Sunday, June 19, 2005
Fighting to Win
Like most bloggers who regularly read him, I am in awe of Mark Steyn and the great good sense and humor he is able to put out day after day. Like today. Check out this wonderfully good article on what was wrong with what Dick Durbin said last week about Guantanamo Bay and Durbin's wrong headed and insulting comparison of American interrogators there to Nazis, et al. The broader question les affair d'Urban leaves me with is: Do we want to win the war against Islamofascism, like we did against the Nazis and Imperial Japan 60 years ago (or lke we did against the Soviet Union in a cold war just 15 years ago) or do we want to lose it, by cutting and running, after our troops did some serious ass kicking, for which they paid a price, just like we did in Vietnam?
You would think that the answer would be obvious. It is for most right thinking Americans. The answer apparently is anything but clear to our less than loyal opposition on the left.
I was looking all over the net for a transcription of a question to Press Secretary Scott McClellan from last week (from a foreign journalist) that Hugh Hewitt played on the radio. I couldn't find it, so again I'll have to go on memory. The question was basically, why have we not lived up to the high ideals we had in WWII in our current fight against terrorism? She meant the so called torture we're supposed to be doing now and (by inference) didn't do in WWII. I'll get to that in a minute. But let me tweak the question a little by asking what high ideals? You mean like fighting to win?
The more I learn about the effort and sacrifice we made as a people to beat fascist, racist governments during WWII, the more impressed I am with my father's generation. The Germans were, individually, dedicated fighters, sometimes with weapons superior to ours. Some of the Japanese troops were superb, despite decidedly inferior weapons. But we had to beat them, and we did--decisively, in under 4 years. Why did we have to win? It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone with the most basic historical sense, that the Nazis were just plain evil. I don't mean they ate babies for breakfast, ganz im gegenteil, they loved their own children and their dogs. But once they started losing the war (as early as our entry into it in December 1941) they began to set up death factories where live Jews and Gypsies (and others) entered and only smoke and ash were carted out. The industrial product was the destruction of 6 million Jews and 90% of the Gypsies in occupied Europe. Just. Plain. Evil.
I like the Japanese (now); I like their food, cartoons, their old movies and most of the Japanese people I have met (especially Yoshiko Doi--what a cutie), but if anything the Japanese were worse than the Nazis during the war. Read Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. The Japanese may not have set up death camps for the gaijin, but they dealt out torture and death to millions of them in the short span of the Empire. (Gaijin, which translates as barbarian, is anyone who is not Japanese). We had to win that war.
Is the current one any less imperative? Do we want the misogynistic, homosexual hating, Jew hating, American hating, non-Arab Muslim hating, suicide bomb loving, extreme followers of the Religion of Peace to win? The answer again seems obvious. The Islamofascist may not be quite as bad as the Nazis and Imperial Japan, but they are close.
So, what do we do? Well, the obvious answer is to fight to win. We at least fight as hard as we did in WWII. How hard was that? Pretty darned hard. We bombed and shelled and invaded the countries and islands the Nazis and Imperial Japanese had invaded and conquered, and then we worked our way towards the homelands--bombing, shelling and engaging the German and Japanese forces in combat. We killed them. We killed civilians living in the homelands. We reduced their cities to ash and rubble. One raid against Hamburg in 1943 was specifically designed to kill all the firefighters so that there would be no firefighters for the second and third waves of incendiary bombs and the fires would get out of control and burn up huge swathes of Hamburg and roast or asphyxiate the women and children hiding from the bombs there. We fire bombed Tokyo in March, 1945 and killed more civilians (probably 200,000), including women and children, during those two days than died when we nuked the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that summer. We nuked Japanese cities! That's how harsh we got; that's how hard we fought to win.
On the field of battle we killed or captured the German and Japanese troops opposing us. The ones we captured were interrogated and the interrogations were not turning off the air conditioning and playing bad pop music at them. We inflicted more than mild discomfort, at times; we did what it took to get the information we needed. I am not accusing the Greatest Generation of torture. Torture is not an effective method of extracting reliable information. But the American interrogators didn't just stick their fingers lightly in the prisoner's chest. We were fighting to win, and harsh methods of interrogation of prisoners is a necessary (if regrettable) part of war, when you're fighting to win; it's part of the reason that war is hell.
During WWII, the Democrats were the majority party by a large margin. Our conduct during the war was the product of Democratic foreign policy. Here's what the Republicans, the minority party at the time, did not do. They did not compare us to our enemies on the floor of the Senate. Even the Republicans were fighting to win.
Rush Limbaugh has been talking about this the last week in a slightly different form. His question is do we take WWII as the template for our fight against Islamofascism or do we take Vietnam (the only war we lost) as the template? I think it's the same question I'm asking.
Fighting to win means that you are deadly against your enemies, even harsh (but not criminal-- war is terrible enough). You also support the effort, even if it's very harsh. Especially if you're not fighting in it, if you love your country, you support the effort by saying things (when people are listening and recording) that are supportive of our aims and our troops. This war will likely last a long time and public opinion (and to a smaller part World opinion) will have an effect on our desire to fight to win in the future You do not hand the enemy ammunition for the propaganda part of the war. You especially do not do this when you have a position of authority in the U.S. government. We can't stop you from saying things that supply comfort and support to our enemies (the First Amendment dose not allow prior restraint except in the narrowest of circumstances) but don't pretend you are a patriot and supporting the troops when you say things (like they're Nazis) that make their job more difficult and dangerous and which weaken the will of the people to make the necessary sacrifices over the long haul. That's fighting to lose; and for the sake of my daughters (at the very least) I don't want to lose this war.
You would think that the answer would be obvious. It is for most right thinking Americans. The answer apparently is anything but clear to our less than loyal opposition on the left.
I was looking all over the net for a transcription of a question to Press Secretary Scott McClellan from last week (from a foreign journalist) that Hugh Hewitt played on the radio. I couldn't find it, so again I'll have to go on memory. The question was basically, why have we not lived up to the high ideals we had in WWII in our current fight against terrorism? She meant the so called torture we're supposed to be doing now and (by inference) didn't do in WWII. I'll get to that in a minute. But let me tweak the question a little by asking what high ideals? You mean like fighting to win?
The more I learn about the effort and sacrifice we made as a people to beat fascist, racist governments during WWII, the more impressed I am with my father's generation. The Germans were, individually, dedicated fighters, sometimes with weapons superior to ours. Some of the Japanese troops were superb, despite decidedly inferior weapons. But we had to beat them, and we did--decisively, in under 4 years. Why did we have to win? It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone with the most basic historical sense, that the Nazis were just plain evil. I don't mean they ate babies for breakfast, ganz im gegenteil, they loved their own children and their dogs. But once they started losing the war (as early as our entry into it in December 1941) they began to set up death factories where live Jews and Gypsies (and others) entered and only smoke and ash were carted out. The industrial product was the destruction of 6 million Jews and 90% of the Gypsies in occupied Europe. Just. Plain. Evil.
I like the Japanese (now); I like their food, cartoons, their old movies and most of the Japanese people I have met (especially Yoshiko Doi--what a cutie), but if anything the Japanese were worse than the Nazis during the war. Read Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. The Japanese may not have set up death camps for the gaijin, but they dealt out torture and death to millions of them in the short span of the Empire. (Gaijin, which translates as barbarian, is anyone who is not Japanese). We had to win that war.
Is the current one any less imperative? Do we want the misogynistic, homosexual hating, Jew hating, American hating, non-Arab Muslim hating, suicide bomb loving, extreme followers of the Religion of Peace to win? The answer again seems obvious. The Islamofascist may not be quite as bad as the Nazis and Imperial Japan, but they are close.
So, what do we do? Well, the obvious answer is to fight to win. We at least fight as hard as we did in WWII. How hard was that? Pretty darned hard. We bombed and shelled and invaded the countries and islands the Nazis and Imperial Japanese had invaded and conquered, and then we worked our way towards the homelands--bombing, shelling and engaging the German and Japanese forces in combat. We killed them. We killed civilians living in the homelands. We reduced their cities to ash and rubble. One raid against Hamburg in 1943 was specifically designed to kill all the firefighters so that there would be no firefighters for the second and third waves of incendiary bombs and the fires would get out of control and burn up huge swathes of Hamburg and roast or asphyxiate the women and children hiding from the bombs there. We fire bombed Tokyo in March, 1945 and killed more civilians (probably 200,000), including women and children, during those two days than died when we nuked the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that summer. We nuked Japanese cities! That's how harsh we got; that's how hard we fought to win.
On the field of battle we killed or captured the German and Japanese troops opposing us. The ones we captured were interrogated and the interrogations were not turning off the air conditioning and playing bad pop music at them. We inflicted more than mild discomfort, at times; we did what it took to get the information we needed. I am not accusing the Greatest Generation of torture. Torture is not an effective method of extracting reliable information. But the American interrogators didn't just stick their fingers lightly in the prisoner's chest. We were fighting to win, and harsh methods of interrogation of prisoners is a necessary (if regrettable) part of war, when you're fighting to win; it's part of the reason that war is hell.
During WWII, the Democrats were the majority party by a large margin. Our conduct during the war was the product of Democratic foreign policy. Here's what the Republicans, the minority party at the time, did not do. They did not compare us to our enemies on the floor of the Senate. Even the Republicans were fighting to win.
Rush Limbaugh has been talking about this the last week in a slightly different form. His question is do we take WWII as the template for our fight against Islamofascism or do we take Vietnam (the only war we lost) as the template? I think it's the same question I'm asking.
Fighting to win means that you are deadly against your enemies, even harsh (but not criminal-- war is terrible enough). You also support the effort, even if it's very harsh. Especially if you're not fighting in it, if you love your country, you support the effort by saying things (when people are listening and recording) that are supportive of our aims and our troops. This war will likely last a long time and public opinion (and to a smaller part World opinion) will have an effect on our desire to fight to win in the future You do not hand the enemy ammunition for the propaganda part of the war. You especially do not do this when you have a position of authority in the U.S. government. We can't stop you from saying things that supply comfort and support to our enemies (the First Amendment dose not allow prior restraint except in the narrowest of circumstances) but don't pretend you are a patriot and supporting the troops when you say things (like they're Nazis) that make their job more difficult and dangerous and which weaken the will of the people to make the necessary sacrifices over the long haul. That's fighting to lose; and for the sake of my daughters (at the very least) I don't want to lose this war.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 11:39 AM 
