-By Warner Todd Huston
On the even of Memorial Day when we take a moment in our busy lives to remember the sacrifice made by millions of soldiers who lost their lives in war since our nation was founded, President Obama went on another apology tour, this time to grovel in front of the Japanese in abject despair for dropping the atomic bomb on them during WWII. Sadly, too many Americans are just as foolish as he if the results of a new poll are any indication. It is all proof that the U.S. is losing its grip on reality.
Before I get too much farther into this business, let me just say to Japan that I am not sorry we destroyed two of your major cities with the A-Bomb. I don’t have even a tiny bit of sympathy for Japan’s loss. They started the war, they murdered and enslaved millions (not hyperbole), they attacked us, and even as their forces were clearly beaten they refused to surrender which would have necessitated perhaps a million more casualties should the U.S. have had to invade to pacify them. They even refused to surrender after we wiped out Hiroshima with a single bomb forcing us to do it again at Nagasaki.
Actions have consequences and Japan’s actions led to what they deserved. Period.
Unfortunately, today too many Americans are starting to regret the A-Bombing of Japan, the bombing that saved the lives of so many Americans and Japanese both. A new poll finds a bare one percent more Americans now disapprove of the bombing than approve.
A new CBS News poll found only 43 percent of Americans still approve of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while 44 percent disapprove. This year’s result compares to 53 percent approving of the bombing in 1990 with 41 percent disapproving.
This is a travesty created by our failed miseducation system.
There are two kinds of war, when you get right down to it, and the USA has had a little of both. First is the idealistic kind, evinced in that of the American Revolution and WWII, which were both fights to free a continent from despotism. Even Korea and Vietnam can be fitted into the idealistic category because the main goal with each was to stop the evils of communism from spreading farther afield. Then there is the pessimistic kind, like ours with Mexico in the 1840s and most of our various Indian wars from Andrew Jackson’s Seminole excursions in Georgia and Florida to the last major actions against the Nez Perce in the Pacific North West. To be honest, few of our actions against the American Indians were little else than overt land grabs.
One axiom, however, can be applied equally of all our past wars up until recently: war means fighting and fighting means killing. Or, as Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman once unapologetically said, “If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.”
Like other warriors of days past, Americans rarely felt squeamish about killing the enemy, even when they were other Americans–whether they be “native” or Southern. Save for a brief time early in the Civil War as the residents of Virginia were spared too much deprivation by Union forces, or when Lee invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania, even civilians were not spared the hard hand of the God of War. The internecine border war in Kansas and Missouri was vicious for its attacks on civilians even as North and South played at their temporary, tender sensibilities in Virginia and the surrounding countryside for the brief moment of peace before the outbreak of the Civil War by pretending they weren’t involved in Bloody Kansas.
For the most part, our ancestors knew war was a hard business and fought it that way. This was a war of the head. A war where one and all accepted the dreaded but necessary fact that people would die, even if some of those people never raised a hand in anger.
But, around the time of Vietnam, things began to change in the larger perception of the American populace. The idea that only “the enemy,” often an amorphous term, should be harmed in war began to gain acceptance. Fire bombing of the likes of a Dresden or the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to take on barbaric overtones until we have, at last, arrived at the ridiculous phrase “collateral damage” to explain unwanted, but unavoidable civilian deaths.
This sentimentalizing of the victims of war has damaged our ability to fight wars as we should fight them with the intent to win early, often, and with overwhelming force. The maxim General Nathan Bedford Forest didn’t say, but certainly practiced, was that wars are won by those who get there first with the most men and then to use those men to crush the enemy without mercy. (Grant knew this, too. He lost somewhere near 4,000 men in around 1 hour of fighting at Cold Harbor in 1864 and also was vocal about making war hurt the Confederacy’s civilian population. He eventually won the war with those principles in action.)
But this childishly, over developed conscience is currently preventing the American populace from understanding and supporting the Global War on Terror in general as well as our specific actions in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. It is also creeping into the minds of our troops and not necessarily to the best end.
This is a war of the heart where we bleed out our compassion, which all too often will defeat our own, and doesn’t, in the long run, save anyone from the extant dangers that sent us to war in the first place.
A school of thought holds that a war should be awful, but quick and done with. But, we have made the “awful” part of war far too subordinate to the winning part. We tiptoe around so much that “quick” seems to elude our grasp right along with “victory.” We just aren’t man enough to fight a war anymore. When the head is quashed the heart and the enemy reap the benefits of the battle.
This is a tragedy for our future safety. Should we turn even more pacifistic than we now are we risk the danger of the fate of a pacifist society warned about by C. S. Lewis.
“In the [Leftist] society the number of pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not,” Lewis warned, “If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate pacifists to its totalitarian neighbor who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no pacifists.”
So, now we have “rules of engagement” that often forces soldiers to remove bullets from their firearms, or rules preventing our soldiers from closing with the enemy, etc. And these “rules” pervade the thoughts of our troops to such an extent that it often paralyzes them from proper action.
Such a failure to the stark but necessary action to win a war occurred to a Navy Seal Team in June of 2005 to disastrous effect as was recently written about in the Houston Chronicle.
In June 2005, on a barren mountain high in the Taliban-infested Hindu Kush, Luttrell and three fellow Navy SEALs came together to talk. Their mission–to locate and possibly take out an important Taliban leader hiding in the Afghan village below–had just been compromised. Three goatherds, one a boy of about 14, had blundered onto their position. Sitting against a log under the watchful eyes of their captors, the Afghans clearly weren’t happy to see the Americans. On the other hand, they were unarmed, technically civilians.
As it was about to hit a nest of Taliban killers the Seal Team found itself debating about what to do with these civilians. Kill them so they don’t alert the enemy or let them go and hope they don’t alert the enemy. The doubt in their hearts overruled their heads with disastrous results.
The consensus among the Seals was to be the nice guy and let them go. Upon release, these “civilians” promptly let the Taliban force know of the whereabouts of the Navy Seal Team. In the resulting fight every member of the team was killed but one.
Unfortunately for his conscience, the Seal Team survivor was one of the soldiers who voted to let the “civilians” go. The decision helped lead to the deaths of his comrades and one he has said he will regret for the rest of his days.
I don’t want to be misunderstood to be heaping any blame on this particular surviving hero and I am not attacking him. They made a judgment call based on many factors from training to institutional to societal. But his decision is indicative of the general weakness we suffer from as a society now in wartime. It is far easier to look back in mock disgust at hard decisions made during war and cast aspersions and judgments upon them when in the peaceful glow of the calm and safety won by that war. But it is harder on everyone to try to tiptoe through a war guided by sentiments that tend more to get your fellows killed and your cause lost to a more purposeful foe than anything else.
Now, certainly I am not suggesting we just “Kill them all and let God sort them out”, but there has to be a time when we fight to win and MEAN to win, even if that means some “collateral damage” will occur.
These Navy Seals died as a result of timidity in war, a timidity not just ensconced in a “failed Bush” or “failed Obama” strategy, but in the whole of our society.
One last quote, this one from John Stuart Mill who once expounded upon this very theme.
“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
We must believe our cause is just. Today Islamofascism is a threat to all mankind, not just the USA. It threatens to sweep over everything in its path and it is not a force geographically isolated, but one with a presence the world over. And to fight this terror timidly will be the death of us yet.
Like I said, war means fighting and fighting means killing.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Follow Warner Todd Huston on:
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Federalist Papers, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
NOTE: If you want to comment, for some reason our Facebook comments section takes a bit of time to load. It’ll pop up soon. Thanks