HOW TO START WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR
AND
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
By
Patricia L. Mosure
and Stephen G. Patten
We would like to make a point at the outset of this
article:
We do not have a lot of time until the terrorists get
their hands on some very nasty weapons and the ability to use them that are
going to change this world in a way we are not going to like. What we will talk about in this article is
not theory. It is now.
Foreign Correspondent
When the United States sends its young men and women
overseas to war, those Americans must know that if they are captured , if they
falter, if they fall behind, America will come back to get them and bring them
home. The United States of America does
not leave its troops behind. That is a
sacred pledge.
We have co-authored a book, “Foreign Correspondent,”
about a CBS News journalist, Steve, striving to maintain that pledge. It runs over 40 years from before Steve was a
journalist and served with the United States Marine Corps in South Vietnam to
his years reporting for CBS News in wars around the world, in the Far East, the
Middle East, and Central America. It
also includes our reporting for our company, Lee & Grant International, on
the War on Terror.
This book is intended to inform our readers, our viewers,
our listeners, of efforts to bring lost Americans home and the role of a
journalist involved in those efforts who became a target himself when CBS News
accused Steve of being a CIA agent using journalism as a cover. Most of all, this book is intended to keep
faith with our heroes and our heroines.
Four Missions
One of the major topics we address in “Foreign
Correspondent” is the War on Terror. It
is actually the concluding chapter of the book.
If we are going to start winning this war – and we are
not now - there are four missions we
must accomplish. First, solve the North
Korea problem. Second, confront and
defeat ISIS. Third, stabilize
Afghanistan. Fourth, refocus on Iraq.
First Mission: Solve the North Korea Problem
Successive U.S. administrations have made clear America
will not tolerate a nuclear armed North Korea.
The result? The terrorist state
of North Korea is now armed with nuclear weapons. The failure of U.S. policy to prevent the
communist government in Pyongyang led by Kim Jong-un from developing these
weapons obviously means we must rethink U.S. policy that has not worked out so
well.
The communist North maintains it is only defending itself
from an aggressive America that seeks to dominate and control the Korean
peninsula. It cites the presence of the
some 30,000 U.S. troops in the South and what it calls the provocative joint
military exercises the U.S. and South Korea periodically conduct. It says the two Koreas could reunite
peacefully if only the U.S. would get out of the way and abandon its occupation
of the South.
Okay. Let’s get
out of the way. Withdraw our troops, conditioned upon a binding and verifiable
agreement that North Korea will dismantle its nuclear arsenal as the U.S. is
pulling out its troops. Once North Korea
has destroyed the last of its nukes, the U.S. will withdraw the last of our
troops, except for a security force manning the demilitarized zone (DMZ)
separating North from South Korea. If
the North is serious about a peaceful reunification with the South and the two
countries do reunite, we will withdraw our security force from a DMZ that will
no longer exist in a reunified Korea.
Fine. What does this accomplish? It removes the excuse the North uses for
building its nuclear arsenal. Even more
importantly it sends a clear signal to China, North Korea’s principal
benefactor, it has no reason any further to prop up the North Korean
regime. A neutralized and neutral Korean
peninsula would pose no threat to China which shares a 850 mile land border
with North Korea and would gain international acclaim for the Chinese for no
longer supporting up the brutal North Korean dictatorship that is the world’s
pariah.
But, one would ask,
doesn’t withdrawal of U.S. troops invite an invasion of South Korea by the
North? Not really. The American forces we have in South Korea
are there not to stop a North Korean invasion by the number of troops we have
in the South. They would be quickly
overrun by the massive North Korean army should it decide to invade.
The Americans are in
the South as a deterrent because any attack on U.S. troops would bring an overwhelming
response from the United States. That
same purpose would be achieved by keeping the U.S. security force on the
DMZ. We would still be justified in
going back into South Korea if our troops in the DMZ were threatened.
The South Korean military –
known as ROK troops, for Republic of Korea – would stand and fight if the North
invaded. ROK forces are highly trained, very capable, and organized to
repel a violation of their territory. And they are tough.
When Steve served in South
Vietnam during the Vietnam War the headquarters for his Marine Corps battalion
– 1st battalion, 1st Marines – was stationed in the South
Vietnamese city of Hoi An, about half way between Da Nang and Chu Lai in the
northern region of South Vietnam.
A South Korean battalion was headquartered right next to Steve’s battalion
headquarters. These South Korean troops, after a hard day’s work of
finding and killing the enemy, would come back to their battalion headquarters
and, to kick back and relax in the evening, would beat each other up using
their Tae Kwan Do martial arts.
On patrol one evening Steve and about 10 or 11 other Marines walked into a
South Vietnamese village. It was the middle of the night and the village
was deserted. Steve walked into one of the huts and an old woman was
squatting on the dirt floor of the hut holding a baby and shaking in
fright. Steve tried to calm her fears and motioned it was all right, the
Marines were not going to harm her or her village. Steve asked her, “VC a
dao, VC a dao.” “Where are the VC? Where are the VC?,” the Viet
Cong communist guerrillas. She continued to shiver and wouldn’t answer
him.
Steve walked out of the hut and he and the other Marines left. A minute
or two out of the village they started taking small arms fire from this
village. The VC had crawled out of their holes in the ground or wherever
else they were hiding, and were firing at them. The Marines returned fire
and continued on their way. There was no point in going back into the
village, for the men would just disappear again.
If that had been a South
Korean unit, fired upon after leaving the village, it would have gone back in
the village, killed any men they could find, killed all the women, the
children, dogs, chickens, anything living, burned the village and destroyed all
their crops. Then,
the Koreans would leave, in
their wake a village that no longer existed. Interestingly,
South Korea’s TAOR - tactical area of responsibility - was more peaceful the
Marines’ TAOR.
The South Korean military is
not to be trifled with. North Korea knows that and would be unlikely to
test the South backed up as it will be by American military might.
Once peaceful
reunification between North and South is a reality and we remove the troops
from the DMZ, we follow that up with a clear commitment to Korea’s
reunification that, if violated, would prompt U.S. forces to go back in in
force.
Will it work? Maybe.
We can’t say for sure. But it is
worth the effort, for it is a far better scenario than a nuclear armed North Korea
bearing down on the South and threatening the United States and the rest of the
world. Which is what we have now.
Second Mission: Destroy ISIS
Now to the Middle East and ISIS, also called ISIL or the
Islamic State, or Daesh, an acronym for its name in Arabic. We have had success against ISIS, knocking it
out of
northern Iraq and northern Syria. But we have yet to deliver the knockout
blow. We must put a standing army in the
field supported by air power, find ISIS’ army, and destroy it. And we must kill and/or incarcerate all of
its combatants. The wanton cruelty these
people have amply demonstrated shows they are far beyond redemption.
And let this be a warning to young people who have a
somehow skewed romantic notion of adventure – and their parents – that if we
catch them with ISIS we will kill them too.
This army we put in the field can be American, Middle
Eastern, Arab, South Asian, European with our NATO allies. It could be Chinese, Japanese, or come from
Venus or Mars. We don’t care. Or, as journalist Bill O’Reilly, formerly of
Fox News, suggests, it could be a mercenary army. There are plenty of mercenaries in this world
– Steve has run across a few of them in his day – who would be more than
willing to fight anytime, anywhere, for any side, as long as the money is
right.
But, in addition to defeating ISIS militarily, we must
knock it out politically. That means
separating from it the Sunni support it now enjoys. Sunni, the major sect of Islam, accounts for
80% or so of the billion and a half Muslims around the world. So, while we are wiping out ISIS combatants
we must send a day contingent down to Damascus, the capital of Syria, and
escort that murderous despot, Bashar al-Assad, and all of his family out of
town. You can’t leave any family there
for they will engender loyalty.
Or, if you prefer, exile his family somewhere in the
world and take Bashar al-Assad himself and hang him from the nearest
lamppost. But get rid of him!! Only the most obtuse who follow the Middle East
can fail to see this man should have been gone a long time ago.
The Assads are Alawites, an offshoot of the Shia, the
principal minority sect of Islam and the sworn enemies of the Sunnis. Prior to the massive emigration from Syria
during its civil war the Alawites likely accounted for no more than 15% of
Syria’s population that was 23-24 million, while Sunnis were probably 75%. We put a Sunni leader or group of Sunni
leaders in al-Assad’s place.
We do the same thing in Iraq, except here the situation
is reversed, for Iraq is a majority Shia country, about two thirds Shia and a
third Sunni in a population similar to Syria.
We go to Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, and ask our ally, Iraqi Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shia, to bring more Sunnis into government. He is doing this somewhat, but he has to do
it a lot more.
The idea of all of this is that if the Sunnis can see
they are fairly represented in the halls of power in Damascus and Baghdad and
they feel protected, they will no longer feel the need
to support ISIS.
We destroy ISIS militarily, we knock it out politically, we defeat
ISIS. Now, it will have to be monitored
for years to come, but it will no longer pose the dire threat to America and
the world that it does today.
Third Mission: Stabilize Afghanistan
We must maintain a residual military force in
Afghanistan, whatever our generals and admirals feel we need. The U.S. has had some 8,000-9,000 troops
there and we applaud our Government for doing so. After President Trump took office he
authorized Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to send in more troops and today we
have around 15,000.
The purpose of these troops is threefold. First, they are there to shore up the Afghan
military so that it doesn’t collapse in the face of enemy pressure as the Iraqi
military did after we stupidly – stupidly - pulled all our troops out of Iraq
at the end of 2011.
Second, our troops are training the Afghan military as
best as they can. And, third,
importantly, our forces are in Afghanistan to ensure the supplies we ship into
Afghanistan get where they are intended to go, for graft and corruption, of
course, in Afghanistan are rampant.
We should encourage other countries such as our NATO
allies who have been helping in Afghanistan to continue their support. And we should encourage more countries who
have not been in Afghanistan to come and help out as well.
All this is in the hope that one day Afghanistan can
become, in the words of prominent American-Afghan author Tamim Ansary, the
Switzerland of Asia.
But we should warn the current and any future Afghan
government that we reserve the right to come back temporarily into Afghanistan
in military force and wipe out any nest of terrorists plotting to kill
Americans and seeking safe haven in Afghanistan, as the Taliban afforded Osama
bin Laden in the 1990s and early 2000s.
As Dr. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama bin
Laden unit of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1996 to 1999 said in his
book, “Marching Toward Hell,” the terrorists can say and think what they want
about America. But they must realize the
cost to them of actually killing Americans will be horrendous.
Fourth Mission: Refocus on Iraq
A renewed concentration on Iraq serves two purposes, both
linked to the crucial geographic location of the country:
1. It puts Iran,
bordering Iraq to the east, on notice that America is not going to allow Iran
to dominate Iraq nor to continue its spreading of terrorism throughout the
region. We can’t change the theocratic
regime currently ruling in Iran. That
will have to come from the inside, from Iranians themselves. But we can serve as a check on Iranian
sponsorship of terror by a strong diplomatic, economic, and military presence
in its western neighbor, Iraq.
2. It addresses
the threat of fanaticism emanating from Iraq’s immediate southern and western neighbor, Saudi Arabia.
The U. S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 ordered by
former President George W. Bush was a response to 9/11. The message was we were not going to sit back
and wait to be attacked again. If we see
danger lurking on the horizon, we will act first to knock it out before it has
a chance to hit us. That, in essence,
became known as the Bush Doctrine.
This flatten-Sadaam-Hussein attention-getter was aimed
generally at the Middle East and in particular at Iraq’s aforementioned immediate southern and western neighbor,
Saudi Arabia. Why Saudi Arabia? One word:
Wahhabism.
Wahhabism is the brutal brand of so-called (we will
explain in a bit the use of the term, “so-called”) Islam practiced in Saudi
Arabia.
Mohammed ibn abd al-Wahhab was a fanatical 18th
century religious zealot on the Arabian Peninsula who believed in the severest
form of society: cutting off the hands
of thieves, subjugation of women, and the like.
He would be long forgotten in this world – which he richly deserved - had he not allied with a family fighting
for control of the Arabian Peninsula, the as-Sauds. Al-Wahhab was the spiritual head of this
alliance, the as-Sauds were the muscle.
Some 140 years after al-Wahhab’s death – that is, early
20th century – the descendants of the as-Saud family who allied with
al-Wahhab emerged victorious for control of the Arabian Peninsula.
Do you recall the late 1960s movie, “Lawrence of Arabia,”
starring and introducing in the title role a young British actor named Peter
O’Toole? There was another character in
that movie, Prince Feisal, portrayed by the great British actor, Sir Alec
Guinness.
Feisal was a real life character. At the time of what became known as World War
I with the British and the French and later the Americans fighting the Germans
and their allies of the Central Powers on the European mainland Feisal was
fighting to unite Arabs under his leadership on the Arabian Peninsula, acting
for his father, Sheriff Hussein, the ruler of Mecca.
The British and the French saw an opportunity in Hussein
and Feisal and approached them with a proposition. Help us, they told them, fight the Germans
and specifically their Turkish allies of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East
and we will in turn at the victorious conclusion of the war support your
efforts to unite Arabs under your flag on the Arabian Peninsula. That’s a deal, said Hussein enthusiastically.
This is how a young British military officer named T.E.
Lawrence got to the Middle East. The British sent him as a military adviser to
Hussein, although he worked principally with Feisal.
But the British and the French, even before the end of
the war, betrayed Hussein and Feisal. In
a secret accord named for a diplomat from each of their countries, the
Sykes-Picot Agreement, they agreed to divide up the Middle East, the remnants
of the Ottoman Empire, into what they called their “Mandates,” which in reality
were just colonies.
And indeed that is what they did when the war ended. Hussein, seeing that he had been betrayed,
went out to fight on his own after the war for control of the Arabian Peninsula
and got whupped by the Saudis.
So, in 1932 the Saudis declared their kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, attaching their family name to that of the Peninsula. And they made clear their brand of what they
considered to be Islam was Wahhabism.
Not content to foster it only with their own borders,
since 1932 to this very day the Saudis have spread, proselytized, promoted,
promulgated Wahhabism around the world.
You may have only slightly heard of Wahhabism before reading this or
maybe you never had heard of Wahhabism.
But let us give you three achievements of Wahhabism and we bet you are
intimately familiar with all three.
First, the world’s most infamous, notorious, nefarious
terrorist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
Osama bin Laden. How did this nutcase
ever happen?
Listen to Professor Walid Phares in his book, “Future
Jihad.” Writes Dr. Phares: “Osama bin Laden did not create al
Qaeda. It created him.” He is referring to the Wahhabist culture in
which little Osama bin Laden grew up in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia.
Second achievement of the Wahhabists, the Taliban, those
folks we have been fighting in Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded the country
in October 2001. The word, “Taliban,”
comes from an Arabic word, “talib,” which means “student.” Taliban is simply the plural. They call themselves the “Students.” Isn’t that quaint?
Why? It goes back
to the Afghan civil wars of the 1990s.
Brutal. Afghan warlords showing
how tough they were would surround population centers and bomb them to smithereens,
killing thousands of men, women, and
children. The Afghan populace fled en
masse, many going to their western border with Iran. But Iran is Shia and most Afghans are
Sunni. The Shia, Islam’s principal
minority sect, and the Sunnis, Islam’s majority sect, have been bitter enemies
for centuries.
So, many more Afghans fled to the eastern border with
Sunni Pakistan. Along the latter border,
the eastern Afghan border with Pakistan, there were at any one time millions of
Afghans sitting in squalid, fetid refugee camps. Into these camps came the Wahhabists from
Saudi Arabia and their surrogates.
They set up “madrasas,” which are schools, and invited
young Afghan males only, of course, to come to school. Well, here is a young Afghan man, 18 or 19
years old, sitting in rags, little to eat, and, worst of all, cooped up, bored
to tears, with nothing to do. You
picture an 18 or 19-year-old you know cooped up with nothing to do and you know
that spells trouble.
Hearing the siren call of going to school, these young
Afghan men shrugged and said, Heck, why not?
So, by the tens and then the hundreds and then the thousands they went
to these Wahhabist madrasas, where they got a clean set of clothing, three
square meals a day, and where they got inculcated, they got indoctrinated with
the hatred and the violence of Wahhabism.
Out from these madrasas marched the students. Out from these camps marched the Taliban.
Third crowning achievement of the Wahhabists, those
charming gentlemen who stole four planes and killed 3,000 people on 9/11. Of the 19 hijackers, two came from United
Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and another from Lebanon. Do you want to take a wild guess where the
other 15 came from? Of course, they were
Saudis, having grown up in the same hate-filled Wahhabist culture as little
Osama bin Laden in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia.
And how does ISIS characterize itself? Naturally, it calls itself Wahhabist.
Still not convinced of the evil of Wahhabism? Then come with us to Mecca, the religious
capital of the Islamic world located within Saudi Arabia. There in Mecca stands the Grand Mosque, the
largest mosque in the world, that encloses the Kaaba, Islam’s most sacred
shrine that Muslims believe Ibrahim, whom they call Abraham, built centuries
ago.
In the city of Mecca little girls – 13, 14, 15 years old
- are going to school. They are dressed
in their hijabs, their head coverings, and their abayas or burkhas, their body
coverings. Once they get into the school
building they take off their hijabs, they take off their abayas or their
burkhas, which is tradition, as they are wearing their school uniforms
underneath. And they go to class.
The date is March 11th, 2002. A fire breaks out in the school
building. Just like most people would do
if they were trapped in a burning building, they panic and run for the
exits. There is a stampede. Kids are being trampled. Some of the girls make it through the exit
doors and out into the safety of the open air.
At that very moment the Wahhabist religious police
arrive. Yes, there is such a thing as
the Wahhabist religious police.
They grab the young girls who have escaped to the outside
and throw them back into the burning building!!! Other young girls are still inside the
building but have made it to the
exit doors and are scratching to get out. The Wahhabist police block the exits so that
these girls cannot escape the death that is enveloping them.
Why? Why would
these so-called police do this? Because
in their panic the girls forgot to put back on their hijabs, their head
coverings. They forgot to put back on
their abayas or burkhas, their body coverings.
In the eyes of the Wahhabist religious police these girls would have
gone out into the world naked, a mortal sin.
Fifteen of these beautiful little children with their
wondrous lives all ahead of them die.
Over 50 are injured.
We would suggest to you this is not Islam. This is madness, pure, unadulterated madness.
Solving Saudi Arabia
We were both born in
America. We are both Christians. Neither one of us has a drop of Arab blood in
us. Every night after Steve reads the
Bible he reads the Quran, the holy book of Islam. He reads it in English and in Arabic.
And there is nothing
he has ever read in the Quran, in either language, nor seen in the Sunna, a
collective term for the ways, traditions, customs of the Prophet Mohammed,
Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him, that justifies the barbarity and the savagery
of Osama bin Laden, of the Taliban, of the 9/11 hijackers, nor of those two
losers as their uncle called them on television who perpetrated the Boston
Marathon bombings, nor of those murderous freaks who massacred people in Paris,
France, Brussels, Belgium, San Bernardino, California, Orlando, Florida,
Chattanooga, Tennessee, Nice, France, Manchester, England, and in many other
places around the world.
What is Islam,
for example, that we would suggest to you is the Suratul Fatihah. That is the first surah, meaning chapter, of
the Quran, and a Muslim prayer similar to the Christians’ Lord’s Prayer in that
every Muslim knows it and can recite it.
Let us share just
part of it, about the first half, with you:
Bismillahi arhammani
arrahiim,
Almamdu lilah rabbi
alamiin,
Arhammani arrahiim,
Maliki yowma diin.
In the name of God,
the Compassionate, the Merciful,
Praise be to God,
Lord of the Worlds,
The Compassionate,
the Merciful,
Master of Judgment
Day.
Compassion. Mercy.
Judgment Day. These are
Judeo-Christian concepts as well, are they not?
The message to Saudi
Arabia is: Stop spreading your vicious,
violent, virulent, vulgar version of Islam around the world! Stop in your role, along with Iran, as the
prime sponsor, facilitator, and financier of terrorism on this planet!
To Win the War on Terror
There is a saying
regarding the battlefields in which America has found itself for most of the 21st
century that has been quoted many times before but bears repeating:
Change Afghanistan
and you change Afghanistan. Change Iraq
and you change the Middle East.
Changing the Middle
East was one of the prime rationales for the much maligned U.S. invasion of
Iraq in 2003 ordered by former President George W. Bush.
We would suggest to
you that we must change the Middle East if we are to win this War on Terror.
What You Can Do to Help in This Fight
Talk with your families, friends, colleagues, associates, co-workers, employers, employees, acquaintances, anyone you think needs to know about what is facing our country. These are vital issues of national concern that affect us all. Spread the word. Reproduce this article for hard copy recipients and send a link to this article to your electronic favorites and ask them to send it on to their favorites.
Contact your two U.S.
senators and your congressperson in their Washington, D.C. offices. Ask to speak with the AA, the administrative
aide, or the LA, the legislative aide.
If either is unavailable, ask to speak with the communications
director. If also unavailable, ask to
speak with the press secretary, the media contact, for you have a message from
two journalists, the authors of this article.
Contact the State
Department in Washington, D.C. and the Defense Department in Arlington,
Virginia. Ask to speak with the
Assistant Secretary of Middle East Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of South
Asian Affairs (Afghanistan is considered South Asian) in each department. Also ask to speak with the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for each of the above.
Contact corporations
doing business in the Middle East and South Asia. Ask to speak with their public affairs
department. Contact the media, broadcast
companies – television and radio - newspapers, and weekly news magazines. Ask to speak with their foreign desks that
cover stories overseas.
Fax or scan and
e-mail this article to the offices of all these officials. And ask for a reply to your fax and/or your
messages you leave on the telephone.
Advise them you are concerned about the issues raised in this article
and you wish to learn their comments on these issues.
Join our
organization, America’s Corps of Advisors (ACA), that calls, e-mails, lobbies,
writes articles,
gives speeches, conducts interviews, and maintains respectful but persistent
contact with U.S. Government officials to provide advice on matters of national
security. As an ACA member, you can e-mail
us at advisesolutions@aol.com with your concerns and we will pass on those
concerns to the appropriate government offices and officials. E-mail us anytime you want your voice
heard.
To join ACA, go to
www.americascorpsofadvisors.com and click on “Membership-Become An Advisor” on
the main navigation bar, fill out the application, and send it into us with
your annual membership fee of $45. Your
voice will be heard.
_________________________
Patricia L. Mosure is the president of Lee & Grant
International and Stephen G. Patten is its editor. Lee & Grant reports on national security
and the War on Terror. This article may
be reproduced with proper attribution.
For questions or comments, please e-mail ppmntpatti@aol.com or call
1-800-533-4726.
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