CONSERVATIVES AND THE WAR ON TERRORISM

[This is the text of a speech I am giving today, March 5, in San Diego, to members of the Council for National Policy. CNP was formed in the early 1980s and is composed of the leaders and principal activists of the conservative movement throughout the United States – i.e., the “conservative elite” of America. CNP members played the principle role in creating popular support for the Reagan Doctrine. This speech calls upon them to do the same for the Bush Doctrine of taking the War on Terrorism to the terrorists. – JW]

The first time I spoke to CNP was in Williamsburg, Virginia in May of 1984. Twenty years ago, conservatives were glum. Sound familiar? You know what they say: conservatives are never happy unless they’re unhappy. Even though Ronald Reagan had been President for over three years, the Soviets seemed stronger than ever, still on the march towards world domination.

Rebellion against the Soviets and their surrogates seemed hopeless. The Red Army was entrenched in Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghans by the tens of thousands. The Sandinistas were entrenched in Nicaragua, Marxist guerrillas set to take over El Salvador and Guatemala, and the Soviets had Mexico in their sights. The largest Soviet Embassy in the world at the time, with more KGB and GRU agents than anywhere else, was in Mexico City.

In my speech — and there are many among you today who where there back then — I focused on the Soviets’ weaknesses, not their strengths. I was not interested in how America could “contain” the Soviets, how we could have peace with them, how we could live in the same world with them. I was interested in how the Soviets could be taken out, how they could be defeated. I was interested in how we could liberate the entire Soviet Colonial Empire and disintegrate the Soviet Union itself.

Those of you who were there remember how the great majority in the audience thought I was out of my mind. What?? The Soviet Union defeated and disappearing?? Are you crazy?? Yet all I had done was taken the words of my hero — Ronald Reagan — to heart. When Dick Allen, President Reagan’s first National Security Advisor, asked him at the start of his presidency what was going to be his strategy towards the Soviets, Reagan replied, “Dick, my strategy is very simple: we win, they lose.”

Ronald Reagan became and will always be a hero to us, to everyone who loves America, because he believed those words and made them come true.

And for precisely that same reason, today we have a president who should be a hero to us, a hero to everyone who loves America, because he believes that we can win the War against Moslem Terrorism and is determined to do so.

Today we — America and Western Civilization — are up against an enemy far more dangerous than the Soviet Union. We are up against an enemy that will actually use nuclear or biochemical weapons to destroy us if they have the chance, an enemy that will commit suicide in an attempt to destroy civilization as we know it.

Doomsday Scenarios were ever-popular during the Cold War. But the reality was that if a nuclear missile hit a US city, we would know for sure who launched it: the Soviets. Thus we knew against whom to retaliate. And thus the Cold War was conducted without a single nuclear shot fired. We are now facing a threat an order of magnitude or greater than that of the Cold War. What if a nuclear bomb goes off in a US city, and we’re not sure who did it, so we don’t know against whom to retaliate?

Such a situation renders cities uninhabitable. If America’s population was spread out – say, in 20-acre parcels per family – nuclear or biochemical terrorism couldn’t get off the ground. It only works in areas of dense population, where large masses of people can be killed or threatened. Cities, manufacturing centers, regions of concentrated industrialization all become targets of opportunity. Under such threat, all would have to be dispersed and abandoned.

Cities are the foci of civilization. Only they are capable of the economies of scale that can create and sustain widespread prosperity. Abandon them and civilization itself is abandoned. It is over as we know it.

I want you all to imagine the state America would be in if The Atrocity of Sept. 11, 2001 had been committed under a Gore presidency.

The voices of the left would have risen unchecked to claim America somehow deserved it, we would have sunk into a quicksand of demoralized gloom, the economy would have never recovered, and the thousands of human beings slaughtered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would have died in vain

We hear the term “tipping point” in popular usage now. Companies have a tipping point, where they either succeed or crash. Countries can have tipping points too.

When America elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980, our country was at such a tipping point, economically and psychologically. Ronald Reagan rescued America.
The horror of September 11, 2001, conjured another tipping point for America. We did not know how much, 10 months earlier, our fate had been poised on the most precarious of featherweight balances.

The slightest breath of bad karma could have tipped the scales against a George W. Bush presidency. That whiff of bad breath would have installed people in the White House totally incapable of preventing what Osama bin Laden tried to achieve: America’s will to protect itself collapsing like the Towers of New York

This is why the stakes for America and for civilization could not be higher this November. The bottom line is this:

If George Bush loses the presidency in November, America will lose the War on Terrorism. Let me put it this way: Who do you think Osama Bin Laden and every other Moslem terrorist in the world want to win in November? Let me assure you it is not George Bush.

So my purpose in coming here today is to look you all in the eye and tell you I have lost my patience with all the whining, moaning, and complaining about President Bush coming from certain conservative circles.

I am not talking about Apostate Conservatives who have become Jane Fonda Libertarians who hate America, call the President a war criminal, and root for America’s enemies. I am not talking about Judas Conservatives who have sold out their principles and are being paid by the ACLU to lobby against the Patriot Act. And I am not talking about that small number of Renegade Conservatives so infected with the moral disease of Anti-Semitism they rail against the War on Terrorism because it involves defending Israel.

I am not talking about them because they don’t matter – they don’t matter because anyone who does matter doesn’t pay any attention to them.

I am talking instead about Petulant Conservatives who threaten to “stay home” and not vote at all on November 2. If conservatives stay home in November, the terrorists win.

Folks, we live in a real actual America, not some idealized America off in Conservative Never-Never Land. Things never were perfect — remember how upset we would be with Michael Deaver, Jim Baker, and Dick Darman running the Reagan White House? — things aren’t perfect now, and they never will be perfect. Ronald Reagan wasn’t perfect. There is even someone in this room who called Ronald Reagan, during his presidency, a “useful idiot.” George Bush isn’t perfect. But he is an incredibly decent and honest man, a true genuine Christian, who has the intelligence and courage and determination to defend America from the single greatest enemy our country has ever known — and we should thank God that he is our president.

So — just how is the War on Moslem Terrorism going?

The most obvious success is that America has not suffered another terrorist attack since 9-11, an astounding achievement, due in no small part to John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. John Ashcroft, a CNP member, deserves our deepest gratitude, rather than sneers from paid ACLU agents.

The next most obvious success is Iraq. The Alphabet Media insist, of course, on painting the bleakest picture, but as usual, they have it thoroughly wrong. Iraq is well on its way to becoming a normal society and the first Arab democracy. As President Bush understands, the democratization of the Arab world is the only long-term solution to Islamic terrorism, and Iraq is the best place to start.

The third obvious success is the capitulation of Kaddafi in Libya, who was terrified of ending up like Saddam in a spider hole.

Less obvious is Afghanistan, where we have not caught Bin Laden, Omar, or Zawahiri, where we have not burned down the poppy fields which finance Al Qaeda, where the Pakistan ISI intelligence agency continues to run the CIA around with a ring through its nose. Nonetheless, there are only a few hundred Taliban fighters left now in Afghanistan and they are systematically being hunted down. Later this month, a major spring offensive led by the US Marines begins, and I predict the time is not far away when we see the heads of Al Qaeda leaders stuck on a pike.

The major failures so far are in Iran and Pakistan. In Iran, the CIA is incapable of fomenting a ready-to-go rebellion against the hated Mullacracy. In Pakistan, the CIA is incapable of arranging the dismantlement of the ISI, which set up the Taliban, runs the drug trade, and sponsored the Nuclear Bazaar of nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan.

The only way to improve this situation is to get into the game with President Bush, and not take ourselves out of the game, or threaten to. During the Reagan presidency, support for anti-Soviet freedom fighters was the premier foreign policy issue for the conservative movement. Such support played a critical role in enabling the Reagan Doctrine to win the Cold War. So today, support for President Bush’s War on Terrorism must become the premier foreign policy issue for conservatives.

How can we help the President win the War on Terrorism? That is the question we must all ask ourselves.

Just as we identified anti-Soviet freedom fighters, brought them to the attention of the Reagan White House, and agitated for supporting them, so today we can do the same for anti-Islamist freedom fighters.

You can find them in unusual places — like China. Christianity is exploding in China, beyond the Communist government’s capacity to contain it. Chinese Christians have formed a Back To Jerusalem movement, and have developed a detailed plan to send 100,000 Chinese Christian missionaries to the Middle East to convert Moslem Arabs to Christianity. They explain it on their website, www.backtojerusalem.com. They deserve our support.

Another place to look is Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of Islam’s anti-Osama, Shaykh Hishan Kabbani — leader of the Naqshbandi Order of the Sufis. Sufism is a branch of Islam that reads the Koran metaphorically, not literally like the Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists. There are well over 100 million Sufi Moslems and they despise Osama Bin Laden and all he stands for.

What Bin Laden stands for is Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist interpretation that originated in Saudi Arabia. Shaykh Kabbani is now organizing a world conference of thousands of Sufi leaders for the purpose of formally declaring to the entire global Moslem community that Wahhabism is an Islamic heresy, and that Wahhabis are no longer to be considered true Moslems. He deserves our support.

Another place to look is Iran, where hundreds of thousands of student freedom fighters are ready to rebel against the totalitarian tyranny of the Ayatollahs. They deserve our support.

Once again, conservatives can play an absolutely vital role in defending America and bringing more freedom to the world. We did it in the 1980s and we can do it again now. If we work together and if we work with our president, we can and we will win the War on Moslem Terrorism.

Thank you all very much.