Take Heart America!

By Ephraim Ben

What happened on Friday, November 13, 2015 in Paris, the brutal, senseless attacks by ISIS on several soft targets, killing over 130 people and seriously injuring over 300 people, brings to mind George Santayana (1863-1952), a Spanish American author-philosopher, who wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

On December 7, 1941, at 7:48 a.m., Hawaiian time, planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Navy Fleet in Pearl Harbor, effectively challenging the United States to enter World War II.

The United States Navy was not prepared for this attack.  Quite frankly, we were caught with our pants down!  And down they were.  Pretty far down!  All the United States had left to fight the war was three air craft carriers, which, by coincidence had been hidden from the Japanese.

For the first half of the war we were on the losing side.  But at the Battle of Midway the tide changed and we won the upper hand.  Without going into too much detail, our three aircraft carriers destroyed eight of the Japanese aircraft carriers and as you probably know dropping two atomic bombs on the mainland of Japan ended the war in the Pacific.  But bombs or no bombs, after the battle of Midway the United States kept island hopping and winning the war at tremendous cost to our armed forces and of course to the Japanese, too.

Before the attack on Pearl Harbor Americans did not have much appetite to fight a war, just as we are reluctant to use our military now to force Bashar Al Assad from power.  We are always too reluctant to get heavily involved, even though we have the power and the expertise to do so.

I empathize with the French people.  But I will bet my bottom dollar that what happened on Friday in Paris will turn out to be the beginning of the end of ISIS as we have come to know ISIS.  Yes, there will be a few more attacks by ISIS or other extremist groups, but now most of the Western European countries that are in the line of fire and the cross hairs of ISIS will strike back and strike back hard.  They have to.  They have no choice.

ISIS did not win all their battles because of military supremacy.  They won because they had instilled fear in all of their opponents.  But frankly speaking, nobody of substance really resisted them.  The armies of the Middle East, with the exception of Israel and the Jordanian Air Force, are a joke.  They are weak, lack leadership and have no intelligence to guide their strategies.  Now all the major powers are on board.  We also have the great opportunity to hit all of them at the same time, Boka Haram, Al Queda in Yemen, Al Queda in Somalia, Hezbollah, the Taliban etc.  But ISIS is now doomed.  No country can afford to sit back and leave the fighting to others.

But this is not all there is to this fight.

The extremists are frustrated and angry at Bashar Al Assad and the fact that the West allows him to continue to hurt and kill his own people.  Unless we do something about Bashar Al Assad, the struggle will continue and other groups will take ISIS's place.

In America there is also frustration.  The kettle is bubbling, and unless Congress gets its act together soon and does something for the masses of our people who are unemployed we will soon have our own version of radical extremists.  Maybe not quite as extreme, but there will be a backlash.  We already had a mild portend of things to come with the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

We are like a sleeping tiger.  We are powerful and strong, but we prefer to sleep.  OK.  So somebody annoys us while we sleep.  We don't like it but we go on sleeping, until we finally wake up angry and let loose all our anger and power.  Watch out world when this happens!

I hope that what happened in Paris will wake up our leaders from their slumber.  If they don't wake up soon, we too will be doomed.

May the force be with us all.  Go back to sleep.