“We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq,” said President George W. Bush on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  “And a victory in Iraq will make this country more secure and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

According to Frank Gaffney, co-author of War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World, there currently is a much bigger war than the war on terror or the war in Iraq; it is the war for the free world, a global war that has very high stakes.  President and founder of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., Gaffney spoke recently at Accuracy in Media’s monthly luncheon.

Gaffney said, “We wrote this book with a view that I think an awful lot of people find pretty gloomy,” and he was “unprepared for how gloomy things really are.”

The gloomy news is that the political ideology of Islamo-Fascism is growing worldwide and even taking hold in the U.S., Gaffney said.

In his book he described the most immediate and dangerous enemy we face, Islamo-Fascism, as a political movement that is a totalitarian ideology similar to the Nazis, the Italian Fascists and the Communists, “All of whom practiced much the same kind of totalitarian repressive domestic policies and aggressive foreign policies,” he said.

Gaffney said the authors of the book used the term Islamo-Fascists to distinguish this group from the larger community of practicing Muslims of which it is a part. “The Islamo-Fascist movement is about power, not about faith,” Gaffney said.  He said this group is intent on using power to dominate a larger community and then to extend their reach to the world.

What makes this ideology more dangerous to the Western world, Gaffney said, is that it uses the fa?ade of religiosity. Because the Western world has a history of religious freedom and toleration, this aids the group in exploiting our civil liberties against us.

Gaffney said the stakes in the war for the free world are nothing short of the destruction of the free world.  If you think about the enemy as a political movement with a very frightening ambition to destroy us, and how they are pursuing a hold not only in places like the Middle East, Asia and Africa but also in Europe and Latin America, then you get a sense of the gravity of the situation.

In his book Gaffney outlines ten steps America needs to take to prevail in the war for the free world.  With only one chapter in the book devoted to what to do militarily in this war, the rest of the book focuses on non-military techniques we need to be engaged in to fight an effective war. He discussed four categories in which the 10 steps of his book are organized.

The first category is economic and financial techniques. Gaffney said this war is one in which one party (the U.S.) is funding both sides of the conflict in two ways. The first, he said, is by oil purchases from countries that either support or sympathize with Islamo Fascists. The second is through investments in companies who do business with states of terror―investments that make these countries better able to support hostile activities against us.

Gaffney suggested employing some of the same economic and financial techniques used in Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, what he called “cutting off the cash flow.” He said by doing so, Reagan was able to bring the Soviet Union to a point where they were not able to sustain themselves and could no longer pose a threat to the U.S.

The second category was to ask what we need to do to protect our homeland. Gaffney said a unique factor of this war for the free world is that one of the fronts in this global theater is here at home. He gave three suggestions for protecting our homeland.

The first was to properly equip those responsible for protecting us at home.

“I personally was very much convinced we needed to renew the Patriot Act,” Gaffney said, “as a means of insuring that we are giving law enforcement?and the intelligence community in this country the means by which it can deny terrorists some of the easier means of attacking us.”

Second, Gaffney said crisis simulation training is something every state and local executive should be assigned to do now before a crisis happens.

Third, we need to secure our borders and reform our dysfunctional immigration policy.

The third category stressed the need to use political warfare tools to effectively undermine this hostile political ideology. Gaffney said we use these tools every day, but against each other; Democrats against Republicans and Conservatives against Liberals, which has a detrimental effect on the war effort.

The fourth category was reforming diplomacy.  Gaffney said, “?as we have practiced diplomacy arguably since WWII it has not been much of an instrument to help us wage war against particularly these kinds of enemies.”

When asked what would happen if the steps in his book were overlooked, Gaffney quoted Benjamin Franklin who said, “If we do not hang together, we will all hang separately.” 

War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World is available in the AIM Store.

You can also listen to Frank Gaffney’s speech online.

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