Okay, good evening and welcome to tonight's event, the fifth lecture of the INRAN Institute's 2006 lecture series. My name is Mark Chapman and I am the Vice President of Development for the Institute, which is headquartered here in Irvine, California. The INRAN Institute is a nonprofit organization and all of our programs are funded by private donations from corporations, foundations, and the generosity of many individuals throughout the United States and around the world. We are now actively seeking funding for more of these talks, so if you appreciate the value of this series and would like to see it continue, please consider becoming a supporter of the Institute and perhaps of this series specifically. If you're interested, please see me tonight, I'll be happy to give you more information. Now a few brief announcements before we begin tonight's lecture. We have a bookstore located in the back of this room with a selection of INRAN's fiction and non-fiction writings and other books and recordings on politics, foreign policy, and terrorism related to tonight's talk. We would also like to announce that the last lecture of this year's series will be held here at the Hyatt on Wednesday, October the 18th entitled, Religion and Morality. The lecture will be presented by Dr. Ankar Gatte of the INRAN Institute. Next month, from October 20th through 22nd, which is on a three-day weekend in Boston, the Institute will be hosting a conference entitled, The Jihad Against the West, The Real Threat and the Right Response. The three-day event will conclude with a talk by tonight's speaker as part of the historic Ford Hall Forum Lecture Series. Other featured speakers will include Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Institute, excuse me, the Middle East Forum, Fleming Rose, editor of Jilin's Post-It, which is the Danish newspaper that published the Muhammad cartoons, and there was quite a controversy around that recently, and Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch. For anyone in the San Diego area, ARI's Lanjorno will be presenting a campus club lecture on Islam's role in the terror war on America on October 26th at the University of San Diego campus. Please visit the ARI website for more information. For those interested in taking courses at ARI, two new courses are just starting up in our Objectivist Academic Center, which are available for auditing. One is a detailed study of INRAN's philosophy, and the other is on the history of capitalism. Details, including information on how to register can be found on the ARI website. Okay, that's it for the announcements. Our speaker tonight is Dr. Yaron Brooke, president and executive director of the INRAN Institute. As a nationally recognized expert on current political events, including foreign policy issues such as terrorism and the Middle East conflict, Dr. Brooke is regularly interviewed by the print, radio, and television media. He is currently a regular guest on several CNBC business programs, including On the Money, Closing Bell, and Kudlow & Company, where he comments on cultural and business-related issues. He also lectures on terrorism and issues related to the Middle East at college campuses throughout the US, including recent talks at Brown University, Columbia, Stanford, and NYU. Prior to coming to the United States, Dr. Brooke served in the Israeli armed forces, including assignments as a member of the Israeli Army Intelligence. He was also an award-winning university professor at Santa Clara University before joining the INRAN Institute in 2000. Tonight's lecture is entitled Democracy vs. Victory, Why the Forward Strategy of Freedom Had to Fail. At the end of the lecture, Dr. Brooke will be joined by Dr. Ankar Gatte, dean of the Objectivist Academic Center at the INRAN Institute. And they'll be fielding questions from the audience. So if you have a question at that time, please step up to the mic, which is located here in this aisle, and they'll be happy to answer your question. And now please welcome me, join me in welcoming Dr. Yaron Brooke. Thank you. Let me, given the cell phone just rang, let me remind everybody to turn your cells off, please. Thank you. In the five years since September 11th, many people have asked despondently if the United States is safer. Well, there has been little reason to feel more secure. About a year ago, many were swept up in the excitement of the government's new strategy in the Middle East. Some people were euphoric with hope. We all saw an early milestone of that strategy in January of 2005. We saw the images of smiling Iraqis, displaying their ink-stained fingers, having just cast their votes in elections in liberated Iraq. Those images, people said, symbolized a momentous development. We all heard the breathless news reports about a wave of democracy in the Middle East. After the voting, President Bush said the balancing was a resounding success and praised Iraqis, who, quote, have taken rightful control of their country's destiny, unquote. The hope and excitement sparked by elections in Iraq was contagious. Even opponents of Bush were swept up. A New York Times editorial, for example, declared that the first three months of 2005 had been full of, quote, hotening surprises, each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing, that Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. This is the New York Times. Even Ted Kennedy hailed the development. Commentators so reasoned to believe Bush's prediction of 2003. He had said that, quote, Iraqi democracy will succeed, that it would be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution, unquote. Indeed, in an Arab League meeting in Tunis, according to Reuters, heads of state, quote, promised to promote democracy, expand popular participation in politics, and reinforce women's and civil society. Later, U.S. pressure nudged Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and Egypt to hold the first contested elections in many years. The upshot of all this, we were told, would be greater security for America. The crusade to democratize the greater Middle East was premised an idea that, quote, Bush, the security of our nation depends on the advance of liberty in other nations, unquote. This is Bush's so-called forward strategy for freedom, bringing democracy to the rest of the world for the alleged purpose of making America safer. So what is the situation today? Just about a year and a half after these elections, these first elections. They have indeed been elections across the Middle East, but they have made us less safe. To understand this point, we must realize who the enemy is, who the enemy that struck us on 9-11 is. It is not terrorism, as the administration claimed in the days and years after 9-11. The enemy is Islamic totalitarianism, the ideology that would enslave the entire Middle East and the rest of the world under a totalitarian state ruled by Islamic law. These totalitarians will use whatever means necessary to attain their goal. Terrorism, if they think it will be effective. All-out war, if they can win. Politics, if it will gain them control over whole countries. So who won the elections in Iraq? The elections that were touted as such an American victory. Well, the new government is dominated by a Shiite alliance led by Skiri. That stands for the Supreme Council for an Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The alliance, the Shiite alliance, whose spiritual leader is an Ayatollah, Ayatollah Sistani, has intimatized with the first nation to undergo an Islamic revolution, Iran. The fundamental principle of Iraq's new constitution is Islam. One of the most powerful men in Iraqi politics today is the hugely popular religious warlord Muqtah El-Sadr, whose Maad-e-Ami committed itself to armed resistance against America and has killed many American troops. The siege of Najaf in 2004 was intended to disarm Sadr's private militia. It was a siege that failed because of America's unwillingness to offend the Shiites. The Iraqi quagmire has so far claimed nearly 3,000 American lives. Iraq has become what it was never before, a hotbed of Islamic terrorists. Consider the Palestinian territories. For years Bush has begged Palestinians to elect, quote, new leaders not compromised by terror, unquote. When Palestinians finally had the opportunity to elect new leaders in January 2006, they did turn their backs on the cronies of Yasser Arafat. Instead, they voted in even more militant killers, the Hamas, the Islamic totalitarian group notorious for suicide bombings. It won a landslide election and now rules the Palestinian territories. Earlier this summer, the Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers and precipitated a war in the region. Now Hezbollah, I will remind you, took part in the US endorsed elections in Lebanon and is now part of the Lebanese government. Hezbollah is a Islamic totalitarian group and it runs two ministries, two ministries in the Lebanese government. Consider as a final example of the trend, the elections in Egypt. In the Arab world's most populous country, voters turned out despite government bullying and interference and it was hailed as a, you know, victory for democracy. Now which group scored the most significant gains? The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of the Islamic totalitarian movement, Hamas and parts of al-Qaeda, as well as many other Islamic totalitarian groups, sprang from the Muslim Brotherhood. The group's founding credo is, quote, Allah is our goal, the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle is our way, and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration, unquote. The Brotherhood's success was considerable. It won 88 seats in the Egyptian assembly, with 20% in the assembly, it is the largest opposition block the body has ever seen. Yet it could have won many, many more seats, but deliberately chose to field only 125 candidates to limit its own success and avoid a crack down from the government. Indeed, government troops would send out to block voting in areas where they could have won even more. Across the Middle East, there is a renewed sense of purpose and greater confidence among Islamic totalitarians, from Beirut to Gaza to Cairo to Tehran. Hezbollah's war against Israel this summer is one major symptom of that confidence. The situation today is worse for America than it was right after 9-11. Witness the numerous terrorist plots that make the headlines, such as the one recently uncovered by British police, to blow up airlines crossing the Atlantic. Few people today feel safer, because in fact America is not safer. With a disaster in Iraq and a worsening situation in the Greater Middle East, many Americans have lost confidence in Bush's forward strategy, and the White House has come under heavy criticism. What went wrong according to these critics? Well, the so-called realists in foreign policy don't explain what went wrong. Instead, they dismiss the forward strategy as hopeless from the outset. The so-called to so-called realists, freedom is just one value among others, and it is not America's job to judge other regimes. Instead, they say, you know, we should broker deals with whomever it is experience, it is expedient to befriend for the moment, regardless of whether they're dictatorships or free countries. That supposedly is the way to secure Americans' interests. But of course this is false. Freedom is an objectively superior value, and it is a losing strategy to appease and cozy up with hostile regimes. Other criticisms come down to this. The disaster in the Middle East is due to some failure in the execution of the forward strategy. We didn't send enough troops to Iraq. There were not enough guards along the Iraq's border with Syria. Iraqi police forces are not sufficiently trained, and equipment is not as good, etc. etc. You can take it from here. Similar criticisms have been put forward about Afghanistan. Too few troops, too little knowledge of the local language, and on and on. Much of the criticism is centered on the concrete means of the strategy, but not on its ends. But perhaps the strategy's end is the problem. Perhaps nothing went wrong, and what we're seeing in the Middle East is the performance of the forward strategy's actual goal. My thesis tonight is that this strategy had to fail at making us safer, because making us safer was never its purpose. And since its actual goal is perverse, the forward strategy undermines America's security. This self-destructive outcome is a necessary outcome of the forward strategy of freedom's immoral aims, goals. So let's begin with a question that the architects of the strategy had to begin with immediately after 9-11. What must America do to defend itself, given the lethal threat posed by Islamic terrorists? What steps are necessary to achieve our security to protect our lives? The rational answer is America must defeat the enemy. Defeating the enemy entails the permanent elimination of the threat, the complete restoration and protection of individual rights, the return to normal life without endless terror alerts and the dread of another 9-11. Now that has been the objective measure of success in war-threat history, victory. It was the goal of the Allied Powers in World War II, and they did indeed succeed. The combat in World War II achieved victory over Germany and restored peace. By 1945, when the war ended, the Germans and Japanese were defeated. People in the West breathed the sigh of relief and returned to their normal lives. The threat was over. How was this victory accomplished? Well, the Allied Powers committed themselves to crushing Germany. They carpet bombed German cities, pulverized its factories and railroads, devastated its infrastructure and demonstrated that the Nazi cause was doomed. In the Pacific Theater, the United States thoroughly defeated Japan. Ultimately, that necessitated dropping two atomic bombs, which spared the lives of countless U.S. troops who would otherwise have died in the continued fighting. So to achieve victory, the United States crushed and humiliated the enemy, proving the ideologies of Nazism and Japanese imperialism impotent and suicidal. Today, the U.S. could defeat the enemy by doing the same to those regimes, advocating the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism. Military force could be used to devastate them until our will dominates. We can thus bring the hostilities to an end and fulfill a legitimate and urgent need for security. The chief targets are the intellectual and financial sponsors of Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is now, of course, chasing nuclear weapons.  Victory in the war on Islamic totalitarianism requires no less than it did in World War II. It requires the destruction and humiliation of the enemy and its ideology. But according to the Bush administration, the steps that America must take are very different. President Bush claimed that, quote, we're advancing our security at home by advancing the cause of freedom across the world, because in the long run, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to break their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering them hopeful alternatives of human freedom. The security of our nation depends on the advance of liberty in other nations, unquote. Oh, he adds, helping the people of Iraq is the morally right thing to do, and it is also in our own national interest, unquote. This then is the strategy that alleges allegedly is indispensable to American security. The Ford strategy will work, Bush claimed, because it seeks to prevent the conditions that enable terrorists to operate and thrive.  We know throughout history that democracies can replace resentment with hope and respect the rights of their citizens and our neighbors and join together to fight in this global war against terrorism. History has shown that free nations are peaceful nations, unquote. Boil this down, and this is what you find. Unless we bring democracy to the Muslim world, we will suffer more attacks like 9-11. We can stop such attacks and make Americans safe, America safer by toppling dictatorships and fostering elections in the Middle East. So the alternatives are, don't spend democracy and be massacred or enter any in the Middle East and be safe. Now this might sound plausible. Truly free nations have no interest in waging war on others, except in self defense. Free nations prosper through trade, not conquest and plunder. Peace is good for them. War is not. It is also true that the more free countries there are in the world, the better off we are. But what this strategy of promoting democracy as the as the main vehicle for defending America, what the strategy have sounded plausible is a response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Imagine that following Pearl Harbor, Americans were told that victory would come not by fighting the enemy until it until it's all unconditional surrender. No, but by bringing democracy to Asia and Europe. Imagine that our goal in the war was declared to be liberating poor Japanese and Germans from enslavement by their rulers. Imagine that U.S. bombers dropped aid packages on German and Japanese cities in between delicate sprinkles of missiles. Because this was not the approach taken, World War II was one decisively in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. We are now entering the sixth year of Bush's war and there was no end in sight. Things are only getting worse. After Pearl Harbor, the outraged people of America demanded self assertive retaliation and their government delivered. Likewise, right after 9-11, people were righteously outraged. Their healthy, rational response was, we need to fight a war now to make us safer. The administration also felt outraged. It famously announced that we must quote in states who support terrorism. The original name of the military campaign in Afghanistan was aptly chosen, Operation Infinite Justice, signaling that it was proper for America to assert its own interests, proper for us to defend ourselves. Put into words, the mood came to this. It was America's moral right to defend itself, to secure its own interests. But that initial response to 9-11 did not last. It was not translated into any military strategy for victory. The idea that it is right for America to be self interested, that did not last. Operation Infinite Justice was renamed to something blandly differential. The nation's willingness to defeat the enemy evaporated. Why? Because the initial response that self interest is proper clashed with people's more deeply held belief about what is morally good. This is where the forward strategy comes in. This strategy reflects and is motivated by the dominant moral code in our country, altruism. From secular and religious authorities left and right, we are urged that to be moral is to give up your values in selfless service to others.  According to this creed, our duty is to put other people first and subordinate or renounce our own values. According to this creed, Mother Teresa is a moral hero, but a productive businessman like Bill Gates is not, unless of course he repents and gives his way, away his billions of dollars. Whom must we serve? Well, whoever is deemed needy, whoever lacks a value like liberty or wealth. And on this standard, the oppressed, impoverished, primitive Iraqis are definitely have-nots. Although bringing them democracy would be hard, Bush said, quote, that is no excuse to leave the Iraqi regime's torture chambers and poison labs in operation, unquote. Why? Because as Bush stated, we Americans know how to quote, sacrifice for the liberty of strangers, unquote. Now it is important to understand Bush's statement precisely. Sacrifice does not mean giving up something unimportant for the sake of a big reward at the end. Like scrimping and saving today in order to buy a car next year. That's not sacrifice. When we serve others, we should do it for their sake, their benefit, not for any gain we hope for as a result. To sacrifice means to give up a value for the sake of a lesser or non-value. It means renouncing benefits now, but for no greater benefit ever. It means scrimping and saving today and handing your savings over to a stranger. It means sending American soldiers to Iraq not to defend their own liberty and ours, but to ensure Iraqis have functioning sewers. It means a net loss. And the cardinal value that America must sacrifice is its own national security, the defense of our lives from Islamic terrorists. The Ford strategy thus demands that we put aside America's rightful need for security and instead sacrifice for strangers all across the globe wherever tyranny rules. The goal of the democracy crusade is not to end the threats await against us, but to bring unearned benefits to the world's hungry and oppressed. Facing catastrophic threats to the lives of Americans, how did the administration respond? Well, guided by its moral premises, the administration did not ask itself what must be done to protect the country. Instead, it asked, how can America best serve strangers in need? The Ford strategy is not concerned with defeating the enemy at all. It is a substitute for achieving victory. And that is exactly how Washington directed the entire war from the outset. The war was pitched as a war of liberation. Just as we toppled the Taliban to liberate the Afghans, so we toppled Saddam to liberate the Iraqis. The campaign in Iraq, after all, was called Operation Iraqi Freedom, not American Security. Shock and awe, the supposedly merciless bombing of Baghdad, never materialized. That's because, as Washington demanded, the military's goal was not to devastate Iraq's infrastructure, but to provide welfare services. Bush had promised that America will, quote, stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq. We will deliver medicine to the sick, and we are now moving into place nearly three million emergency rations to feed the hungry, unquote. The fighting had hardly begun when Washington launched the so-called Reconstruction. Our military was ordered to commit troops and resources, which were needed to defend military personnel to the tasks of reopening schools, printing textbooks, fixing up hospitals. For the Iraqis, Washington laid on food and medicine, schools and sewers, but of course, it tied, at the same time, it tied the hands of its own military. Washington commanded the military to tiptoe around Iraq, troops who coached in all sorts of cultural sensitivity training so that they would not offend the primitive customs of the locals. The military had to avoid treading in holy shrines in order not to bomb high-priority targets such as power stations. The welfare of Iraqis was placed above the lives of our soldiers, these soldiers who were put in line of fire, but prevented from using all necessary force in order to protect themselves and win the war. Many of our servicemen died as a result. Washington treats the lives of our military personnel as expendable. Their blood is spilled for the sake of serving Iraqis, a people overwhelmingly hostile to America. Bush had committed America to the selfless mission in the run-up to the war. Speaking early in 2003, he said, quote, the first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people themselves. They live in scarcity and fear under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war and misery and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein, but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us, unquote. Their lives did matter greatly to Washington. They mattered far more so than the lives of security of Americans. Now this is mandated, this approach, by the self-sacrificial morality guiding the forward strategy. For Bush and other advocates of the forward strategy, America has a moral duty to spread democracy globally. We must sacrifice for strangers, not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but wherever tyranny exists. Promoting democracy across the world is supposedly America's destiny. For Bush, this is a religious mission that God has conferred upon us. Bush elaborated, quote, we are confident that history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose. We did not ask for this mission, yet there is honor in history's call. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the calling of our time. Now, pause to contemplate what it means in concrete terms to say that America has a calling, a moral duty to the world's oppressed people. Project what that means in practice, given the nightmare that Iraq has become and the onerous cost of the war so far. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have fought in the wars since 9-11, and Iraq at the peak, as many as 300,000 of our military were involved. Today, about 140,000 troops are stuck in the quagmire that exists there today. The war effort since 9-11 has cost us about $368 billion, with Iraq costing $261 billion, about 2,600 brave Americans have come home dead in body bags. Nearly 20,000 have come home burned, blinded, limping. They are returning wounded, both physically and psychologically. The casualties of the war are largely unseen, but they are real. And for what? Contemplate what advocates of American destiny are calling for. It is not just one nightmare like Iraq, which is horrendous in itself, but dozens of conflicts that grind up American men and women and drain the lifeblood from our civilization. And not for a few months, but indefinitely, as we fulfill the open-ended calling of our time. Now this is morally obscene. We are told that fulfilling such a destiny will boost our national greatness. Not protect the lives of individual Americans, but boost some cloudy, free-floating conception of U.S. greatness. This implies selfless campaigns to reshape other countries by any available means. President Bush is doing his part to fulfill America's destiny, not only in Iraq. Despite a shortage of military recruits, U.S. troops remain as so-called peacekeepers in Kosovo, Bosnia, and dozens of other places around the world. On top of this, America funnels vast amounts of money and charitable donations to other countries. Note the response last year to the terrorist attacks in London. The response was not a commitment to destroying the enemy, but instead, at the G8 meeting that was being held at the same time as the terrorist attack happened in Scotland, Bush pledged to ramp up American foreign aid, promising billions of dollars to the poor and oppressed of Africa and the Middle East. This is their answer to the terrorist attack that had happened a day earlier. To make all this seem palatable and practical, advocates of the strategy rationalized their selfless campaign by pitching it as pro-American. This stuff about destiny, they tout as patriotism. They declare that such missions build and enhance our collective national identity. Such missions supposedly add to our glory as a people. But this is not patriotism. It is crude nationalism of the kind spouted by fascists in the last century. Underneath the rationalizations is the perverse code of self-sacrifice, the demand that Americans put their own interests aside for the sake of the nation, for the sake of strangers abroad, always renouncing our own individual interests. But this vicious notion contradicts the individualist's origin of America. This country was the first to conceive of itself as the land of free men. Not of men chained by the nose to the clan, the tribe, the race, or the nation. Each individual American is sovereign and independent, owing no duty to serve others.  That was the premise that inspired the founding fathers. Anyone who understands that would reject calls to serve America's destiny in Iraq or anywhere. Americans are not yet a people who respond favorably to blatant calls to self-sacrifice. So advocates of altruistic policies typically package self-sacrifice as a sensible, self-interested policy. For example, they tell us that if we want safer streets and less crime, the government must redistribute our wealth from the productive to those who have not earned it. Likewise, to make the forward strategy appealing, the advocates must deceive the public. They claim that if you want to make America safer, we must sacrifice U.S. troops in a global democratic crusade. But if the goal were truly to make America more secure, defeating our enemies would have to have been priority one. Victory is the precondition of American security. We do need to ensure the defeated enemy remain a non-threat once we've defeated it. But logically, the question of what political system is set up in a defeated country can only arise after one has eliminated the threat and the enemy has been demoralized and defeated. The forward strategy, however, sacrifices the goal of being victorious over the enemy. Instead, the strategy substitutes the goal of spreading democracy, spread democracy instead of victory. But even in its own terms, by advocating democracy, in other words, unlimited majority rule, the forward strategy is a vicious fraud. This should be clear to anyone who truly understands what freedom is. While claiming to champion freedom, the strategy has nothing to do with it. The truth is exactly the opposite. The forward strategy encourages tyranny and is an assault on the freedom of Americans. Freedom, in a political context, means the absence of physical coercion.  In order to take that action, he must be left alone, left free from the interference of the government and of other men. The moral foundation of freedom is respect for the sovereignty of the individual and his right to exist for his own sake. Because the founding fathers understood this, they created a constitutional republic, enshrining the protection of individual rights, the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Our constitutional framework prohibits the majority from voting away the rights of anyone. The founders firmly rejected democracy. Democracy rests on the primacy of the group.  A democracy is majority rule and limited by moral principle. It is a form of tyranny. Now observe that spreading democracy is an inherent part of the forward strategy. The reason is that the system of democracy is an efficient means of selflessly serving others. To serve America's self-interest would mean that we decided the political makeup of a defeated regime, how it is made permanently non-threatening. We would be better off and safer if we could ensure that we don't have to face a resurgent threat in a country we've waged war to defeat. But Washington disavows any intention of deciding this issue. What political regime will be in place? Bush proclaimed all along that America would never determine the precise character of Iraq's new regime. The decision was entirely theirs. That's what democracy is. Whatever these Iraqis choose, America would endorse selflessly. When asked if the U.S. would accept an election, they brought to power an Iranian-style militant theocracy. In the new Iraq, Bush said, yes. He explained that, quote, democracy is democracy, unquote. Why should America sit back and accept a new hostile regime in Iraq? A worse threat to our security than Saddam Hussein was. Why? Because whatever the Iraqis dictate goes, their will must be sovereign. Their desire must come first above any American interest. We must sacrifice our legitimate need for security, our prerogative to render and keep Iraq peaceful, in order to satisfy the will of the majority of poor, weak Iraqis. Anything else would be selfish. You can see what drives the strategy. America is free, wealthy, and strong. And thus, on the morality of self-sacrifice, we must serve others, not ourselves. You can also see why democracy is the necessary political expression of this morality. By this means, Iraqis and Afghans can decide and dictate to us what they want. It makes their interests paramount. Giving them a democracy puts their interests ahead of ours. It is perfectly selfless. Now, that this strategy is patently hostile to American interest should be clear to anyone knowledgeable about the culture of the Middle East. The Bush administration wished to believe that Iraqis and other people in the region yearn for freedom and prosperity, just as Americans do. And that if America liberated them, these people would embrace us and the supposedly self-evident value of liberty. Only by self-delusion could anyone come to believe this stuff. Only by self-delusion could they evade the religious, mystical, collectivistic, tribal nature of so much of Islamic culture in the Middle East. The results of elections in the Middle East have exposed the truth. The undefeated people did speak. And what they clamored for are Islamist leaders hostile to the West. That is what happened in the Palestinian territories with Hamas, in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood, in Lebanon with Hezbollah, and it is likely to happen as well in Jordan, when that country has elections next year at Washington's urging. Islamists who are closely tied to Iran now hold power in Iraq. The forward strategy of freedom has left the enemy undefeated and much stronger, with its path to political power paved by Washington. Note Iran's glee at events and how boldened they feel. Absurdly, after five years of war, America now faces a threat that we help make more potent, more dangerous. This is precisely what the forward strategy must lead to, given its moral premises and what its promoters evaded. The strategy means sacrificing American lives, not merely for the sake of indifferent strangers, but for the sake of our enemy. Bringing democracy to the world requires sacrificing the lives and liberties of Americans. The troops who risk their lives are not fighting to protect our and their liberty. They fight so that Iraqis and Afghans can have mob rule and elect Islamists to power. The forward strategy requires violating the rights of Americans so that hostile peoples can form new regimes that threaten our lives and freedom. By endorsing democracy, Bush's strategy teaches the enemy a profoundly encouraging lesson, that America does not fight to defeat the enemy, it does not stand for its own interests, but renounces them on principle. America does all this so that people across the Middle East can have their desires for Islamist regimes fulfilled. To our enemies, America is a paper tiger, in spite of its unsurpassed military strength, because it lacks conviction that it has the right to exist and defend its own values. Morally, the forward strategy of freedom is irredeemable. It should be clear why the strategy had to fail making us safer. Victory was never its goal. What then would a strategy of victory look like? What would a strategy that truly embraced freedom demand? A strategy for victory, the defeat of an enemy threat, necessitates an entirely different orientation from Bush's strategy. A strategy is an integrated plan for achieving some goal, and the choice of the goal ultimately depends on the moral code one holds. The forward strategy is self-destructive, because its goal is self-destructive. The strategy is an expression of the morality of self-sacrifice. That fundamental conception of what is morally good shapes every aspect of Bush's strategy. That is what dooms it. A strategy for victory achieves our security, because its goal is to achieve our self-interest. Defeating the enemy must be its highest purpose. The single-minded commitment flows from the recognition that man has a moral right to his own existence, a right to life, and that it is the US government's obligation to protect the rights of its citizens. This is the moral justification for waging war to defend America's self-interest. That is, to protect the right of each individual American to live free from the threat of foreign aggression. A strategy for victory rejects the so-called realist approach of balancing powers, of amoral dealmaking, of cynical geopolitical chess games. Rather, it is committed to the protection of American lives, not merely in the range of the moment or in a given crisis, but across the span of decades and in every single situations, unprincipled. This strategy is pro-freedom. It's pro-freedom. The freedom of Americans to live unmolested and unharmed by foreign powers. This precludes sending men to fight wars, not for the sake of their own liberty, but selflessly. It's a preclude selfless wars. A strategy for victory is based on the morality of rational egoism.  Now, what in concrete terms would a strategy for victory demand? First and foremost, we need to go to war knowing clearly that it is morally proper to destroy the enemy.  To win, we must know what we are fighting for our own freedom, and what means that implies. Before, during and after combat, U.S. foreign policy must boldly advocate for our ideals. Our government must broadcast that we believe that our own ideals of individualism, political freedom, secular government, lesbian capitalism are right, and that defending them is morally good. It must broadcast that the enemy's ideology is morally corrupt and must be stopped. If we are to establish our long-term security, we must demonstrate in practice and in logic that Islamic totalitarianism is a losing ideology leading to death and destruction, while the ideology we fight for is morally good, leading to life and prosperity. America should be an intellectual advocate for freedom. It is in our best interest to encourage others to adopt political and economic freedom. To genuine freedom fighters, we should give our moral endorsement, which in itself is considerable, though often underappreciated. We should, for example, endorse the free Taiwanese who are resisting the claims of authoritarian China to rule the island state. But the advocacy of freedom has an absolute limit. It is never, it is never moral for America to send its troops in order to liberate people and then pile sacrifice upon sacrifice for the sake of nation building. It is wrong to send our troops on humanitarian missions or to fight wars where America's security is not directly at stake. Such wars are a violation of the rights of our troops who fight to protect our and their liberty. It is also an outrageous squandering of resources that our government is obliged to use only in defense of American lives. America must never sacrifice the freedom of life and lives of its own citizens in the alleged name of promoting freedom. That would be a flagrant self-contradiction in the Middle East for the culture to become a non-threat to us forever. The people must accept that attacking the U.S. and its allies will bring them nothing but destruction and death. For them to prosper, they must look to us not as an enemy, but as a source of knowledge. They need to learn the value of individualism, of political freedom, of individual rights, of laissez-faire capitalism. They need to learn the crucial importance of separating state and religion, of keeping government secular. These are just some of the values they must learn to embrace, the values that have made America great if they wish for peace and prosperity. America has no moral duty to rescue the Arab Islamic world from its only rational ideals. It is in our rational self-interest to confidently assert our fundamental values and to stand as an exemplar to all who care to learn. Now, how do we translate this confidence in America's moral superiority into military action to defend our values? Well, since the enemy we face is Islamic totalitarianism, the vicious movement that wants to subjugate the West Islamic rule, we must target the source of this movement instead of nation-building, of rebuilding infrastructure, of sponsoring elections, of doling out food packages in Iraq and Afghanistan. America must focus its military efforts on Iran and Saudi Arabia. These are the wallsprings of Islamic totalitarianism. Iran promotes, sponsors, trains and arms jihadists. Support for the movement is government policy in Iran. In Saudi Arabia, government support might be passive, but it is substantial. These regimes inspire the terrorists and make the perverse ideal of an Islamic regime appear practical and realizable. Ending these regimes will halt the material support that enables Islamists to wage their jihad, and it will undermine the ideal that inspires them to fight. In the case of Iran, massive force should be used to destroy the Mullah's regimes and their supporters, and it needs to be done now, before the regime acquires nuclear weapons. This is the most urgent step we must take in the war. It is a travesty that nearly 140,000 American troops are stationed miles from the Iranian border, and instead of preparing to invade that country, they're performing social services in Iraq. But in waging war in Iran, we must set aside the self-sacrificial rules of war, the rules of engagement under which our military has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we are to win the war on Islamic totalitarianism, we must crush and demoralize the Iranian regime and all who support it. We must be ready and willing to use whatever force is necessary to achieve this goal. Since victory is our highest priority, since we recognize the irreplaceable value of human life, no military options should be ruled out. Breaking the spine of Iran will demonstrate America's resolute will to combat aggression. With that accomplished, Saudi Arabia will likely capitulate. Such regimes will know that to stay in power, they must not risk incurring America's wrath. Saudi Arabia's capitulation must include an end to the export of Islamic totalitarian ideology. That means no more funding of religious schools and mosques outside Saudi Arabia, no funding of radical Islamic groups anywhere, a stop to the horrific anti-American and anti-Jewish rhetoric in its state mosques. Other problematic regimes, such as Pakistan and Syria, will no longer feel so bold in the face of America. Dealing with them and ending their complicity in terrorism will prove far easier once America's commitments to its self-defense is demonstrated unambiguously. Finally, we need to hunt down the committed jihadists and stop them before they carry out further atrocities. But that is a hopeless task unless we smash their support infrastructure and expose their cause as doomed. Once we do that, they will be increasingly isolated and despondent. They will be far easier targets. What we do after victory is achieved should be guided exclusively by our self-interest. If the enemy is thoroughly destroyed and receptive to a new free political system, it might very well be in our interest to remain and help implement such a system as we did in Japan after World War II. Otherwise, if establishing a culture of freedom would be too costly in dollars and U.S. lives, then we have no moral obligation to pursue such a cause. In such a case, we should leave the country in as non-threatening a condition as possible and be clear on the consequence of them becoming a threat to us again. If our potential enemies know without a doubt that the consequence of threatening us is their own destruction, the world will be a peaceful place for Americans. And that, after all, is what we have a government for, to secure peace for us so that we may live and prosper. In foreign policy and other fields, there are supposedly only two mutually exclusive choices. Be idealistic or be practical. So-called realists claim to be practical, while advocates of the forward strategy claim to be moral idealists. Either we engage in amoral deals with hostile regimes for specious gains, or open-ended self-sacrificial crusades. What we need is a radically different foreign policy, one based on the morality of rational egos. Such a policy unites the moral and the practical. It leads to a strategy that demands victory over the enemy for the sake of our own freedom. In this war, as in all wars to defend America, victory comes first, above all else. The forward strategy is suicidal, and it's suicide deliberately pursued. We are in an ideological battle, first and foremost. A battle about the morality that guides our foreign policy. A battle about the meaning of freedom for Americans. A battle about the meaning of victory. A battle that must be won here in America if we are to beat our enemies overseas.  Remember the evil of the attacks on that day, and recognize that this is a war. Remember that it is morally proper, indeed morally necessary, that we crush the enemy. Aware that our cause is just, we must help America recapture the spur to righteous action left to us by the brave passengers of Flight 93. Let's roll. Thank you. Bush identified the enemy as Islamic fascism, and was criticized for it. In last night's speech, he identified the enemy as extremism versus moderation. Could you comment? Yeah, Bush for a while was identifying the enemy as Islamic fascism. What was it? Almost five years it took him to come to that realization that Islam had something to do with who the enemy was. And of course, fascism is the long term, because it's really totalitarianism. Fascism is one form of totalitarianism. There's no real link between fascism and the particular ideology that the Islamists hold.  So even calling it fascism is too narrow. But at least there was Islam in it, which has now disappeared again. And if you read the strategy for victory, which was just published a week ago, there's no mention. Yeah, national strategy for combating terrorism. Yeah, the national strategy for combating terrorism, Islam is not mentioned.  Islam is not mentioned in entire documents. They walked away even a week ago from the term Islamic anything. And the reason is that they are appeasers. They are fundamentally appeasers. So Bush was trying to make a case for why the war was justified, why Iraq was justified. There was still at war and so on. Why all this sacrifice in Iraq was still legitimate. So he was trying to beef up Americans' consciousness to the war. And I think some of its advisors said, well, Americans have kind of figured out that Islam has something to do with it. So maybe you should use the real term, which is Islamic fascism, which has been used by certain conservatives since day one. So he used it. It was a trial balloon. Immediately after using it, people got really upset. K got upset. Muslims got upset. He probably got a phone call from his pal, the prince in Saudi Arabia and probably from the prime minister of Iraq, who's after all an Islamic fascist and an ally of the United States in the war on terrorism. In this document, it calls Iraq an ally in the war on terrorism. And in dealing with Iran, the solution to Iran is to turn them into an ally on the war on terrorism too. So he got criticism from everybody. Nobody actually said what took you so long. Nobody advocates, nobody, you know, so he's kind of, at some point, looking at public opinion or looking at what the intellectuals are saying and looking at what phone calls he gets. And he doesn't get any from people who are saying you've been a wimp all along. You know, it's about time you came about. And he gets pushed towards the left. I mean, I've been criticized from day one for criticizing Bush because, oh, you're in league with the New York Times. It's, you know, you're on the left and so on. And my argument is even if you think Bush is redeemable, which I don't think, but even if you think that, don't you want to voice on the right to counter the voices on the left to push him kind of in the direction of the right, which I think happened with Islamic radicalism and disappeared as soon as the left. And again, it's not just the left. I'm convinced that he got phone calls from Saudi Arabia and from Iraq and, you know, from the prime minister of Lebanon, who he was trying to protect during the war between Israel and the Hezbollah. And how can he stand up against that? I mean, the whole purpose of the war is to defend the democratically elected government of Iraq. Yeah, I want to say something. I have an even more dim view of the term fascism and why it's being used. It goes back to, its prevalent use goes back to World War II. And the Nazis were called fascists. And they were called fascists in order to try to differentiate them from what they were. We're socialists so that we could preserve the ideal of socialism, but say, well, somehow it's become perverted by the Nazis. When they openly said, we're socialist and we're taking it to its logical extreme, and they did take socialism to its logical extreme. What I was actually reading today, the national strategy for combating terrorism and fascism is used there. And it's used in the context of the discussion of Islam and of Muslims. And it's used to try to draw a distinction between the Islamic fascists who take religion and completely distort it. So the term fascist is to sever the relationship, to make it impossible for someone to even ask the question, is there a relationship between their advocacy of religion and their advocacy of force, that they want to shove it down our throats? And it's, no, this is a distorted, it has nothing to do with religion. That is, so the term fascism is used to, in the same way it was used for the Nazis. Well, this is some crazy movement. It has nothing to do with the actual ideas they espouse, which is religious ideas. And Bush, because he's so incredibly religious, can't entertain the idea that there could be something to matter with religion. And if it's taken consistently, consistently it leads to a massive use of force on innocent people. So I think it is a deliberate term and deliberately used to confuse people and to sever, to make it such that you can't ask the question, does their religion have something to do with what they're doing? Well, there's more to say, but I'll say at least that. First, I got to say that your comparison to World War II I think is kind of false because Germany and Japan attacked other countries. They were aggressive. And as far as I know, Osama has always been saying that what he wants is the West to stop interfering in the politics of his land in the Middle East. He was against our presence in Saudi Arabia, you know, things like the Shah and stuff like that. So given that, if we allow these people to vote, and they say vote in some terrorists like from Hamas or Hezbollah, that's their choice. And, you know, isn't that the way like even in Israel, didn't many Israeli leaders get their start in a stern gang, near gun, or letty? I think it's a correct pronunciation. But what if we just pulled out and we let them choose their own government and then we trade with them, look at Vietnam. When we finally pulled out, Vietnam is one of our biggest trading partners. So, you know, to me it's like they want us to stop interfering in their country. They brought the fight to us. So what if we just pull out? Well, that is a complete perversion of what they stand for. Bin Laden uses the presence of U.S. troops and the presence of Americans in the Gulf States and elsewhere as an excuse to go after it. Their goal is not to get rid of American troops. Indeed, American troops are no longer in Saudi Arabia, in the holy places. If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, they would fight us somewhere else. They would go to Greece. They would go to Bosnia. They would go to Austria, which used to be part of the Islamic Empire. And indeed, their interpretation of their religion is a commandment to bring Islam to the entire world. I mean, that's how, how did Islam spread from being in a tiny little desert oasis in, you know, 660 or whatever it was, AD, to being an empire that went from Spain all the way to India, past India, by the 1100 through conquest, because that is their means. That is the essence of their ideology.  What you're reading is a few lines of Bin Laden that the press would like you to read, but read him. Read everything that he writes. Read what their intellectuals write. Read what they could write. The intellectual, the spiritual father of the whole Islamist movement today. Read what their real intention is. And their real intention, they don't hide this. They don't hide this. We choose to evade it. But their intention clearly stated is to establish an, an Islamic Empire taking over the entire Middle East that would then, once it got established and became powerful, launch a war against the West, eradicate the West. They want to destroy America because America is a, is, is a symbol of everything that is immoral and wrong about the world. They hate us because of who we are, because we're free, because we're prosperous. And again, read them. Read them. Don't take my word. Read what they write about America and why they hate us. They don't say, you know, they hate us because we're secular. They hate us because we have separation of church and state. They hate us because we're wealthy, because we're successful in spite of the fact that we have separation of church and state. So they, in that sense, they're nihilistic. They hate us for everything that's good about us. But they are committed to a worldwide movement to take over the world. And they're no different, in that sense, from the Nazis and the Fascists and the Communists.  There's 72 virgins or whatever waiting for that. The only way is to destroy them first. If we backed out, they would take over the Middle East. They would vote themselves in. They would have nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. It's this close to falling into the hands of the militants. Iran is going to have nuclear weapons soon. And then what do you do?  They don't care about dying. They're not like the Communists. The Communists, you know, didn't mind killing other people, but they didn't want to die themselves.  They want to, they want to die in the service of Allah because that gets them into heaven. That's, that's, and we have trade relations from Vietnam because Vietnam turned away from communism. It rejected communism in the last 10 years and we have trade relations, but it didn't reject communism because we left. And Vietnam never had an ideology. I'm against the Vietnam. Well, we should have never been there because Vietnam, never had an ideology of saying, we're going to cross the ocean and come to the United States and attack America and blow up America and destroy it. They wanted to enslave their own people, let them enslave their own people. As I said, I'm not willing to go fight for other people's freedom. But, but these people want to cross the ocean and come and destroy us.   You've identified an important source of danger to the United States, which is the encouragement of faith-based democracy in the Middle East. But we have an administration whose domestic policies are centered on promoting faith-based democracy in the United States and on removing constitutional barriers to faith-based democracy at home. And in fact, the first use of anti-terrorism legislation that permitted the government to seize library records, to monitor internet and telephone conversation in the name of fighting terrorism has been the faith-based war on obscenity and the faith-based war on drugs and the faith-based war on gambling. So, don't you see that there is a consistent, integrated promotion of faith-based democracy at home, which is far more dangerous to the freedoms of Americans than the promotion of the same faith-based democracy in the Middle East? I mean, I definitely agree that Bush's whole agenda is based on religion, but I think it's one and the same issue. The same reason that he brings faith-based programs into domestic policy is the reason that his foreign policy is so altruistic. It's, he cannot, I mean, I think one of the main things in terms of having moral confidence and of self-righteously saying that we're in the good here and the regimes in the Middle East are in the wrong, is to tell them that you need a separation of church and state. But this, what the Islamic totalitarians are after is precisely religion to have political power. And to defeat that movement, you have to say that goal, the goal of religion having political power is corrupt.  It is un-American, and anyone who takes up arms for that goal will be met with death. And that is the lesson. There is an ideological lesson that you have to drive home to these people, that if you take up arms in the cause of religion having political power, you're going to be met with American bombs. But precisely because Bush believes that religion should have political power, he can never say that. And so he can never oppose the actual source of those attackants and the ideology of those attackants, whatever terminology he uses. And however, often he refers to Islam because he makes a distinction between those who pervert the religion of Islam and those who willfully and properly carry it out. And he's in support of the second. And he's explicitly in support of the second. And we've poured tens of millions of dollars into what they call the Muslim World Outreach Program. We fund Maas all over the Middle East. We preserve the Koran, old editions of it, because they want these religious texts. No. Well, religion is part of what will bring them freedom is what he thinks. So it's, they're one and the same issue. His belief that religion should have political power is precisely why his foreign policy is so corrupt. Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't take anything I said to imply that we're sanguine or accepting of the slow deterioration and separation of church and state in the United States. Of course, that is a huge threat to American liberty. But you know, you want to have to be careful in evaluating which is the greater threat when you've got thousands of kids dying overseas. That to me, and you've got a powerful enemy, or not so powerful, we making it powerful, but an enemy who is dedicated to killing us. To me, that is the more urgent thing that has to be addressed right now and quickly. Let me also say about the use of Patriot Act and the very listening in, which I think, which I am against. I'm not against it at a time of war. But the problem is that there is no defined war here. What I think should have happened and still can happen is for the United States to declare war, which requires an act of Congress. We haven't done this since World War II. By the way, maybe that's why we haven't won a war since World War II. Declare war and then put in emergency provisions for the duration of the war. Define what victory means, go after victory. And once the war is over, I mean, sometimes you have to listen into people, you have to do things that you wouldn't do in peacetime. Once the war is over, the emergency provisions go away. But what's scary about what they're doing now is that this isn't definite. Bush just said this war is unwinnable, or he said that it will last a very, very long time, decades. And in the meantime, we're supposed to live under emergency provisions for decades. And that is very, very dangerous to own individual liberties. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, I enjoyed your talk and I agree with just about everything you said except one thing. And that is, we've been here for an hour and a half and I never heard anybody say the word oil. You know, I believe everybody believes we went over there for oil number one. And you never mentioned that. You said we went over to spread democracy. I think that was a secondary thing. Well, so let me address that. I don't believe we went over there for oil, I wish we had. Oil, oil to me is a legitimate reason to go to the Middle East. And I don't think we went there for that. The fact is that we spent almost no, there's almost no American troops dedicated or at least there's not enough troops dedicated to defending the Iraqi oil fields and the refineries and so on. Instead, we're training police forces, we're providing, you know, building hospitals and schools. If we really cared only about oil, 140,000 American troops would now be surrounding the oil fields or production in Iraq would be going through the roof. It's not because we don't care about oil because that would be selfish. And we don't believe in selfishness. Hello, I enjoyed your talk greatly this evening. Let me, let me just add to that. I really believe they believe this stuff. I know nobody does, but when they talk about the Ford strategy of freedom, they, if you read this, the administration's materials, all their strategy for victories, which come out every six months, different ones. And then if you go back into the 90s and you read the new conservatives and other conservative thinkers, they really believe that defeating, that bringing democracy to Iraq, allowing elections will overturn them at least, that it will become a flourishing, wonderful place if only we allow the vote. I mean, this is, these, the intellectuals were advocating for this in the mid 90s of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing elections to Iraq. You know, in the mid 90s, you can read this. This is, and you got, this is the real intellectual agenda because it's consistent with a moral ideal of altruism. Oil or any of these other supposedly cynical reasons. I mean, I wish because then it would mean that at least they had a semblance of self-interest motivating them and they don't. They're really committed. And I mean, for Bush, it's clear when you read his speeches that it's, he views the people in the Middle East as religious and therefore basically good. And therefore they have to have corrupt leaders. And if we just remove Saddam Hussein, they'll all vote for freedom. And that, I mean, that his whole strategy is premised on that view. Yeah. When we went into Iraq and we were giving them, doing the nation building, I was saying, oh great. What's the best way to start a nation? Well, let's use the U.S. Constitution.  Our politicians, every single one of them for the most part, don't seem to know what America stands for anymore. What, as you eloquently stated in a lot of your talk, why America exists and what, that we should promote it. What happened? I mean, it's, I know it's been a lot of years where America has deteriorated to where socialist borderline marks this kind of state in a lot of our philosophies. There's still freedom there. How did it all deteriorate and how do we get it back? Well, I mean, it's basically altruism has become one more dominant in the culture. It's become one more prevalent. It's become one more explicit. There's been a battle in the American psyche, American psyche, there's such a thing, the American culture between an American sense of life grounded in the founding of this country, grounded in the entrepreneurial nature of kind of 19th century rugged individualist Americans, a sense of life that was fundamentally selfish, self-interested, pursuing one's own dream, the American dream was not about bringing democracy to other people, it was about making your life the best that it can be, about helping your kids have a better life than you had, progress, about the future, but fundamentally selfish, fundamentally self-interested. But the explicit morality held in this country and in every country, because there's never been an alternative to it, was altruism.  On the one hand, you have Thomas Jefferson writing that we all have an aleable right to our own pursuit of happiness. And on the other hand, he's writing about the morality of altruism and the morality of self-sacrifice in his other writings. There is the split. And what happens is that the explicit ideas, the explicit ideology slowly grinds away at that sense of life and slowly chips away at it. And I think particularly since the late 19th century, early 20th century, that process has really been in play as European philosophy, content philosophy has been brought into the United States. You know, the left has come to dominate our universities and they've just chipped away at the American sense of life and that explicit philosophy has become more and more prevalent. You see that in the growth of government, you see it in socialism, you see it all around us and ultimately you see it in our foreign policy and we've basically lost much of it. Americans still have it, but it's shallow. You saw it after September 11th with the flags out for three weeks and then they were gone. You saw with that urgency for action, but then it was gone because that explicit altruism kicked in, kicked it out. And Ayn Rand writes a lot about this on this whole issue of how the decay of America occurred and it's in philosophical terms the way she puts it is that morality is more fundamental in politics. The America's founders were political revolutionaries. They were the best political philosophers and politicians the world has ever seen and they created an unprecedented nation that protects individuals' rights, his right to life, to liberty and to happiness and these are all selfish, but the selfishness is implicit when you say the pursuit of happiness it means the pursuit of your own happiness and for that to be a moral ideal you need some kind of morality that will say look it's right, it's good, this is the ultimate good, this is the ultimate value, this is what you should be doing, your whole life should be dedicated to achieving your happiness, but you need that as an explicit moral statement and pre Ayn Rand there is nobody, literally nobody who would say that, who had the courage to say that that is moral. There are basically two egoists that is two people who advocate selfishness in the history of Western thought as morally ideal and that's Aristotle and Ayn Rand and you needed somebody in the 19th century who would stand up and say and develop a new rational moral code and unfortunately it didn't happen until the 20th, but unfortunately it happened in the 20th. Thank you. Dr. Brooks I agree with your your point that if we're going to fight a war we need to we need to defeat the enemy and I also agree that there are things that we should do such as in World War II declared war and you mentioned and another thing you also mentioned and that was using atomic weapons if absolutely necessary and I think the argument was that it was and that it saved a lot of lives I wouldn't be here personally to ask the question I want to ask if that hadn't been done and I've never felt any guilt about that but there are people that I discuss this with who seem to think that I should and maybe you can help out a little bit here they use words like mass murder and genocide and mass slaughter and and I looked up genocide because I wanted to ask you this and it basically just means killing a large number of people now Ayn Rand wrote that using altruism as a justification for mass slaughter was obscene or evil or something and I agree with that however it in your opinion is there a good rationale a good justification in terms of self-interest or egoism for using weapons of mass destruction yes the preservation of your own life in a war of self-defense that is if somebody attacks you it is your moral responsibility to defend your life by whatever means necessary you owe the other side nothing you owe the other side nothing and it is it is um I'm not sure about your definition of genocide I think it I think it's something different but sure mass in this case mass killing I wouldn't call it murder because it's killing in self-defense can be the way in which you defend yourself in some cases like like in the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima Nagasaki was a very effective way in which one protected ourselves and the only consideration is your own life and the fact that that this is necessary for that in this country is a country that attacked you um and let me add about this notion that well you know there were children there and there were women and there were men you know who didn't participate in the battles I mean if children are truly innocent die that's sad you know nobody likes to see that happen but it's not your fault it's the fault of the people who brought you to that situation it is the fault of the people who initiated force every death in in Hiroshima Nagasaki is the fault of the Japanese every death in Dresden and Hamburg and Berlin is the fault of the Nazis it is not the fault of America so it's they're more responsibility if they are true innocence but then most people are not innocent most people are not innocent they actively support the regime you can see that in the Middle East right now where a majority is voting for Islamic Tertillitarians the majority is our enemy if they support Islamic Tertillitarianism but it's more than that they work for the regime they they fund it they provide the labor for it they are part of the country and you cannot isolate certain individuals when you're fighting a war your only priority is your own victory is the lives of your own troops that's it so do you think then that people are using some of these terms almost like package deals then well it's it's they're appealing to altruism it's appealing to their lives are more important than your life you know a million Japanese lives are more important than a hundred American lives so you know they play a numbers game on you but it's not a numbers game it's a question of your life of American freedom it's not a question of of their lives thank you yeah I mean I think that that last point is really important that morality is not a numbers game if you have the right to kill one Japanese in self-defense you have the right to kill a 50 or 100 or a thousand however many necessary to defend yourself and if it was wrong to kill a thousand or a hundred thousand then it's wrong to kill one there's there's no it doesn't somehow become well we've killed 50 that's okay but if we kill a hundred all of a sudden it the morality is not a numbers game in that way it is but it is for altruism and and that's the perversity of we won't use nuclear weapons or we won't use chemical weapons or whatever I mean that's ridiculous you use whatever weapon is the most effective to deal with the problem the problem of self-defense that you encounter at that moment the use the weapons that will solve your problem that will lead to your victory so we won't use nuclear weapons that might kill let's say a hundred thousand people but we use lots of tiny little bombs that'll kill a hundred thousand people I mean that's exactly the the ridiculous nature of the argument and you know so we can kill we can bomb one school but we can't bomb 10 schools I mean it's not a numbers game you have a right to your own self-defense yeah first of all I enjoyed your talk it seems like this could be a subject that we can discuss all night and I know we're limited but through your talk it's seems to me that you agree with sending American troops into Iraq no you do not no because I think Iraq was the wrong country I don't I don't oppose necessarily going to Iraq but in this war it was it was the wrong target there was no it wasn't necessary it was it was a waste we should have gone to Iran I said that a number of times during the talk I'm sorry I misinterpreted I don't believe we should have gone in there if we did when we did and found out there were no weapons of mass destruction we should have gone home just like weapons of mass destruction are not the issue that's not the issue in this war lots of countries that are hostile to the United States have weapons of mass destruction the point is is the question is when you go to war the question you have to ask is who is the enemy and what is the most effective way to deal with that enemy the enemy is Islamic totalitarianism and therefore the most effective way to deal with the enemy is to destroy the Iranian regime Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein it was a thug he was nothing but a two-bit thug and as soon as America had had been clear on its willingness to use force he would have been eliminated as a threat to the United States it's been stated and I just read it again this week that it's almost impossible to win a guerrilla war because the combatants look exactly the same as the non-combatants just like how do you tell the difference between a north vietnamese and a south vietnamese or north korean or south korean so this it seems that this war just cannot be won because there's no country that we could attack well what there is I named it Iran and I named it a Saudi Arabia but even the insurgency can be won it's not hard to win the insurgency three weeks max even though you don't know who the the combatants are why does that bother you well clearly clearly the insurgents I mean today it's more complicated because the insurgents are on both sides and everybody wants to kill America it's a civil war but a year ago the insurgents were Sunni Arabs living in the Sunni triangle being hidden finance supported you know fed clothed by Sunni Muslims in cities like Fallujah and Samara and others you know I advocated at the time and I think it would have worked very effectively to take a city like Fallujah a town like Fallujah and flatten it you're supporting these you're supporting these insurgents you're supporting terrorism you are responsible as responsible for it as the terrorists are we'll flatten it we'll flatten every city in the Sunni triangle until this stops and believe me you flatten one city they'll turn against their own and they'll stop the insurgency immediately I know other people have said that and I agree with that also even the soldiers it's been proved to start that have been and the Marines the Marines know this there's no question that's how we did in the Philippines in the turn of the century and it's not hard to do you have to be brutal you have to be tough you and you know how did Sherman stop the civil war he burnt their plantations he burnt their crops he destroyed their homes he didn't even kill that many people but he made the civilian population of the south suffer so that they didn't want war anymore so they wrote to their troops and told them stop you know you don't even have to flatten the city starve them burn all their crops don't allow any traffic on their roads just just bomb every truck that travels on the road every car that travels on the road until they until there's no transportation and and let them turn against insurgents kill them and then they'll come to us on their knees asking us to forgive them and then what can they do first that well you know that's how you deal with an enemy that's what war is about don't go to war otherwise well stay home I have a moral it's not that that is the moral response that is the moral thing to do well that's your opinion it's moral response in every uh what do you call it embargo the people that suffer are not the soldiers they're the the the civilians the people who feed clothes fund and harbor the soldiers they may not feed clothes and harbor the soldiers somebody does right it's a civilian population of the country well you mean a hundred percent of the population in iran uh no but a significant proportion of it as and again as I said before the people who suffer who are not feeding and clothing the soldiers suffer because the iranian regime is an evil regime it the moral responsibility is that are not in your hands trying to defend yourself but on iran for trying to engage us in a war that's true of the iraqis as well the the responsibility of the deaths in fallujah not on us they're on the insurgents who are fighting us because we're bringing them freedom well I agree with that I guess where I disagree with you it is in the uh what uh the extent of it's not a numbers game as dr. gates said before well I wouldn't want to be one of the innocence that uh you know that no and I think nobody wants to tank just I want to add one thing to that I think the attitude of innocence in iraq would be pro-american indeed I think that's a necessary condition of being innocent if you have to I mean leave aside a one-year-old but if you have the capacity to know what's going on you would be in favor of the us crushing the insurgency even if that means the loss of some in his truly innocent life people who are against everything that iraq and the islamic totalitarian stand for in the same way that the freedom fighters in world war two welcomed american bombing so I think even on the level of worrying about innocence you're completely wrong of what a truly innocent person would think and the partisans in europe died under american bombing but they welcomed it and they helped make it possible by providing targets and some of them died in the effort because that's what truly innocents do they they work to defeat the the hostile regime and they encourage those who are going to ultimately free them I mean the truly innocent in iraq should be rallying to america's side and helping them root out insurgents and kill them and if they don't do that they're not innocent I mean imagine what your reaction would be if you were if some killer made you a shield for him going around and killing people you would say to the people being killed you have a right to defend yourself you should shoot back if I get hit in the process it's too bad but the responsibilities for this person who's made me a shield not for the people fighting back they're all muslims okay we're considered christians okay if we bomb and kill 10,000 muslims the christians killed the muslims I don't think they're going to say hey they're trying the christians are trying to free us this is okay this is you know this brings up this issue of you know if you're too brutal with them what'll happen is you encourage hate they'll hate you even more I hear this all the time if you if you bomb if you go after iran and you bomb iran you'll just make the muslims angry at the united states and they'll come after us so I want to read you something uh this is um because what's interesting to me is we dropped bomb and he was human agasaki atomic bombs killed 150 000 japanese and the japanese are not pissed off at us and and I want to read you I want to read you this is a general macArthur writing right after world war two uh he's in japan and he's describing the state of mind of the japanese right and this is what he writes and this is the fact of real victory on them of really crushing them this is the effect on they suddenly felt the concentrated shock of total defeat their whole world crumbled it was not merely the overthrow of their military might it was the collapse of a faith it was the disintegration of everything they had believed in and lived by and fought for it left a complete vacuum morally mentally and physically and into this vacuum flowed the democratic way of life or I would add the american way of life if we had an american general could write this well and it was in command I mean who had this kind of ideas these kind of ideas it would have been all over three months after september 11th you don't need to spend six years fighting this war and he macArthur understood and he understood what why japan could turn it could turn because it had been humiliated because it being crushed and that humiliation and and that defeat didn't cause the japanese to hate us it caused them to question everything it caused a complete intellectual vacuum into which we could then bring our ideas and that's what we need to do here we need to completely crush their belief in islamic totalitarianism their belief in in religion and state as combined their belief in their own culture we need to show them that the culture is what it is a culture of death and once a culture of impotence and once they are completely they completely reject that culture then you can approach them with better new ideas but not before that and you do that you know the only way to do that is by killing a lot of people that's what war is about and I know you know nobody likes to say it so I'm the guy who gets to say it all the time but that's what needs to be done there's no shortcuts there are no shortcuts we've tried any walk the shortcut of not killing anybody and all that happens is americans die great my turn now um yeah I thank you for a very informative discussion on the eve of uh you know september 11th um you identified two nation states as being uh targets um and as being behind uh or financing the radical islamist extremism um my question to you is there's been a number of developments um basically showing that uh the al-qaeda threat the extremist threat has been splintering and it now um now there's a presence in many countries not only iran not only saudi arabia not only the middle east we now have it in northern africa they are you know you have a terrorist threats coming out of the uk out of canada you have splinter groups in miami um there's a lot of frightening stories that um i just read one of the economist where um anyone with a biology degree and $50,000 in funding can basically create a a lab in their bedroom or a lab in their garage and create all sorts of you know horrible things so sure we have identifiable nations that can be you know that they're probably financing a large chunk of this radical or radicalism and if you eliminate them sure that will decrease however how would you address the fact that there are so many enemies so many extremists in you know little pockets during their all over the world including canada the us australia allies and and how would you go after them without encroaching on the personal freedoms that we value so greatly well what are they after what are what are what are these terrorists in london and and uh denmark and in the u.s probably and and many many of these countries what are they after um what are they uh what inspires them what gets them going what gets them motivated what inspires them is the example that the iranian regime provides a successful so-called successful islamic totality in state what what they what their goal is is to bring more irans into existence because look we've got one we want more of them we want an islamic state over the entire world um they have particular goals one of the purposes of defeating iran and Saudi arabia is to show them that those goals are unattainable they don't have a chance to ever see an islamic totality in states survive because the united states will not tolerate it so then they have to ask the question what are we fighting for now some of them a you know have completely lost it they're nihilists that they're out to fight america for the sake of killing americans they don't care about anything else and those people you have to hunt down and kill but most of them i don't think i like that or at least not the people sitting on the fence that they haven't been radicalized yet those people do it because they believe they can actually attain a islamic totality in world in islamic totality in caliphate and that's what you have to persuade them that is unachievable and you don't do that in london you do that by going to the middle east and showing them that the few examples where it's succeeded for a while have been eliminated have been eradicated there's nothing there anymore also note that every time one of these groups is caught in london they discover that they've been to pakistan right i mean they all were right they always so they don't think up this stuff by themselves i mean it's rare like the the guy who shot at the jewish uh uh jewish uh uh congress i think in seattle a guy goes nuts you know is radicalized he's an individual he goes and he shoots a bunch of jews uh but that's that's not what we're talking about we're talking about organized sophisticated terrorist activity that is all guided by central authority out of al qaeda from pakistan uh the same thing happened with the uh london bombing of the uh subways they linked the people back don't underestimate the role of the al qaeda infrastructure and the role of the funding and the organization and the and the um material support that is provided by countries like uran and sardinia maybe so you think they're pretty centralized then there's a few locations that i still believe al qaeda is pretty so centralized i think this whole idea of individual cells even the madril cell was linked to the moroccan cell which had links to to you know pakistan and to to the rest of middle eastern al qaeda um and even again those who are really isolated are still striving towards an iran and a saudi rayman if you eliminate those what are they striving towards they've got to be a fight for i'll just ask one final question because i'm sure this this could be a very long discussion but so do you go out to just want to add to that um it's you have to make a distinction between that they're willing to fight to the death for a goal and that they don't care about their own deaths the fact that they are willing to commit suicide remains that they're willing to commit suicide in the car in for a cause and if you strike at the cause and convince them through your actions that the cause is doomed they will no longer be willing to commit suicide for nothing it's the same there was a similar argument in regard to what to do with the japanese because they were fighting to the death and they were having suicide attacks and so long as they thought the cause of japan is a legitimate cause that has a possibility of success even if i'm dead the cause still has a possibility of success they fought to the death but when japan was humiliated and the emperor was humiliated and the whole cause that they were fighting for was discredited you no longer had them willing to die for nothing it's the same thing here it's there are many people they can recruit many people willing to commit suicide for the cause if you strike at the cause they will no longer be able to recruit those people but is it really that easy i mean can't they just go to syria what if what if there's an attack on iran can't the powers that be kind of shipped elsewhere and hide you have to do it until the cause is destroyed and if they do shift you have to destroy syria okay and what about us resources do we have do you really think that we have enough resources to truly do all that if we fight the war properly if we don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of troops securing sewers and schools and social services to these countries and absolutely i don't think i don't think there's any problem right i like to say that you know pattern with three armored divisions could take them at least in three months i mean israel probably israel could i mean if if they really fought a war properly not like the way they fought the chisella this is not you're not talking about real armies here i mean think about world war two you you are fighting two mighty industrial nations germany and japan had factories they they built the before the u.s entered the best airplanes the best aircraft carriers they they built all the weapons they fight with there's not a single weapon in the middle east there wasn't purchased from the west or from or from the soviets but they produced nothing they were they were they are they live in caves they're equivalent of living caves there is no industry there is no economy they all they have is oil which they store from us to begin with and they get dollars from us all they have is all they have nothing else there is no opponent i mean if we fought seriously i mean think of just the iraq iran war or mill millions on both sides were killed we can beat iraq in three weeks if we want i mean there's nothing there if we took military action what's hampering us is not insufficient military resources what's happening hampering us is insufficient moral resources okay great thank you well first of all i enjoy the speech very much um at the bulk of the time that you're speaking was demonstrating how the current altruistic practices the american government aren't going to solve the war on terrorism so you suggested that we need to destroy the enemy you cited world war one world war two not one not not one because that wasn't very successful when we destroyed germany that time well we didn't destroy germany that was the problem um well we can take get into awful close the result of that was because of how it was handled we end up with world war two about 20 years later um what what's the battle plan what's the game plan we're here we're gonna change the government um we're gonna put your plan into action we're going to attack iran okay world war two let me let me first deal with world war one because i do think it's an interesting historical question what happened in world war one what why was germany ready within uh 20 years to launch another world war and i believe and you know i believe that the reason was that germany was not crushed in world war one i believe that germany the peace agreement was germany was way too uh beneficial to the germans now i'm against i was against i'm against us ever having gone into world war one put that aside but but it was far more far too generous to the germans the peace agreement um countries as a consequence germany took away from world war one the soldiers returning from the front had the attitude of we could have won it our generals messed up we didn't have enough patriotism or we didn't have enough tanks or we didn't have enough something but we could have won this just a little bit more and we would have gotten it and that created an environment that was ready for the nazi party now there are other causes i mean you should read the ominous parallels by lenin pico for the philosophical causes for world war two but i think that the the specific existential cause was the fact that world war one didn't do what world war two did world what you crushed the germans the germans were like i described the japanese here they were completely humiliated and and nazism as an ideology was completely destroyed and as a consequence the germans were open to change which they won after world war one after world war one everything just continued normally um the battle plan um i think i've laid down most of the battle plan already um i'm not a general i'm certainly not an expert in military strategy to give you the play by play scenario um although you know i could make something up which would kind of be fun but um but right now uh as i said in my talk i would abandon iwak um i would abandon iwak in the sense of taking all hundred and forty thousand troops to the iranian border um i would bring whatever aircraft carriers you needed into the persian gulf i would give the iranian regime 48 hours to fly themselves to the the property they have in torano um which they won't um and then i would invade and but as i said in the talk i would use all force necessary if if uh that meant that the military expert believed that flattening tehran was necessary i would flatten tehran um if uh if it meant flattening kum i would actually vote for flattening kum kum is the religious center for shia islam and and the religious center for uh sistani and for khatami and for all these all these ayatullahs and mullahs it's where they preach this stuff it's where they develop this ideology then you flatten that city you do whatever is necessary to to destroy the iran and i think i've said in the past after you do that if you discover that iran is like some people believe this haven for west for the west where the population is just craving for freedom fine hand it over to them if not then uh give them the infrastructure their philosophy deserves that is destroy every bridge every dam every power plant every semblance of western technology the entire country put put troops to protect all filled and get up and let them sort the rest out after that what you do there are lots of options it depends on what the rest of the muslim world does but you might go into afghanistan and into pakistan to hunt down bin laden you might have to put some troops in uh in saudi arabi you might have to deal with syria i doubt it i don't think you'd have to do any of that i think after you do that to iran the saudis would come groveling because they only exist that i'll be because we let them so basically you want us to go in more or less unprovoked unprovoked in my view no let me let me let me answer that let me answer that unprovoked um i believe we have been in with in war with iran since november 4th 1979 which was the date they took our embassy um if that wasn't enough their response they are responsible for killing 244 marines in beirut in 1983 for killing a country on how many marines in the corpo towers in saudi arabia in 1996 they are responsible for spurring terrorism they are the lead support of terrorism in the world uh so unprovoked is ridiculous but if you mean without french support without un without un support then absolutely i think the un is a travesty and we should pay no attention to it now we do need to build american support so any president who goes to war needs to convince americans that it is a justified war i happen to believe that wouldn't be hard if if if if a president not george bush but a president clearly articulated what's at stake i don't think that would be a hard thing to do so you don't see a world response developing out of this just kind of it's like yeah you know they took care of those oh yeah the fence will be pissed off and so will the russians and so will the chinese and what will they do and the koreans and pakistanis the koreans and pakistani pakistanis will say you know please don't do this to us next but what will the rest of the world do what will they do i mean it's a it's an interesting question what would they do i i'll tell you what they'll do absolutely nothing they'll send a few diplomats here in there they'll scurry around they'll they'll negotiate they'll be upset and we'll say we don't really care what you guys think we did this to defend ourselves you should thank us because we have just solved your problems russia maybe we have solved the islamist problem that china has on its western border you know if anything you should be thanking us because we have just eliminated a massive threat to civilization all civilization and you know if america suited itself maybe i think people would believe it thank you i agree completely with your analysis of the failed strategy and the analogy with the world war two uh the young lady's question was similar to mine but your answer didn't satisfy me um every time i think about this issue more than five minutes i come up with the same problem uh or let me put this way iron rand said many iron rand said many times that we're not going to defeat altruism by going to the polls we're not going to defeat altruism by electing somebody or having a radical revolution in washington it's got to start in the classroom university classrooms yet we're going to defeat radical islam by crushing syria or iran it seemed to me that it's a similar problem you got a philosophy there how do you carpet bomb how do you crush a radical ideology well i mean how did we do it with japan the difference is there weren't no cells of uh nazis in south america at least i didn't know there were no so they were first of all they were but but that's not they weren't a similar threat as the all then if there are cells in london if that is really the problem then hunt them down and capture them and kill them if necessary i mean i'm not against that i just happen to think it won't be necessary for the reasons dr gote mentioned if they don't have a goal for which to aspire to they will not be radicalized and they will not go out to bomb but i do fundamentally agree with you in this sense we're not going to have this war as long as america is altruistic we're not going to have this one unless we change the culture in this country first we're not going to be able to crush iran unless we adopt a different philosophy so the battle is the battle iron rand identified ultimately it has to be and that is the battle the philosophical battle here in america that is the fundamental the fundamental is there's no question we will not bomb iran until we change our until we change what we teach at our schools we want bomb iran until we change what us teach at our universities because as long as altruism is prevalent in america never mind you tell iran we won't take the sort of action necessary to defeat the enemy in other words this is not going to happen i want to say something about the the issue of um changing their minds by attacking them and somehow dislodging the radical islam it's true you're not you're not going to instill any positive ideas by bombing them but that's not our obligation and we don't need to do that in order to be safe what you need is for them to feel fear real fear and an an intellectual fear that if we embrace these ideas and if we advocate for their political expression we're going to be met with death and that's what the japanese got and that's what the germans got they didn't turn all of a sudden into these great egoists and i think the germans didn't and i think the japanese didn't but they were scared we if we're going to embrace any ideas it's not going to be these ones in the case of the middle east it really is important to realize what a total zero the middle east is you take out western oil that was discovered developed and still produced by western companies you take that out of the middle east they have nothing i mean when's the last time you bought a computer a cell phone a shirt made in saudi arabia they have literally zero and if they're scared of embracing islam and giving it political form because they know we're going to visit bombs upon them they'll go back to being the total zeros that they are and they'll go back to their caves and they'll have literally nothing and there'll be nothing to fear from these people and you don't need to convert them to capitalism or spread of freedom and bushes all you want is for them to feel fear that if we embrace this ideology that's going to mean our death i you know i feel like i need to read the quote from a carter again i mean that's the attitude you want to instill in them that they are so afraid that they so realize that their ideology is nothing that there is a complete intellectual vacuum that they were open to anything but a return to in this case islam islamic totalitarianism but that's but that has happened in history and there's no reason to think that it won't and again that is even more so with islamic totalitarianism because they have literally nothing they'll go back to roaming the deserts i mean there's nothing else for them to do that there is nothing other than you know change and then they're capable of anything any human being is capable of but they have to change if they won't change then they go back to roaming the deserts but they're not a threat to us while they roam their deserts on their camels now let me i do have to address the other point that you made and that is well then there's no hope well no there is hope and that is the hope to change this culture and you know i think it's wrong to be negative about that because there really is hope in doing that and and because if you give up you know i think that we really have an opportunity have an impact on this culture because i think that today in the world we live in there's a vacuum there is an ideological vacuum and people are looking for answers and you can see that people are looking for answers all around you they're upset they don't like what's happening in Iraq they don't want to stay they don't want to leave they don't want another september 11th they want an answer they want something to happen to help them they want some new ideas every group that i go to non-objective it's just groups that i go to and speak about farm policy the response is overwhelmingly positive even though if you told them before i arrived that you will be cheering on this and this idea they'd all go oh never no no but once it's laid out to them in a logical fashion they go yeah that's kind of consistent with american sense of life so there's still hope and you know what that's what the institute does that's what the ironman institute's job is and that's what we spend millions of dollars a year trying to bring about is a cultural change is to bring these ideas into classrooms high school classrooms to bring them into the universities to bring them into philosophy and history and political science departments to bring these ideas ultimately to west point into the naval academy and so on air force academy and we are making progress and and but that's it you know if you give up hope on that then then what's left but that is you know your support those of you support us and those of you who don't should be embarrassed um you know you should because because we are fighting for these values and the fight is winnable the fight is winnable it is not a lost case the america is not doomed but it is doomed if we don't get these ideas out there and the only way we can get these ideas out there is with your support so support us more i want to add something about you brought up the universities um and certainly that is a significant part of what the ironman institute institute does is we try to get better ideas and better teachers and better intellectuals into the universities but what ironman said about i mean she wrote an article what can one do her answer is speak and that implies to everyone it doesn't imply just to the intellectuals applies to every single person if you know the right ideas if you know that egoism is correct if you know that this war on terrorism is a travesty of what compared to what should be done you need to speak and you need to speak to every person you meet who you think would listen the reason we're focused on the universities is basically for an issue of leverage that is where you meet with young minds who are eager to learn and figuring out a direction in life and this is it's usually in the college years that they form a certain philosophy that will then carry them for the rest of their lives and that is the point at which a small number of people can have a significant impact by teaching and writing but that is just one form of speaking and it's a highly leveraged form and that's why we're focused on it but the more fundamental is to speak and that applies to every single person next question hi how are you hi enjoyed your speech thank you my name is robert i could similar to self a mainstream american sometimes i vote democrat sometimes i vote republican but um i i would like to uh point out your speech um what you're really concerned with you what you're trying to bring to enlightenment is that the problem we have right now is that there's real no focus on ending this that's the problem with the bush administration's policy right now we don't have a clear focus on ending this when the purpose of war is to defeat the enemy yes it's not just ending it it's there's no focus on victory and there never was so that from day one there was no focus in the administration on winning the war an actual victory but the focus was in instead on how can we benefit the afghans how can we benefit the iwakis and as a consequence we fought a war to benefit our enemies not a war to benefit americans not a war to win right i got a couple questions um my dad was a veteran world war two he served in pannes army and uh and you're right i mean they win in there to win and they won and they were defeated uh japan was defeated we put restrictions on the amount of money they could spend on military on defense and that's why they prospered instead what they did instead of using that as an excuse for anything they took the money that they would have spent on defense and they spent on the economy and that's why they're uh they're uh prosperous well let me comment on that because i don't think that's true that is um no um the reason japan is prosperous is because we forced them on them a constitution that basically leaves japanese free i mean it's still more statism than i would like but it's basically free governments don't create wealth it's not through spending less on military that you create wealth anyway individuals create wealth businessman create wealth and what we allow japan is what we what the constitution that we left in japan allowed is for individuals to go out and create wealth uh and that's why japan prospered it was prospered because we left the country free we left the country uh we left the country that respected at least to some extent the individual rights of its citizens in every example in history in every country look at the united states we spent a huge amount of our budget on on uh military but we're incredibly prosperous why because fund basically with a lot of limitations basically americans are free to produce americans are free to live the life that they want to live and therefore they go out and make money create wealth and we implanted that basically that similar system onto into uh japan and that's why they're successful not because the military spending one way the other okay i i understand um the point i think okay so the problem we have here with al qaeda is they attacked us we cost us three thousand american lives here and and we shouldn't forget that obviously um this the difference is this is not a political ideology it's a religious ideology it's it's Islamic fundamentalism right they they want to attack us for being who we are and that's political right that's not i mean it's politics driven by religion but it's still the political ideology if it was just Islamic fundamentalists they want to go i don't know like uh like monks they want to go and live in caves okay it's political too okay then it's fundamentally political that's it's the mood your politics with religion that is the problem but the basis of their attack is their religion is long is long right whereas um like world war one was basically about colonialism the the european countries were cloning in in the middle east in africa and they were fighting over who could have more who could and in world war two we oppressed uh hitler he didn't he didn't we didn't pay attention to him he built up his military and he decided to take back the land uh that we took from them and he took took poland and uh and yeah and while he went right over poland and uh and then and then we we got engaged in world war two but the middle east these countries weren't even developed in 1940s we carved them up after after world war two that's a bizarre interpretation of world war two uh i'm not sure exactly what the question is though well the question the question is is that um um you you want us i'm sorry but um well let me try let me try to milk the question out i mean if you're trying to say look in in uh um you know in some way this is our fault or in some way you know you're even playing the world war two is somehow awful um i just i think that's first of all that's ludicrous i mean uh hitler was driven by an ideology Nazism that as dr. Garte mentioned is driven is an ultimate expression of socialism so you know replace socialism with Islam that's what you have today it's a particular ideology that drives them um it's an ideology that is political in a sense that it's about political goals taking over countries destroying other countries okay that's what drove hitler and that's what drove them and the only way to stop that is to show that the ideology is impotent and you do that by destroying it you did it by destroying Germany and now you need to do it by destroying those countries that exemplify that ideology like you want okay here i i remember now exactly the point i was trying to get to okay is that what we need to do is we need to defeat islamic fundamentalism they're the enemy okay that's what we need to do al qaeda like we need to kill their top leaders and keep killing them until we and in what you're seeing we're not going to engage iran unless they do something against us or against israel as i've said they've already done lots of stuff against us and lots of stuff against israel but the point is that iran is the heart of this islamic totalitarian ideology and they are the one that are producing the bin laden they're supporting iran in saudi in saudi arabia that's why you have to take out those i ran in saudi arabia is what you're saying okay i understand what you're saying okay um so we need to clearly define the enemy and we need to defeat the enemy exactly but okay what what are your comments or any comments that you have on um the fact that what they're doing with their youth is that they're taking their youth i mean i i understand the faith and i understand theology you know but what they're doing with their youth is they're teaching them the quran all they do is just teach them the quran that's it they read it over and over and over again they're teaching them to hate israel and hate jews and ultimately of course they want to eliminate israel i mean what kind of victory are we going to have unless we can get into the young minds that are controlled by just islam and the quran is what i'm saying it's again the issue is not that we have to win their hearts and minds in the sense of convincing them that we're good we have to convince them that they're evil which means that they have to see if we embrace these ideas it's our death that we're gonna happen not the deaths of america to the extent that they think we embrace these ideals and our cause will be advanced you'll keep getting recruits so to say that you're targeting islamic fundamentalism you're targeting its political expression we're not it's not the mission of the us to go and educate everyone in the world that would be a completely selfless mission the mission is you're going to destroy the political manifestation of this they can believe whatever they want in their caves they can recite the quran from morning to evening it's when they take up arms that is when they think it's legitimate to force this on other people that has that is the point at which you have to completely demoralize them so that that idea never takes hold in their mind and you do that by a show of force it's the same there are marxists today i mean go in a college classroom and you will meet marxists but as a political ideal that this can gain political power and then it's right that it should gain political power it's been discredited and it's the same you can meet nazis but the the the political manifestation of it is what the target that is all the military can do is it can show if you take up these ideas and you take up arms in their support we're going to kill you okay okay okay thank you all thank you all