Islamo-Fascism is an Oxymoron

by Chuck McGlawn
If you support the war in Iraq because you think it is a war against Islamo-Fascism, let me tell there is no such thing as Islamo-Fascism, there can be no such thing as Islamo-Fascism. The President Bush first use of the term came in Oct. 5, 2005, almost three weeks passed before the second. It is a word clearly designed to garner support from the naïve. Support for the war, which is precipitating an expansion of governmental power unprecedented in history.

Fascism is a societal development that is more than five centuries ahead of the development of any Islamic nation. There was a time 9long long ago) when the Middle East was the most advanced and technologically superior, area of the world. When they accepted Mohammad as a profit, their social and technological advancement stopped cold. Fascism is a development that requires many elements not present in any Middle Eastern Country.

The culture that gave the world the zero, and the numbering system still used by most of the civilized world is hovering in and around the 18th or 19th century. Most of the rest of the world experienced an Industrial Revolution. The Middle Eastern populations, by the time of WWI were still wearing the flowing robes of the 8th century. They had not reached the, "division of labor" stage so necessary for the next step in the evolution of mankind, so eloquently described by Adam Smith in 1776 Scotland.

By the time of WWII, the Middle East had barely advanced beyond flintlock rifles. By the time of Desert Storm, the Middle East military had barely reached the 20th century with simple rifles and automatic weapons bought from others. The Scud Missiles are just very big fireworks "sky rockets" bought from China, a China that could have provided more sophisticated weaponry, but training levels locked them into the simple point-and-fire Scud.

Anything in the Islamic world that smacks of the 20th century is imported. In an area of the world where energy would have been so cheap, and their location so perfect for the development of a world-class automobile industry, it is doubtful that the manufacturing capability of the Middle East could produce a simple bicycle. This is the Great Enemy we are supposed to fear.

The Middle East holds a position of significance only because of policies of the US Government. Moreover, the supporters of the war with pom poms in hand are cheering the war along to even more stultifying policies with that effect on the US economic development. The Middle East as a threat to the US is a total fabrication of the Military Industrial Complex.

Please note the great enemy of the US, namely the USSR was beginning to crumble by July of 1989, when Gorbachev frees Warsaw Pact Nations to choose their own futures. By November, the Berlin Wall came down. By Jan, of 1990 the Soviet Union with plans to rule the waves was now waving the rules. It ceased being a power. A little more than eleven months later the US propaganda machine had manufactured out of whole cloth a new Great Enemy.

We picked a fifth rate power Iraq, and goaded them into attacking a 10th rate power Kuwait. Then the Great Moral Leader of the world could not allow Iraq to occupy Kuwait, even though by geography, religion and temperament they were brothers in the field, and had been fighting amongst themselves for centuries.

If the US had just stayed out of the foreign policy business, and allowed a free market system to deal, or not deal with a particular area of the world, then the disparity in the standard of living would have been so gigantic, that $5.00 per gallon gasoline would have been a small price to pay. If you add to today’s gasoline price the taxes and borrowing necessary to wage an ever-escalating war. Then include the loss to economic expansion caused by the war, we are paying more than $5.00 per gallon today. Alternatively, who knows if we had pursued a different course a different source of energy may have emerged.

We need to get out of Iraq, and the 100 or more nations of the world, and notify the world that we will no longer be acting as the world’s police. Take the money dispersed through out the world and return it to the beleaguered taxpayer. Then experience a growth in the national economy that would send signals around the world that war is excessively costly, not only in life, but money, that peace would be the wave of the future. Then no tin-horned dictator in the world could hold its populations in the semi-slavery now so commonplace in many parts of the world. Then Americanism could become the positive forward-looking philosophy that it set out to be in saner times.