Posted on 09/27/2009 11:03:54 AM PDT by foutsc
With Obama set to go weak on the "Good War" in Afghanistan, we need to recall some lessons of history. There is no such thing as a humane war. Indulging in such fantasies, with CNN enforcing the rules, has made the world a more dangerous place.
GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition. (Source: Jonathan Landay, a real battlefield reporter for McClatchy)David Warren, trenchant thinker and writer from Canada, observes that "The Second World War was the unfinished business of the First World War."
Is is no longer possible to just go in and completely wipe somebody out in a fiery, bloody carnage. Gotta protect their dignity, can't kill any "innocent" civilians whose skirts the "brave fighters" are hiding behind. Nobody gets their ass beat anymore, and that's the problem.Germans were left with the possibility of believing that they hadn't really lost the war, that they had been somehow cheated at Versailles, that in the upshot of their military aggression they were somehow victims not perpetrators...
This is precisely what made the Hitler phenomenon possible in Germany. And it was the bitter experience of 1945 -- the unconditional surrender of Germany, in the ruins of Berlin -- that ultimately cleansed the German nation of militarist ambitions.
We rained down fiery hell on Germany and Japan, followed up by an allied land invasion, full occupation, and execution of the guilty. Look at them now... They don't wanna fight no more.
War is Hell That's how you take the fight out of people. A little inhumanity up front saves a whole lot of it down the road.
That is what General Tecumseh Sherman meant when he said "War is hell." He believed it should be hell in order to teach the belligerents a harsh, bloody lesson that would make them think twice before starting something again.
Ralph Peters explains:
It isn't just that war is hell. It's that war must be hell, otherwise why would the enemy ever quit?We are no longer permitted to visit hell upon our enemies. They can take us on and live to fight (and brag about it) another day. We had better learn to pick our fights: Go big or go home. Otherwise, we're just wasting peoples' lives. Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, lone survivor of Operation Redwing, said it best:
If you don't want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place. -- Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal, from Lone Survivor, p. 313David Warren
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam.
Col. Bui Tin interview with The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1995:
Q: How could the Americans have won the war?
A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland’s requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.
Q: Why was the Ho Chi Minh trail so important?
A: It was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort, involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units.
Q: What else?
A: We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.
Go big means go after Iran. Iran is the problem. If we would have gone after the mullahs during the riots and overthrown that regime, the young eduacated folk of Iran would have taken over. That would have spurred a wave of overthrowing islamic rules worldwide....hopefully.
I love that tag line. The sad shame of Nam is that the politicians lost that war, a war our our troops would have won if not for the armchair generals in the White House and Congress. Why must we doom ourselves to learning the same lessons over and over?
excellent post, chock full of info to let these namby pamby p.o.s. that are afraid to win the war....
I vomited my way through George S’s partisan drumbeating show today. The bright spots were the woman in the roundtable segment (it’s apropos only in that the table is round), and Senator McCain.
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