at “Krauts”, or “Japs”, or “Commies”, but the next thing you know, the epithets are gone from the language, and things are back to normal, with Americans welcoming their former enemies into their country as immigrants, and marrying them, if possible.

Therefore, my advice to Islamists is to just give up fighting the US and forget about it. Your hate will not even be reciprocated, and you will probably still be welcomed as immigrants during the conflict. In the meantime, remember it’s not the Americans fault that your son wants to play with X-Box, or your daughter wants to wear Prada. If you don’t like Coca-Cola, don’t buy it. By flaunting your hate, you expose your jealousy, and humiliate yourselves. At the end of the war on terror, those who hate will be no better off than they were, while the US, by not hating, will be ever brighter, as “the shining city on the hill”.