Sure the U.S. will pull out of…. where?
Name the country (or countries) that the U.S. has had hostilities with… and (more importantly) which one has the U.S. pulled out of?
1. Japan
2. Germany
3. Korea
4. Iraq
… interesting, eh?
~ Helston
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Okay, so I’m way behind the power curve in commenting on this post, but sue me, I’ve been in the process of moving across the country and haven’t been keeping up with the blog. I’m trying to remedy that now.
As usual, I’m going to skew off onto a tangent, because hey, it’s what I do. Helston tosses out a post, it puts me in mind of something else, and I run with it.
In this case, I’d like to draw your attention several months back to the “Political Shambles 2″ timeframe and my comments about the Law of Armed Conflict.
There’s been all kinds of press about the Marines killing Iraqis in Haditha and Blackwater Security lighting up Iraqis unnecessarily over the course of the war. There was a lot of press coverage about all the nastiness that happened in Vietnam too…all the myriad atrocities that Americans were involved with there. Every time it happens it’s horrible, it’s regrettable, it’s treated like it’s never happened before, and IT’S NOTHING NEW TO THE FACE OF WARFARE!
If you get the opportunity, I want you to watch Ken Burns’ “The War” which is a really excellent WWII documentary that just aired on PBS in the past few weeks.
There are a couple of very telling comments by WWII veterans that define what I’m talking about. One man, a Marine vet of the various Pacific campaigns, talks candidly about the fact that after several of the men in his battalion were captured and tortured to death by the Japanese, to his knowledge the battalion didn’t take a single Japanese prisoner for the remainder of the war. That’s right, he as much as admits to killing POWs.
Another man makes the comment, “I don’t think there’s ever such a thing as a ‘good’ war. I do, however, think that there are ‘necessary’ wars.”
Now I’m not necessarily a fan of the fact that we went into Iraq in the first place, but for good or ill we’re there now, and I believe we need to see it through, whatever that takes. The problem here, much like with Vietnam, is that the military is too hamstrung by politics and the idea that war can be clean and atrocity free to actually make a plan for victory.
In the whole history of warfare, the winners have always been the ones were willing to commit any atrocity to win. You sack the enemy’s city and salt the earth. You go in and destroy everything there is until the enemy can’t fight anymore.
Is that overly harsh? Of course it is. That’s what war IS folks. War isn’t meant to be something palatable with minimal casualties and no collateral losses.
Maybe if we embrace the fact that war is the most godawful, horrible, disgusting thing in the breadth of human experience we won’t be so quick to run our mouths and send our sons and daughters off to fight.
What’s the solution in Iraq? I don’t know. What I do know is that the peace that the Allies established at the end of World War II was established by nothing less than, as Helston has pointed out, a more or less permanent occupation force. And in saying that, 100,000 troops isn’t going to do it. If you really want to establish a peaceful government in Iraq, I’m afraid the only way you’re going to do it is the same way we did with Germany after WWII, namely put a massive occupying force in and keep it there until you’ve beat the bad guys into submission.
It’s ugly. It’d cost a lot more lives on all sides. Unfortunately, that’s the price you pay. Look at the Romans…they didn’t establish the Pax Romana by politics. They established the Pax Romana by garrisoning troops everywhere they had interests and violently, bloodily supressing all resistance.
Gundy - October 6, 2007 at 6:42 am |