ASKIAM and
Abdul Arif Muhammad
WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) – It was a shocking morning in American history. Pain, sadness, anguish, amazement, and horror filled the hearts of most people–including Muslims throughout the world–as the events of this country’s greatest national tragedy unfolded in New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001. Six years later, the shock and pain of 9/11 and President George W. Bush’s response is producing a chorus of dissatisfaction among the American people against the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
As the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan forewarned, the United States is now isolated and bogged down in an even more ghastly scenario with no relief in sight.
Congress is set to debate continued funding of the military conflicts, but Democrats who hold majorities in both the House and Senate concede there is little or nothing they can do to force President George W. Bush to remove U.S. forces from the conflict.
›In a surprise visit to Iraq on September 3, en route to a conference in Australia, Pres. Bush sought to strengthen his claim that his troop build-up earlier this year and the war itself–ostensibly to find and remove Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”–are now stabilizing the ravaged country.
But those outside of the Bush administration’s neo-conservative pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq are now describing the so-called War on Terror as “nonsensical,” “fatally flawed,” and “intellectually bankrupt.” This view is being expressed not by anti-war activists, or by Democratic political adversaries, but by the top military commanders of Pres. Bush’s chief ally Great Britain.
In late August, some of the men who helped the Pentagon plan and execute what is now seen as another “quagmire” on the scale of the Vietnam War attacked the U.S. Iraq war effort. And on the ground in Afghanistan, that war is going just as poorly.
“Anybody who tried to tell them anything that challenged [their] idea–they simply shut it out.” Retired Major General Tim Cross, the most senior British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq told London’s Sunday Mirror Sept. 2. The general, who was deputy head of the coalition’s Office Of Reconstruction And Humanitarian Assistance in 2003, reinforced the comments of Sir General Mike Jackson, then the British Army Chief of Staff in his new autobiography Soldier. Gen. Jackson retired in 2006. Gen. Cross retired earlier this year.
“All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste,” Gen. Jackson wrote. For Mr. Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative supporters “it was an ideological article of faith that the coalition soldiers would be accepted as a liberating army.
“Myself and others were suggesting things simply would not be as easy as that. But he ignored my comment. He dismissed it. There is no doubt with hindsight the U.S. post-war plan was fatally flawed–and many of us sensed that at the time.”
The comments confirm the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s prophetic warning to Pres. Bush of the current turn of events in this war in his two letters: The first letter dated December 1, 2001–a full 15 months before the ill-fated invasion; and the second dated October 30, 2002. (See the full text of both letters on pages 20-23).
The letters were an outgrowth of the Vision-Like Experience Minister Farrakhan had on September 17, 1985. In this Vision-Like Experience, the Minister heard the voice of his teacher, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, giving him guidance and instructions.
During a press conference held at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. on October 24, 1989, Minister Farrakhan informed the U.S. government and the world of the instructions that he had received:
“President Reagan has met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a war. I want you to hold a press conference in Washington, D. C., and announce their plan and say to the world that you got the information from me [Elijah Muhammad] on the Wheel.”
Many in the U.S. government have defined the existence of this “Wheel” as a UFO (unidentified flying object). However, presidents, governors and Japanese pilots have all seen these so-called UFOs.
In 1987, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution, the truth of the Minister’s Vision-Like Experience was verified–Pres. Reagan, in the early part of September 1985, had in fact met with the Joint Chief of Staff and had planned a war against Libya.
In his first letter to Pres. Bush after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had begun, Minister Farrakhan warned:
“Afghanistan is only a preliminary to a much wider war which is already planned, and this war also has a home front aspect as well. Should you persist in this, you will do what no Islamic Leader is able to do. No leader of any Muslim nation can call for Jihad or Holy War and cause the Muslim world to obey that call…
“You will unite the Muslim world in hostility against America and Great Britain, and you will use your great position of power, inadvertently, to call for a Holy War against the West. You will force the more moderate Islamic regimes either not to side with you, or to side with you at the risk of being overthrown by growing Islamic forces within their countries.
“The coalition that you are gathering will fall away from you and you will have to pursue this war alone. I am afraid that this extended war may take a turn that you and your advisors least expect, and involve America in the greatest of all wars, the War of Armageddon, in which no nation will be left out, including Russia and China,” Minister Farrakhan continued.
Now on Capitol Hill, Democrats and more and more senior Republicans are condemning the administration’s strategy of trying to win a military victory in Iraq. The much touted “surge,” the insertion of tens of thousand of more troop reinforcements sent to Iraq earlier this year has failed to achieve the goal of reducing violence so political reconciliation can take place, according to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who addressed the nation Sept. 1, in the Democratic national radio address.
“The president’s surge has failed, and there is no end in sight for the war in Iraq,” she said. Rep. Schakowsky visited Iraq in July and says top commander General David Petraeus told her U.S. troops could be in Iraq another nine or 10 years. That, she insisted, is not the timetable most Americans had in mind.
In August, Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), a former Navy secretary and a respected former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Pres. Bush should bring some U.S. troops home by the end of the year. British troops have already begun their withdrawal from their last outpost in Basra, and their commanders are urging their complete removal by year’s end.
“As in the past, President Bush stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the facts on the ground about the sectarian civil war in Iraq or the growing bipartisan opposition to his failed policies. He insists that our soldiers sacrifice even more, and taxpayers spend billions more dollars for an Iraqi government incapable or unwilling to institute reforms required by the President himself,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) complained in a statement after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that the puppet Iraqi government set up under U.S. protection, had achieved only three of 18 benchmarks set by the President.
The emotional toll among the families of war casualties is rising in this country. “This is a total waste–a total waste,” Steve Samuels Sr., the grandfather of slain Mitchellville, Md. soldier Sgt. Princess Samuels said Aug. 30, looking at her coffin during her burial at Arlington National Cemetery, according to a published report. “She shouldn’t have been over there. We’ve got young folks dying fighting a war that they know nothing about. They are not defending a country–they are being used as pawns.”
Anika Lawal, the mother of Sgt. Samuels, said she plans to use her daughter’s death as a platform to argue against the war. She is another mother who must bury her daughter, Mrs. Lawal said in a broadcast interview, while Mr. Bush is planning a White House wedding for his daughter, who will never have to fight in Iraq.
The post-9/11 military strategy has left the U.S. weaker, and more isolated from the rest of the world, including allies, according to many accounts. Troop morale is poor, and enlistment in the all-volunteer army is way down, especially among Blacks, according to Pentagon reports.
In fact, frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with shortened amounts of leave time, have stretched the military and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new chief war adviser said recently. “I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio Aug. 9.
“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” said Gen. Lute, who is sometimes referred to as the Iraq war czar.
“We are headed into a terrible time,” Minister Farrakhan warned Mr. Bush in another letter before the Pentagon launched its “shock and awe” attack on Iraq. “I am writing this letter as a final witness of my deep concern for you and for the nation; Believing however, that you are bent on doing what is in your heart with respect to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
“Mr. President, if you do this, you will bring down upon America an increase in the Divine Judgment of rain, hail, snow, wind, earthquakes, pestilence and famine that is already witnessed in the country. As you go about destroying other nations and cities, you will bring this kind of Divine Wrath on the American people and on American cities.
“Please reconsider your plans,” Minister Farrakhan asked Pres. Bush. Unfortunately, Pres. Bush has refused to listen.
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