America’s Hundred Years War and What it Means for Your Bottom Dollar

January 13, 2010 by John Myers

A new decade arrived and the world woke up to another round of Islamic extremism.*

Last week President Barack Obama held a White House inquest into the intelligence failures that saw a man try to bring a jet down over Detroit on Christmas day.

Meanwhile the headline being pumped out by the world’s news sources reads: Yemen Jihad!

If Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t bad enough, now we have to worry about Yemen. These are getting to be trying times—especially if you are like me and have to use Google to find exactly where Yemen is.



If there is one thing aplenty these days it is information, and the above map, courtesy of the Internet, shows Yemen at the heel of the Saudi boot. That puts it pretty much at the epicenter of the Muslim world (shaded in green).

Of course, if you yearn for the return of cheap gasoline you will notice that Yemen is also dangerously close to the House of Saud and its elephant oilfields.

So what, you say? Yemen is just one more speed-bump in America’s 21st Century Autobahn.

Perhaps, but take note that the speed-bumps are starting to pile up, and if the idea of another Hundred Years War seems ridiculous, consider that the United States has already been fighting Muslim extremists since Oct. 23, 1983. On that day an organization calling itself the Islamic Jihad blew-up a Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon killing 299 U.S. servicemen. We have had to live with Islam and the radicals in it ever since.

More than a trillion dollars waged so far
All these years the U.S. has been involved in costly warfare in places like Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. And before we engage another enemy that happens to border on our most important strategic ally, Saudi Arabia, we might want to take stock of how successful these operations have been.

According to George Friedman in his new book, The Next 100 Years, A Forecast for the 21st Century: “The (Islamic) world is more fragmented then ever. U.S. defeat or stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan is the likely outcome, and both wars will appear to have ended badly for the United States.â€