As highly civilized people, we're 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.
Police
actions, nation building exercises and the like have vague and poorly
defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones.
Wars are
either won or lost. That's why modern governments rarely like fighting
them. Or doing anything that has clear and measurable results. Once you
declare a war, you know you have to win.
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 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. At
Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put
their rather naive theory into operation. They have sown the wind, and
so they shall reap the whirlwind," RAF Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief
Arthur Harris bluntly stated.
"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," Patton told the Third Army.
FDR'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.
A
just war is based on a fundamental moral clarity about your enemies,
not your tactics. War crimes are a meaningless term except when applied
to violations of an agreement between the two combatants or civilians
that are not a party to the conflict. That is not the case in Gaza. And
is rarely the case when fighting Islamic terrorists.
The United
States met the Japanese torture, execution, abuse, medical experiments
and cannibalism of our troops with increased determination to win at any
cost. This was the cost for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not war
crimes, this was how a regime of monsters that committed unspeakable
atrocities was finally forced to surrender.
That is what fighting to win means.
Winning
against Hamas does not mean dropping a few bombs on buildings, staging a
limited incursion, taking out a few Hamas leaders and then letting
Turkey and Egypt negotiate a truce. That's not a war.
Winning
means destroying Hamas, its leaders, its terrorists and its supporters
by any means necessary, and securing the territory they operated from so
that it can be used to stage similar attacks.
Can Israel fight and win such a war? Yes, it can. Will it? That's the question.
Israel,
like America, has tried not fighting wars. That is what led to the
horrors of the High Holy Day attacks. It may want to fight and win a war
before it's too late
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
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