Just another typically brilliant Daniel Greenfield essay.
As highly civilized people, we’ve lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.
We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that’s because we don’t fight them. Instead, we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists, and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.
To win a war, you have to fight one.
If your enemy is fighting a war and you’re fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.
A few rules of thumb, from people who knew a little something about it.
We fight things that are not wars to ‘stabilize’ regions. Wars are not fought for stability, but destruction. To win a war, destroy the enemy. That’s what the United States and its allies did in WWII, raining mass death and destruction on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in ways that still make modern liberals cringe.
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them,” said Arthur Harris, the Royal Air Force chief of Bomber Command, in 1940.
“The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that,” General Geroge Patton told the Third Army.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s obsession with taking the war to Japan led to the Doolittle Raid. One of the bombs from that raid hit a school. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well. That is a hazard of war,” Doolittle had warned.
That is what war is. It’s why wars should not be fought lightly. But when you fight them, fight to win.
Indeed so. Or, as the rockabilly folks always like to say: Get hot or go home.