One question that has been vexing me of late has been the question of whether we really want to win the wars we are fighting, be they in Afghanistan, Iraq, the mythical "War on Terror", etc., and it appears as though I am not the only one pondering this issue: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bstephens/?id=110010827.
Honestly, I do believe that we need to ask ourselves if we are committed to winning these battles. It's only the occasional crank or historical revisionist who questions the tactics employed by the Allies in fighting the Germans, Italians and Japanese in World War II. Yet, there is no ignoring the fact that in that war, the Allies (who supposedly held the "moral high ground") killed tens of thousands of civilians. And you know what? Horrible as it may sound, I don't have a problem with it. Wars can't and don't end in ties. They are either won or lost. It seems to me as though either FDR or Sir Winston Churchill would have sneered with contempt at the way we are fighting our wars now. They have become politically correct exercises in which the "rights" of those who we are fighting are of much greater concern to our media and the chattering elites than are the lives of American servicemen and women (except where the numbers of those U.S. casualties can be used as a P.R. weapon against an Administration that same media and those elites despise).
Further, I place much of the blame for this lack of will to win squarely at the feet of President George W. Bush. Yes, our descent into P.C. warfare began long ago, but I keep hearkening back to his instruction to the American public after 9/11: "Just keep shopping". Pay no mind to the smoking wreckage of the Twin Towers or the disfigured Pentagon. Just keep shopping. Don't worry about sacrifice or inconvenience; just keep shopping. How can we fight a war to win when for the most part we don't even know that we're in a war?
Just keep shopping........................
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