We saw it in Iraq, on the highway of death in Kuwait in 1991, and across Europe, the Islands of the Pacific, and across the pacific. We saw it in pictures of no man's land in 1918. We saw it over and over in the Middle East in the turret less hulks of thousands and thousands of tanks and the rounded up, and cut off armies of thousands of Egyptians and Syrians.
But a military victory presages VICTORY and defeat of the enemy only when the society and polity behind it recognizes it's defeat.
In a military victory alone we go on and on about the people not being our enemy. But in a true victory the enemy society and culture are crushed.
In 1918 we were on the verge of an obvious outright military victory, and to preserve the German society and culture an armistice was achieved. The real result of that was at hand by 1936. Alternatively, in 1865 the entire southern society lay in utter ruin.
In 1945 Tokyo and Berlin and all the major cities of the cultures they represented looked like Richmond.
By contrast we have Gaza in 2008
While we have quieted the urgency of the violence in Iraq (with military force backed by political action, and a determination here) the issue remains, the modern model of war as WE PRACTICE IT is a civilized medieval version of chivalry which never existed.
Israel uses precision bombs with but 50lbs of explosives so as to attempt to not harm the neighbors of those who have sworn unabashedly to kill them and eliminate their nation, but those neighbors are those who brought those sworn people to power.
Is it possible to use our modern model of war to win a societal, and certainly in Israel's case religious war made against you?
Germany and Japan are different today because their societies WERE COMPELLED to 
recognize that their model of the the way to live has been unsuccessful. But no religion reinforced the view that that way of life was compulsory.
Today the violent and racist demonstrations around the world falsely accuse Israel of perpetrating another Jenin in all Gaza. But the haunting question remains...can this war ever end until those who support the HAMAS's and Hizballahs, and the Al Qaeda's and the IRGC's and mullahs, and the MMA's and ISI's are themselves so crushed that those who want their children to have another kind of life recognize the FACT their culture is DOOMED, and will only kill their children, their hopes and their dreams.
Note the large sign hanging outside Admiral Halsey's office during the Solomon Islands campaign, a moment after Coral Sea, Bataan, Midway, and the invasion of Guadalcanal, and a moment when things wre in doubt. Is this what it takes to win a societal endeavor? Th yellow thing is over the line to me, but the sentiment about the task is ..... (fill in the blank)
And are we willing to undertake such actions anymore in our own defense, even in the abstract?
I don't know the answer to these questions, but I am certain they need to be asked
13 comments:
And are we willing to undertake such actions anymore in our own defense, even in the abstract?
Only after unimaginable damage has been done to us.
And is that the way it must be for a democracy?
Pearl Harbor killed less people than 9/11, but the military damage was though to be HUGE (it was only later when we realized battleships were not worth much that this opinion changed)
the change in attitude has a lot to do with postmodernism:
postmodernism brought us cultural relativism and the idea that there is no truth but only competing narratives.
as a result of this brainwashing, many if not most in the west feel that there's nothing worth dying or killing for.
so they just wanna stalemate/negotiate.
though they share hatred of the west with postmodernists, the enemy are not postmodernists and will fight to the death for their narrative - the koran - and the caliphate.
that's why i have long argued that we will have to defeat the postmodern left before we can fight the war the way it - and all wars - must be fought if we want to win:
no holds barred.
dubya has had us fight with 5% of our tools.
that's why i say about him, Dubya stands for wimp.
on top of that, he ran the domestic side like a true LIB.
all he turned out to be was a lib hawk. like mccain.
that's why the left strengthened under bush:
his half-assery in the GWOT allowed the left to ridicule him and the war effort.
and none of his lib efforts at home - the pharma entitlement, NCLB, the amnesty attempt, the hugest increase in domestic spending since LBJ - all this got him ZERO support on the left.
we need to crush the left if we expect to crush global jihad once and for all.
we do that by demolishing obama and the dem congress.
we do that by exposing the "stimulus" package for what it is: unnecessary pork for the chicago machine-types (and the seiu/afscme etc) and the crooks who run the dem party.
and by relentlessly repeating rezko, blago, et al...
it is likely that after closing gitmo and appeasing iran and russia and all of our other enemies we will suffer a huge attack.
maybe this will shatter the left and free us from the shackles of their amoral relativism.
Epaminondas,
I agree, the only way we can defeat this enemy is to crush them. They must be forced into unconditional surrender and made to see any attempt at resistance as futile, then we force them to give up their way of life and their theocracies. The biggest problems are how do to get enough Americas to support doing what must be done, and how to you get the rest of free world to go alone with it? We can't force other democracies to support us, and we need their help, not their condemnation, and I fear America won't be able to do it alone with the support of other free societies.
Reliapundit,
I agree that the American left's unwillingness to stand up for our culture, is part of the problem, but lets not ignore another part of the problem, oil. We need to either get off of oil (find an alternate source of energy) or find a way to artificially manufacture all that we need here. We need to bankrupt oil rich Arab states. They are the Jihadists biggest source of income and getting rid of their money will severely hinder their efforts to destroy us.
Wasn't it also illegal for Americans to trade with the axis powers during world war two? We need to eliminate our enemies source of income as well.
By the way, when we do crush them, and make them lose all hope, lets not allow them write their own constitutions. We need to force them to abandon Sharia, and that means not allowing them to make their religion part of their government. We made that mistake in Afghanistan.
AOW - 9/11 was unimaginable however what we have seen since then is a perverse logic whereby the worse the act, the harder we have to look to find out why they hate us. I'm sure many a gut reaction on the day was instead for the wrath of god to rain down on anyone and everyone who aided and abetted them as well as the filth that celebrated in the streets. Oh, and the loons who subseuqnetly believed that it was an inside job.
Of course, we all know the answer as to why they hate us however this is too simple for the moral elite who are convinced it's deeper than that and somewhere along the line it's our fault. They believe that religiion can't possibly motivate people to commit such depraved acts and this is because of the weakened position of religion in Western society.
So yes, we do have to crush this mentality first of all however to do this we'll need the media. Blogs, regardless of coverage, are not enough. Something more mainstream is required.
Ironically, I sense Obama might be a key instigator of a huge backlash against leftist liberal thought. His lack of experience is going to leave gaping holes, primed for exploitation by competing super powers sooner or later - Russia for definite are going to have a go. As Russia are a defined entity (i.e. everyone knows where they are on the map, history of the cold war etc), any weakness shown to them is going to stick out like a sore thumb to the masses. Can you imagine a situation where Russia starts to build up its presence in Cuba and all as Obama wants to do is talk it out? Even the hardest of pinhead lefty would surely start to get nervous at this point!
Ted Nugent for President!
JC
terrorbytes.blogspot.com
DAMIEN WROTE: lets not ignore another part of the problem, oil. We need to either get off of oil (find an alternate source of energy) or find a way to artificially manufacture all that we need here.
ER UM WE DONL;T USE MUCH ARAB OIL;L THE EUROS DO - AS MUCH AS THEY USE RUSSIAN GAS.
WE GET OUR OIL FROM DOMESTIC, CANADA, MEXICO, VENEZUELA MOSTLY.
WE SHOULD BE BUILDING 100 NUKE REACTORS AND WIND AND SOLAR AND WHATEVER ELSE PRIVATE ENTERPRISE WILL RISK CAPITAL ON.
Epaminondas
And are we willing to undertake such actions anymore in our own defense, even in the abstract?
I have asked myself this question many times over the last 7-8 years, and honestly I am not very optimistic.
What if we change the sign a little and replace Admiral Halsey's name with Slobodan Milosevic.
Atlanta. Richmond. Dresden. Tokyo. Hiroshima.
We had no compunction about civilian casualties then. Why now? They certainly don't.
Is it more morally acceptable to allow your loved ones to be killed or to kill those who would kill them?
Total war. Kill or be killed.
I blame alot of anything less on all the peace & love crap of the 60's.
And a great deal on the media. The more they show of carnage in real time the less stomach many seem to have for it.
You didn't have live TeeVee in WWII and to many, though very real, civilians being killed in horrible ways was still abstract enough, enough detachment to it. Plus the media was still on our side.
Now they're not and, if enough carnage can't be found, they make it up. Show enough dead kids and soften up the public. How horrible we are doing this. But let it be dead American civilians and, out of decency and respect, we're not going to show the pictures. Now to Kandahar where we have video of a bus load of school children detroyed by a bomb.
Whether it's Oklahoma City or New York. If it were 1942 they wouldn't be afraid to show those pictures from OKC or NYC.
They stopped showing the falling towers, the planes hitting them, too soon. We should stil be howin them. Again and again and again.
We need to dehmanize the enemy. We need to find our meanness again.
"What if we change the sign a little and replace Admiral Halsey's name with Slobodan Milosevic"
Sorry Shiva, Srebenica takes that into a different land.
The “Srebrenica massacre” is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars. Other claims and outright lies have played their role in the Balkan conflicts, but while some have retained a modest place in the propaganda repertoire despite challenge (Racak, the Markale massacre, the Serb refusal to negotiate at Rambouillet, 250,000 Bosnian dead, the aim of a Greater Serbia as the driving force in the Balkan wars), [69] the Srebrenica massacre reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood, and the justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels, including a bombing war and colonial occupations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomized by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 “missing”--who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines—was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/politics.htm
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