Are we too nice to fight a real war?

Posted By Uncle Jimbo

Johnny Podhoretz gets an amen from the congregation for his piece about whether we (the civilized West) have the capacity to effectively wage war anymore. He wonders if the restrictions that we place on ourselves have limited our ability to inflict an actual defeat on an enemy and relegated us to simply stopping immediate threats, but leaving the entity threatening us viable.

WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Can it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our civilization as well?

I have made his point about not killing enough Sunnis on numerous occasions. They never had to face their defeat and consequently have been emboldened by their successes slaughtering innocents. Had they faced us in battle and been crushed there would be a completely different dynamic and I don’t believe we would have nearly as bad an insurgency.

Our will to kill and no good answers

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Are we too nice to fight a real war?

Johnny Podhoretz gets an amen from the congregation for his piece about whether we (the civilized West) have the capacity to effectively wage war anymore. He wonders if the restrictions that we place on ourselves have limited our ability to inflict an actual defeat on an enemy and relegated us to simply stopping immediate threats, but leaving the entity threatening us viable.

WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Can it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our civilization as well?

I have made his point about not killing enough Sunnis on numerous occasions. They never had to face their defeat and consequently have been emboldened by their successes slaughtering innocents. Had they faced us in battle and been crushed there would be a completely different dynamic and I don’t believe we would have nearly as bad an insurgency.

Our will to kill and no good answers

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Johnny Podhoretz gets an amen from the congregation for his piece about whether we (the civilized West) have the capacity to effectively wage war anymore. He wonders if the restrictions that we place on ourselves have limited our ability to [Read More]