Army Bob: Our longest war is vs. Islamic fundamentalism

by Robert M. Traxler

The history of the United States is a path we must travel to understand our present-day view of the world. Folks in the news business will tell us the war in Afghanistan is the longest in our history; not correct on so many levels.

First, we must look at the Korean War, 1951 to today; a peace treaty has yet to signed formally ending that war. However, the longest war we have fought is with ISIS/ISIL in its various shapes and forms and different names. From the Mid-East to the Philippines, from Boston to New York, from 1783 to 2017, we as a nation have been at war with Islamic fundamentalism.

Even before we became a nation, ships from North American ports were seized and the crews enslaved (literally sold into slavery). After we became a nation in 1776 the attacks continued, at an accelerated rate. With no formal navy, we were easy pickings for the “Barbary Pirates,” Islamic fundamentalism’s first name.

Two future presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were dispatched in 1786 to London to negotiate a peace treaty with the Dey of Algiers the puppet master and state sponsor for the terrorists. They reported the Dey’s reason for his Islamically-inspired hostility towards America:
“[I]t was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

In 1800, 20% of the federal budget, some $82. 94 billion in today’s dollars, was paid as tribute and ransom to terrorists.

Appeasement rarely works; Chamberlain’s appeasement policy toward Hitler and President Clinton’s $2 billion to North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program are examples. The more you pay, the more the bad folks want. The Congress finally said enough and in 1801 sent our newly-minted Navy to fight the pirates. From May of 1801 to June 1805 the Navy and the Marine Corps actively pursued the terrorists, seizing the port city of Derna, Tripoli. Indeed, the Marine hymn “to the shores of Tripoli” immortalizes the battle in song and it deserved to be; the Marines fought outnumbered and outgunned, defeating a determined well-fortified enemy. I do like to remind my Marine friends that the Marines were under the command of LTC. William Eaton, an Army Officer, but I will never refer to the battle as anything but a hard-fought Marine Corps victory.

The modern age of Islamic terrorism started in earnest after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; groups such as, Al Fatah and The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were born. The terrorists adopted the Soviet Socialist play book and went underground. Islamic terrorists worked with other international terrorists like the Irish Republican Army, who taught them to use the IED, the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof and the American Weather Underground and many other groups. A list of the names is long, and a terrorist by any name is still a terrorist.

Every American president in the modern era of terrorism has had to fight these people. The real problem with the War on Terror is that we are in denial of the scope of the problem. Islam has 1.6 billion members, and too many approve of terrorist acts like homicide bombings, per an Al Jazeera survey.

Islam is in the grips of modernization as Christianity was during the age of enlightenment, and many Muslims do not like it, as it threatens their power. The marriage of government and religion was banned in our nation’s Constitution for good reason; the founding fathers knew a separation of church and state produced a much less dictatorial and moderate national government.

The truth is the War on Terror will end only when Islam learns to stop preaching violence in the name of Allah. That process has begun, but it will take generations. Please note that most hard-core terrorists are educated, middle to upper income Muslims. Sadly, we will not see the end of the war on terror in this century.