Nuclear Terrorism — Coming Soon

There are three steps required to build nuclear weapons.

1. You need to have a missile capable of delivering the bomb to its target.
2. You need to process a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb.
3. You need to assemble a warhead and attach it to the missile.

Iran already has a missile capable of delivering a nuclear bomb. Last month, Iran conducted a successful test of their upgraded three-stage Shahab-3B missile. According to Viktor Yesin, former Chief of Staff of Russia’s Strategic Missile Force, the tests demonstrated Iran’s capacity to produce rocket engines that would give these missiles a range of 2,500 miles or more. With that range, they could easily reach targets in Europe. (With strap-on boosters, they could potentially reach North America.) Iran insists their intentions for this missile are entirely peaceful, referring to it as a “space launch vehicle” for orbiting satellites.

However, evidence presented at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month revealed detailed designs from Iranian military labs for a nuclear warhead, including how it would fit in a Shahab-3 missile. Other evidence included documentation of experiments with warheads and missile trajectories where “the height of the burst … didn’t make sense for conventional warheads,” according to a senior diplomat who attended the IAEA meeting. IAEA Director General Oli Heinonen commented on an Iranian video showing mock-ups of a missile reentry vehicle that it was “configured in a way that strongly suggests it was meant to carry a nuclear warhead.”

Iran will have sufficient weapons grade uranium to make a nuclear bomb within the next two years. The European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC) recently ran computer simulations that modeled the centrifuges that Iran is currently operating at its Natanz nuclear facility. Based on the simulations, they determined that Iran could produce sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb by the end of this year (operating at optimal efficiency) or by 2010 (operating at only 25% efficiency). Iran claims their uranium enrichment program is intended for “purely industrial purposes” to generate electricity.

The U.N. Security Council adopted a new resolution last week, imposing further sanctions on Iran for refusing to cease its uranium enrichment program. Iranian president Ahmadinejad beat them to the punch in making it clear that he doesn’t care. In a televised interview last month, he said “If they want to continue with that path of sanctions, we will not be harmed. They can issue resolutions for 100 years.”

Iran could assemble a nuclear warhead in a matter of months, once they have enough enriched uranium. The National Intelligence Estimate issued in December, which determined that Iran had “halted” its nuclear weapons program in 2003, was focused exclusively on nuclear warhead development. It explicilty ignored the uranium enrichment program, since Iran claimed that was for “industrial purposes.” Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence and primary author of the NIE report, later conceded that developing a nuclear warhead is, in fact, “the least significant part” of a nuclear weapons program. Prior to this NIE report, uranium enrichment has always been used as the key indicator of nuclear weapons development programs. Since the NIE report was made public, Mr. McConnell has expressed concerns about its effect in downplaying the continuing nucelar threat from Iran. On February 26, he said unequivocally “Our estimate is they intend to have a nuclear weapon.”

Iran denies that it has ever engaged in any design or development of nuclear weapons technology. They insist that all of the evidence presented at the IAEA conference last month were forgeries.

But Iran has a proven track record as a world leader in the funding and training of radical Islamic terrorists. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared that Israel should (and will) be “wiped off the map.” Ahmadinejad was also a member of the Islamic terrorist organization that took 52 Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. This blog entry lists a Chronology of Islamic Terrorist Attacks Against the U.S. between 1979 and 2001. A great many of these were perpetrated by Hezbollah, which is funded by Iran. Hezbollah also provided explosives training for Al Qaeda operatives, in Iran, prior to 9/11, as discussed the post Sunni and Shiite Unite Against the West.

Why would anybody be gullible enough to believe that this terrorist nation is amassing all the means to build nuclear weapons “for purely industrial purposes?” Israel knows better. Europe knows better. Russia knows better. The U.N. knows better! Nobody in the world believes Iran has stopped its nuclear development program, except for certain people in the U.S. who, because of their own agenda, were all too eager to latch on to the now discredited NIE report, — and even they don’t believe it anymore.

What could be more menacing than nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist nation with a suicide bomber mentaility that has repeatedly characterized the United States “the Great Satan?” Is the reason we’re being so squeamish about acknowledging this threat simply because the left keeps calling Bush a liar on account of not finding any WMDs in Iraq? Could it really be possible that our nation’s leaders are more afraid of name-calling from the left than of an increasingly imminent nuclear threat from Iran? That’s a scary thought.

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Terror, Poverty, and the Willfully Naive

Certain enlightened people keep trying to convince me that we can only solve the problem of terrorism by humanitarian, rather than military, efforts. After all, the jihadists wouldn’t be able to recruit terrorists if those people weren’t so poor and desperate. So, perhaps, if we really want to end this war, we should cut our entire military budget and give all that money to the Arab nations, in the hopes that it will raise their collective standard of living and make them all love us.

Unfortunately, no matter how much money we might shower upon them, it’s hard to see how it would raise the average standard of living of their populations. The countries we’re talking about are not particularly poor, though the vast majority of their citizens are. (How does one come up with a way to blame the U.S. for that?)  No matter how much foreign aid we might bestow on these oil-rich countries, why would  their governments redistribute our wealth any more beneficently than they redistribute their own?

Even if it were possible for us to raise their standard of living, what evidence is there that they would no longer hate us? My personal experience with people collecting entitlements is that they don’t feel any great love for the middle and upper classes whose taxes subsidize them. (If you imagine they do, try taking field trip to your nearest ghetto and take a survey on how grateful they feel.) People who receive benefits without providing anything in return grow to feel entitled to those benefits, and soon start feeling resentful that they aren’t getting enough — because the ones giving it to them still live much better than they do. Obviously, the money is owed to them. Otherwise, why would they be getting it? Once the war was “over,” we’d have to keep on paying forever, to sustain whatever standard we set, or risk their hatred and reprisal for withdrawing it.

As warm and fuzzy a fantasy as it may be, it isn’t realistic to assume that we can buy the hearts and minds of all the people in the world by altruistically showering our money on them. Especially when some of those people have a history of using the money we’ve given them to launch deadly attacks against us. Blindly trusting people who have proven they cannot be trusted doesn’t make them trustworthy. And using our defense budget to arm our enemies somehow just doesn’t seem wise.

The ideal world imagined by the willfully naive is not grounded in reality. The poverty argument is a red herring. This war is not about poverty. It’s about terrorism. Islamic terrorism is not about poverty. It’s about extremist ideologies. No amount of redistribution of wealth is going to address that issue.

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Sunni and Shiite Unite Against the West

If you’re one of those who is absolutely convinced that there could never be any connection or collaboration between the various Islamic terrorist organizations, because Sunnis and Shiites hate each other, you need to read this article, Death by Car Bomb in Damascus. (I’ve included excerpts below, but there’s much more information in the original article.)

They may hate each other, but not as much as they hate us. Historical evidence shows clearly that, whatever ill will the rank and file Sunnis and Shiites harbor toward one another, their radical leaders are more than willing to set aside sectarian differences to unite in a common effort to destroy the West.

Imad Mugniyah is the top-ranking Hezbollah terrorist leader who was killed last week in a car bomb in Damascus. We all know who Osama bin Laden is.

Imad Mugniyah’s relationship with Osama bin Laden began in the early 1990s, when al Qaeda’s CEO was living in Sudan. Bin Laden’s benefactor at the time was a charismatic Sunni Islamist ideologue named Hassan al-Turabi. …

The differences between Sunnis and Shiites were not insurmountable in Turabi’s eyes; on multiple occasions he dismissed the importance of any theological disagreements. Instead, Turabi envisioned a grand, Manichean clash of civilizations in which the Muslim world stood united against its common Western foes, especially America. In a few short years, Turabi’s Sudan became a hub for international terrorists of all stripes. …

Bin Laden agreed with the Iranian assessment that the enemies of the West should come together. …

The Clinton administration recognized that an alliance between Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda had blossomed in Sudan. In its 1998 indictment of al Qaeda, Clinton administration prosecutors charged that al Qaeda had “forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with representatives of the government of Iran, and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.” …

That the two men met was made clear by Ali Mohamed, a top al Qaeda operative in the early 1990s, who testified at the embassy bombings trial that he had arranged a sit-down in Sudan between the aspiring jihadist bin Laden and Mugniyah. Mohamed explained:

“I was aware of certain contacts between al Qaeda and [Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad] organization, on one side, and Iran and Hezbollah on the other side. I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between Mugniyah, Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden.”

According to Mohamed, bin Laden was interested in forcing American troops out of Saudi Arabia the same way Mugniyah had forced them out of Lebanon. Mohamed said that Mugniyah agreed to help:

“Hezbollah provided explosives training for al Qaeda and [Egyptian Islamic Jihad]. …”

The type of training described by Mohamed took place not only in Sudan, where hundreds of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah operatives had built terrorist training camps, but also in Lebanon and Iran. The 9/11 Commission reported that “senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives.” Then, “in the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security.” …

[Former Al Qaeda opertive] Jamal al Fadl also told U.S. prosecutors that he had talked to one of his fellow al Qaeda terrorists about his training in Lebanon. Al Fadl said he was told the “training is very good” and his colleague brought “some tapes with him.” Al Fadl elaborated: “I saw one of the tapes, and he tell me they train about how to explosives big buildings [sic].” Al Fadl went on to list the names of some of those who received Hezbollah’s training. Saif al-Adel, who was promoted to the third-highest position inside al Qaeda shortly after the September 11 attacks, was among them.
– Death by Car Bomb in Damascus, Weekly Standard

The information in this article is a matter of public record, and comes from the 9/11 Commission report and from testimony by Al Qaeda operatives in the 1998 trial for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. If, after being exposed to the historical evidence, you still don’t believe in an international network of Islamic terrorist organizations working together to defeat the West, I can only conclude that you have your own reasons for preferring not to believe it.

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America Sucks

It baffles me why so many Americans readily accept that, in any conflict with foreign interests, America must be at fault. To these people, all of our enemies are actually our victims, and are justified in hating us because America’s a big bully. They seem to believe the rest of the world is full of peaceful, good-natured people and, if the terrorists want to destroy us, it must be because we’ve done them wrong. If those who have declared us their enemies commit inconceivably vicious acts of barbaric violence, it’s only out of desperation because we have somehow driven them to it.

Those who want to believe in our culpability insist that the attacks on (and prior to) 9/11 were only retribution for our “meddling” in the Middle East. The flaw in that reasoning is that, if you look at the history of the Islamic extremists, they do not only attack those who “interfere” with them. They have an impressive track record, throughout the world, of ruthlessly attacking and oppressing those who don’t buy into their ideology. But it’s convenient to ignore that historical perspective if it runs counter to one’s agenda. On the other hand, perhaps all the nations and peoples against whom they’ve committed brutal acts of violence and terrorism are somehow also responsible, and only the terrorists are victims.

The people whose agenda it suits to blame America refuse to consider the possibility that the terrorists might actually hate us for the reasons they claim to hate us. — Because we are the great Satan, and they see our culture as an abomination to Allah. Their law requires victims of rape to be stoned and beaten. They torture and execute homosexuals. They arrest and imprison women for showing their faces, arms, or ankles in public, or for talking to any man to whom they are not related. They execute people for speaking out against their government. In a culture where these affronts to human liberty are strictly enforced by law, why is it so hard to conceive that they find our culture, with all the freedoms we cherish, to be an abomination? Until and unless we’re willing to give up the inalienable rights that we hold to be self-evident, and submit to Shari’a, we will continue to offend.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who hold on so tightly to these romantic notions of our enemies have ever been outside of this country. They seem to assume the rest of the world enjoys the same fundamental rights and freedoms we take for granted here. They seem to assume that everything bad they hear about our enemies is just political rhetoric, and that those governments are really no worse than ours. (In fact, they seem to assume ours is the worst.) This is not just naivete, but willfull naivete.

I’d like to ask those people who really think we’re the bad guys the following questions. 

• Do you believe they don’t really treat women as property, and punish them for crimes committed against them, or do you believe that’s ok?
   
• Do you believe they don’t really torture and kill homosexuals for offending Allah, or do you believe that’s ok?
    
• Do you believe they don’t really execute people for being critical of their government, or do you believe that’s ok?
   
• Do you believe they don’t really fund and train terrorists to blow up international civilian targets, or do you believe that’s ok?

I’m just curious, do you not believe these things really happen, or do you not believe they’re evil? Or do you believe that they happen, and that they’re evil, but that we are somehow worse than they are?

There really are bad guys out there in the world. And the Jihadists really are bad guys. They are not innocent victims of America’s rapacious hegemony. Nevertheless, people will believe what they want to believe. But why they want to believe that America is always the villain is truly an enigma to me.

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Are We Really at War?

Some people keep insisting that the war on terrorism isn’t a real war, because you can only be at war with a country, and “terrorism” isn’t a country. The problem is, a worldwide network of well-organized and well-funded terrorists has declared war on us.  When someone declares war on you, and demonstrates the ability to effectively attack you on your own soil, killing thousands of civilians and attacking the Pentagon, you are at war with them whether you call it a war or not. It’s pointless to say “they aren’t a country so we can’t be at war with them,” when they’re clearly at war with us.

There’s a significant difference between the war on terrorism and any previous wars we’ve fought. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a war. We’re at war with an international network of radical Islamic terrorists. The fact that the enemy isn’t one sovereign nation makes this war extremely difficult to prosecute, because it’s literally a war without borders. But does that mean we should give up and go home?

Their leaders have declared that they will not stop until they’ve succeeded in annihilating our culture. Because they’re fanatics, I believe them. These are not rational people. They believe they will defeat us. If they perceive that we’re too weak to continue the battle, it will give them strength to pursue it more vigorously.

There are radical Islamic fundamentalists just about everywhere in the world. Wherever they are, they’re a potential or actual threat, not just to us, but to anybody they deem is an infidel. We need to stop them, both because there’s no other nation on earth powerful enough to do it, and because we are, have been, and will be again, targets of their terrorist activity.

The people who say we should have stayed in Afghanistan because that’s where Bin Laden was before 9/11, or that we should focus on Pakistan because he’s probably there now, don’t understand that Osama bin Laden is not the enemy. He’s only one leader in a vast network of terrorist cells, spead throughout the world. You can’t kill the Hydra by chopping off its heads; you have to disembowel it. That means cutting of its source of funding. Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are the biggest sources of funding for Islamic terrorism. (Saudi Arabia is ostensibly our “ally,” so they will undoubtedly be the last one with which we engage, if it should come to that…)

IMHO, this war will ultimately be fought in every country that harbors or funds terrorists, because it’s a war on terrorism, not on a particular country. The countries that fund terrorism, and the countries where the terrorists organize, plot, stage, and train their operatives, will either fight with us or against us. If they commit to eradicating the terrorists within their borders, we will fight alongside them. If they side with the terrorists, we will fight against them.

Withdrawing our troops now, as the Democrats want to do, would leave the spoils to the enemy, and give them a chance to regroup and grow stronger. And they will attack us again.  I’d rather the war be fought over there by trained soldiers who volunteered to fight for their country than have it come here and be fought by suicide bombers against civilian targets.

Do you remember 9/11? Do you remember how you felt inside when you first learned what had happened? Or has it been glazed over by the media bombarding you with the same images over and over until you were finally inured to the reality of it, and it became just another media event? It was real. And it can happen again. And again. And again, and again. And, if you don’t believe me, ask an Israeli what it’s like to never know from day to day if the bus you take downtown, or the pizza shop your kid stops in with their friends after school, is going to be blown up by terrorists. Do you think it can’t happen here? Don’t forget, it already has.

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Libertarian at Home, Conservative Abroad

I have always been, and will always be, at core, a libertarian. I used to be an idealistic libertarian. The first time I ever voted was in 1980, for Ed Clarke. (Anybody remember Ed Clarke?) I was a purist then, in favor of non-intervention and no foreign entanglements. But that was before we were attacked on our own soil, killing thousands of civilians, in a clear and compelling act of War. Now I’m a pragmatic libertarian.

I understand the standard Libertarian argument that, if we just leave everybody alone, they’ll leave us alone too. It’s very nice and neat and rational. The problem is, it assumes everybody else in the world is nice and neat and rational, too. It doesn’t account for terrorists who want to destroy us because we’re infidels and our Western culture is an abomination to Allah.

I’m still a libertarian, albeit a conservative one.  But I’m not a pacifist or a non-interventionist. The Monroe Doctrine just won’t work today. Back in the day, there was an entire ocean separating the eastern hemisphere from the western hemisphere, and it took months to cross it, at great peril, and we felt pretty secure from whatever they were doing over there. Today, we have satellites that traverse the globe (Iran just launched one),  and nuclear weapons that can decimate entire cities at one pop. (And Iran may soon have those, too.) Back in the 1800s, everything ran on coal or wood, and we had all the coal and wood we needed right here. We had no dependencies on resources controlled by others on the other side of the globe. Today, our entire economy would grind to a halt and people would starve and freeze to death if our oil supply were cut off.

In a rational world, with a free market ruled only by the laws of supply and demand, that would not present a problem. But, when you have ideological enemies who are determined to see your culture brought to its knees, and they control the supply of your economy’s life blood, you have a very different situation. We need to protect our access to the vital fluid that sustains our economy and culture. I’m not suggesting that we have a right to take it just because we need it. We’re willing to pay – but we can’t afford to be cut off entirely.

That’s the world we live in today. It’s a lot more complicated than it used to be. With satellites and nuclear weapons, and the ease of transcontinental transportation, our neighbors are no longer just the countries in our hemisphere. The whole world is our neighbor. And some of them are nuts.

When it comes to domestic policy, I’m still a libertarian. I’m for minimizing government and maximizing individual freedom and responsibility. But when it comes to foreign policy, I’m a hard line conservative. We can’t change the world. But we can preserve our own sovereignty and, within our own borders, we can maintain a free society. And people who share our values, and revere the principles on which our nation was founded, and have something to contribute to our country and our economy, are welcome to come here and carve out their own niche in the land of liberty. And I believe we should make it easier for those people to become citizens. But open up our borders, grant entitlements to aliens, increase our exposure to terrorism, or compromise our sovereignty by entering into binding agreements that let other nations dictate our policies? No way.

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Don’t Believe the Enemy’s Propaganda

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceful people, with families and jobs and lives, who have nothing to do with terrorism. A very small percentage of Muslims are extremists, and the extremists terrorize other Muslims as well as non-Muslims, because they believe anybody who doesn’t subscribe to their particular militant interpretation of Islam is an infidel.

We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with an international network of terrorist organizations, led by fanatical extremists who use a radical interpretation of Islam as their justification.

We are at war because we were attacked on our own soil, and because our enemies have declared war on us. We are not at war because the people who attacked us are a different religion than most of us are. It’s an unfortunate, unfair, and dangerous distortion that some people insist on portraying this conflict as America vs. Islam. It does a great disservice to the vast majority of Muslims in the world, who are not terrorists, and do not support terrorism, and are not at war with the United States.

It also does a great disservice to us, because it serves our enemies’ interest to convince the world that this a war between America and the religion of Islam. That’s why the Jihadist leaders keep repeating it. Over 20% of the world’s population is Muslim. If the militant Islamic leaders could convince the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world that America is at war with Islam, our enemies would outnumber us 6 to 1. It does not serve our interests to buy into, or to help propagate, this Jihadist propaganda.

I’m not trying to minimize the threat. The threat is very real. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. If even 1/10 of 1% of them buy into the radical ideology of the extremists, that’s close to 2 million people who would gladly give up their lives to see us destroyed. And they have attacked us on our own soil, which is not something a nation can ignore. We had no choice but to respond to their declaration of war against us. And to retreat now would be perceived as giving up, sending the message that we don’t have the strength to continue prosecuting this war, which would only embolden our enemies and invite further terrorist attacks.

We can’t give up and go home without bringing the war home with us. But we need to remember who the enemy is, and not confuse the religion with the worldwide network of terrorist organizations that twist its teachings to justify their heinous acts.

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Chronology of Islamic Terrorism Against the U.S.

The Hydra was a mythical monster with the body of a snake and a hundred heads. Every time one of its heads was cut off, a new one grew in its place. The Islamic terrorist network, spread out across the world, is the modern day Hydra. It has many heads. And, any time you cut one off, a new one will soon replace it. But it’s funded by a small handful of very wealthy countries, who fund it through the proceeds from oil. We cannot kill the Hydra by cutting off its heads. The only way to kill it is to cut off its source of funding.

Ron Paul and the Democrats would have us believe that all we need do is go home, and the Jihadists will leave us alone. To me, that seems naive. Remember, the Islamic terrorists started this war by attacking us at home, on our own soil, killing several thousand civilians in our nation’s largest city and attacking our Pentagon. Before that, there was a whole series of escalating attacks spanning over two decades.

• In 1979, fifty-two American citizens were taken hostage by Islamic terrorists who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran.
• Between 1982-1991, ten Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon.
• In 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people.
• Later that year, another suicide bomber attacked the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. marines and injuring over 100 more.
• Terrorists also bombed the U.S. Embassy annex in Kuwait in 1983, killing six and injuring over 80 others.
• In 1984, there was another suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy compound in Beirut, killing 24 people.
• Later that year, Hezbollah hijacked Kuwait Airways flight 221, and killed two American officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development when their demands to release the 17 terrorists who had bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait were not met.
• In 1985, Hezbollah hijacked TWA flight 847, first to Lebanon and then to Algiers, where they held the passengers hostage for 17 days. Again, they demanded the release of the terrorists who had bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, and shot a U.S. Navy diver when their demands were not met.
• Later that year, the PLO hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, and killed an American tourist when their demands for the release of PLO terrorists were not met.
• In 1986, TWA flight 840 was bombed just before landing in Athens, Greece, killing four people who were sucked out of the hole caused by the explosion.
• In 1988, Pan Am flight 103 from London to NY was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground.
• In 1993, a Muslim sniper opened fire on the CIA complex in Langley, VA, killing two CIA employees and injuring three others.
• That same year, a car bomb was planted in the garage under the World Trade Center.
• In 1995, a car bomb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killed five Americans.
• In 1996, Hezbollah bombed the U.S. military complex in Riyadh, killing 19 Americans and injuring hundreds more.
• In 1998, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassies in both Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing a total of 223 people and injuring over 4,000.
• In 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole harbored in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors and injuring 39.
• In 2001, they destroyed the World Trade Center, killing 3,000 civilians, and attacked the U.S. Pentagon.

Our policy of turning the other cheek up until 9/11 only emboldened them. They kept escalating the violence until they hit us so hard we couldn’t ignore it. And they’re going to continue waging war on us, whether we fight back or not, until Allah grants them victory (as they’re confident he will). Ignoring them hasn’t worked in the past. Why would it work in the future?

Bringing our troops home before the job is done would result in bringing the war home with them. Is that really what America wants?

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