If we were that way after Pearl Harbor, we’d be a Japanese colony right now.
The attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941 brought the United States into World War II. Four months later, on 18 April 1942, came the American answer: The Doolittle Raid, also known as the Tokyo Raid, a, aircraft carrier based attack by Army Air Corps B-25 bombers on the Japanese capital, Tokyo.
Not quite four years later, came the American air attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Come the XXI Century and we saw a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks said to have been committed by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, then headquartered in Afghanistan, on New York City and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
By 7 October 2001 President George Bush's Operation Enduring Freedom was initiated, and on 19 October, Operational Detachment Alpha 555, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was the first of several 5th Group teams to infiltrate into Afghanistan, and work with the Northern Alliance to bring down the Taliban government, along with forces from the United Kingdom. The two were later joined by other forces, including the Northern Alliance and some NATO nations. ODA 555 was the first U.S. military unit to enter the city of Kabul after a short battle on Nov. 13 and 14; cleared the U.S. embassy complex of any booby traps and unexploded ordnance, and set up the first American mission in Kabul since the Soviet invasion 22 years earlier. Along with the other ODAs, ODBs, and SOF units from other services and allied countries, ODA 555 had just helped win a great battle, all in just 25 days since landing in Afghanistan. The U.S. and its allies drove the Taliban from power and built military bases near major cities across the country.
Oh yes, we can still do it. All we need now is the leadership, and a little stiffening of the national will.
It wouldn't hurt a bit to hang a few traitors and Quislings as well.
Our gutter culture, our toxic media, quotas, affirmative action, anti-male family court laws, $18 trillion dollar deficit, food-stamp lifestyle, exodus of American manufacturing to the third world, legislation driven by bogus climate change science, NSA surveillance, crony capitalism, breakdown in the rule of law, marginalization of the religious, militarized police problem, out of control regulatory agencies, open borders, entitled illegals and amnesty supporting leftists ... none of this can be solved by military intervention abroad.
Domestic military action, like an American Pinochet, might be able fix it. He fixed Chile by running a dirty war and throwing thousands of leftists out of airplanes without parachutes. This achieved killing off the cancer of the left in his country. Today they are the best country in South America. That seems to have worked.
But would it work here? Is there even enough cancer-free tissue left in the body politic for the nation to survive if we went on a cancer killing spree? I think not. The therapy would likely kill the patient.
But it's pretty clear we're not going that route. That's far outside our tradition Today the American military is full of Politically Correct affirmative action supporting sissies, just like every other institution in the USA. Patreus? He couldn't even figure out how to pull off a simple affair without be caught, humiliated, stripped of his career and prosecuted. He would hardly be able to pull off a coup.
Nope, the military are just another Govt. special interest group, complete with guys in camoflage and red shoes learning to be sensitive to woman.
Maybe I'm agreeing it would take leaders, but it also takes people and institutions for those leaders to lead. The quality of "followership" in the USA is at an all-time low.
I agree with the author's sense of pessimism.
(BTW: WW2 didn't undo the previous 8 years of FDR's transformation of America either. Much of our current mess was started by him, and WW2 locked all that progressive BS in place, essentially forever. SO even in our most heroic war, it did not provide a foundation for fixing the culture and social fabric.)