As the Strident Conservative grows in popularity, we continue to receive requests for the opportunity to be a guest contributor. We’re proud to give space for today’s guest.
Since the events of 9/11, Larry Kelley has written over 100 articles on terrorism and resurgent militant Islam (http://larrykelley.com/). His new book (Lessons from Fallen Civilizations) asks the question, “can a bankrupt America survive the current Islamic threat?” He is a frequent contributor to Townhall Magazine and Human Events, and is a frequent guest on radio and TV.
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Jerome Corsi begins his book, Atomic Iran, (published in 2005) “On Sunday, October 31, 2004, virtually on the eve of the US presidential election, the Majlis, Iran’s Parliament, met in Tehran. The bill before them would require the government to enrich uranium. The session was carried live on national radio. As the assembly voted unanimously to enrich uranium, the members of parliament took up the chant: Death to America . . . Death to Israel.”
Seven and half years later, submerged beneath the waves of mobs-in-the-street media stories was a Washington Times report from the National Counter Terrorism Center. It reported to Congress that a nuclear Iran with its Revolutionary Guard Corps “poses a threat to the US Homeland.” Iran not only possesses long-range missiles, is very close to completing the weaponization of enriched uranium, but it has been testing over the Caspian Sea an electro magnetic pulse (EMP) weapon,a nuclear tipped missile that can be mounted on an unmarked barged, brought into international waters off the Eastern seaboard of the US, then be launched into our atmosphere and detonated at apogee. The nuclear blast would then destroy our electrical grid, the infrastructure that controls everything from our water supply to our banking systems. A report delivered to Congress predicted that an EMP attack would drive the US back to nineteenth century where only those Americans with access to an agrarian food source would survive. As several Iranian officials have stated, “We can envision a world without America. “
Apocalyptic Shiites
The Mullahs now running the regime in Tehran are apocalyptic Shiites. The are fervent believers in the Twelfth Imam who disappeared down a well in the Iranian city of Qom in 874. They believe that, although invisible, he is not absent from this world; that Hidden Imam will return. And when he does, all the infidels will be vanquished, including Sunni Muslims. Shiite Islam will impose its dominion over the earth in the aftermath of a great apocalypse such as a nuclear war.
Ahmadinejad’s chief spiritual advisor, the Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, is considered to be Shiite Islam’s premier authority on the Twelfth Imam and has proclaimed that Ahmadinejad is the “chosen” of the Hidden Imam, the person “designated for his return.” Ahmadinejad himself has said he is in communication with the Twelfth Imam. Preeminent Middle Eastern scholar, Bernard Lewis has stated that the concept of “mutually assured destruction” may not be a deterrent but rather an incentive for the Iranian regime. Given that the leaders of this regime believe they can accelerate the coming of their messianic figure through a great conflagration, they may choose war over peace. The West has spent a decade seeking to negotiate with those that claim to seek Armageddon.
A Duplicitous Leadership and an Ultimately Defenseless America
To grasp just how insolvent the country now is, Congressman Tom McClintock who sits on the House Budget Committee told me, “We could shut down the entire Federal Government, send the military home, fire every federal employee, close every department, shutter the White House, and it would still not be enough to balance the federal budget. Just the mandatory spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, other welfare programs, and interest on the debt is consuming more than the entire revenues of the Federal Government.” Experts who regularly testify before Paul Ryan’s committee estimate that the US has between two and four years before it would experience a “debt crisis.” When I asked McClintock what that meant, he replied that it referred to a time when the US would run out of sources from which to borrow. In essence, it would mean a systemic breakdown of an unprecedented magnitude.
As Barack Obama’s welfare state plunges our republic deeper and deeper into deficit, he has already shown that he is committed to dramatically downsizing our military. Despite the fact that Obama has stated that he would maintain our military strength, only the naïve and easily duped really still believe him. In his quest to keep his welfare state from default, every year of his tenure he has made deep cuts to every branch of the military. But what is worse, under last year’s Budget Control Act there will be sequestration cuts to the military that will add, over the next decade, another half trillion in cuts to the $487 billion already in the works. It is no surprise that under this president, should he be reelected, entitlement-state America will, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “be left with the smallest Navy since World War I, the smallest ground forces in 70 years.”
The coming sequestration has the corrupt Obama administration scrambling to prevent the public from knowing that it undermined funding for the troops in Afghanistan, operations in the Persian Gulf, training programs, equipment maintenance, even military personnel benefits. Unofficial reports have surfaced that the administration has been trying to convince Defense contractors to break the law and not to send out lay-off notices on the 1st of October, even though the law requires that they send out lay-of notices 90 days in advance. Lockheed Martin has stated publicly that it intends to send notices to most of its 123,000 workers.
As I record in Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, in 2009, President Barack Obama has already traded away, to the Russians, some of America’s most important and robust missile defense installations located in the Czech Republic and in Poland. They were almost ready to be brought online. These were traded in exchange for the Russians’ duplicitous half-promises regarding Iran, promises they had no intention of keeping. President Obama’s head was handed to him diplomatically. He abrogated signed treaties negotiated by the Bush (GW) Administration. This humiliated and deeply angered some of our staunchest allies in the region. In so doing, he let the world know that contracts with the United States were only operative within the term of a single presidency. Even worse, the cancelled installations were capable of intercepting long-range inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM). With Iran testing its own ICBM’s, Obama left the East Coast of the United States vulnerable to an Iranian attack—when he did not need to do so.
Mark Helprin wrote, “By 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s election, America had enjoyed air superiority since World War II. And it had been sixty years since a single American soldier had lost his life on the ground due to an attack from the air. Incomprehensibly in 2009, President Obama cancelled the F-22 Raptor jet fighter, which threatens to relinquish American air superiority. Canceling the F-22, the most capable fighter plane ever produced, is yet another act in the tragedy of a nation that, bankrupting itself, is losing its will to prevail.”
Larry Kelley earned his BA in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara and operates his own small business. Since 9/11 he has written over 100 articles on terrorism and resurgent militant Islam (http://larrykelley.com/). His new book is Lessons from
Fallen Civilizations (http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Fallen-Civilizations-Bankrupt-America/dp/1936449099/).
