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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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AMERICANS AT WAR There is a great scene in the 1960s film “The Battle of the Bulge” when the valet of the fanatical Nazi Panzer colonel finally sees the light. The colonel admits that Germany cannot win the war, but he says a victory in this latest offensive will have an excellent result. “Zeh vohr vill go on, and on,” he says. The valet’s sons will become soldiers. They will fight – and die, if necessary – for the Fatherland. No longer a believer in the colonel and his war, the valet requests transfer to other duties. A war without end or purpose has no attraction for him. Americans have fought well and hard in their wars, but the citizen-soldier – often a draftee – was always best motivated when the war had clear objectives and an enemy who was a clear threat to America. The citizen-soldier was always eager to finish the fighting and go home. We have never liked protracted wars that seemed unwinnable or unresolvable. The Vietnam War, of infamous recent memory, dragged on for eight years under a perverse no-win strategy before we finally made peace with North Vietnam. Today’s journalists – many of them still wearing diapers at the time – like to say we were “defeated”, but this is a false construction. In fact, we had seriously thrashed the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong in the field. But after years of fighting without victory, Americans were heartily sick of the war and wanted the troops home as fast as possible. We effectively abandoned the field – pulling out at warp speed without looking back. The North Vietnamese saw our war-weariness and bided their time. Then, fresh from two years of rest, seizing the moment of our maximum political weakness after the Nixon resignation, NV forces motored in and took Saigon with scarcely a shot fired. Thus, the expenditure of hundreds of billions, plus nearly 60,000 dead and hundreds of thousands wounded, all went for nothing. Veterans of honorable service were vilified and spit upon. South Vietnam was absorbed into the Worker’s Paradise of Greater Vietnam. And a bummed-out America “moved on”. Did we learn anything? Maybe yes and maybe no. Time will tell. What some of our cognoscenti think we learned is that we must never fight another war, and that any military involvement must be resisted. This is why every American military action is now protested by a small, histrionic core of anti-war activists. “Never war again” is what they are about. (Can’t we all just get along?) Whatever might have triggered a war, like the 9/11 attacks, is immaterial to the anti-war crowd. Nothing is worth a war. Democrats seem to have adopted this as a permanent article of their political faith. They are now the anti-war party (except when a Democratic president needs a political diversion). Another small fringe group believes the Vietnam War was a righteous objective that deserved our support and commitment, and that protests against it were “wrong”. Basically, they think every war we enter is a “just cause” because our leaders have decided we should fight. There is as much thinking in this group as in the anti-war crowd. Between these two factions, in the broad center of American politics, most people are neither doves nor hawks. Most citizens in the center think seriously about the issues at stake and try to determine if the declared enemy really threatens their families, homes and workplaces enough to deserve the drastic action of war. In 1941, Japan and Germany were clearly seen as such a threat, so Americans went to war with a formidable sense of unity and purpose to defeat them. Japanese leaders understood that our enormous reserves of will, industry and wealth would defeat them if they had to fight a long war with us. This is the primary reason that Japan tried to knock us out with an early hammer-blow at Pearl Harbor. Many Germans – excepting the delusional Hitler – also understood our national character and feared our intervention on the side of the Allies. The Korean War seemed to many Americans an extension of World War II hostilities, so there was not great resistance to intervening in far-away Korea. However, there was much more impatience with war-restrictions and scarcity of consumer products. America had had enough of the inconveniences of war. Sensing this, President Truman did not seek another term in 1952, as he could have done. Mr. Eisenhower was elected for several reasons – not least, for his popularity as a wartime general – but one strong reason was his promise to end the Korean War. He followed through immediately. The Korean Armistice was signed in June 1953. Vietnam was a textbook case of political carelessness. President Johnson – who appears to have provoked open hostilities (at the Bay of Tonkin) as political insurance during the 1964 campaign – understood the unpopularity of wartime privations. He took great pains to assure the public that the war would be painless. It would not cause shortened supplies or rationing. “We can have both guns and butter”, LBJ famously declared. But he oversimplified. LBJ and his leaders ignored (or failed to comprehend) the public’s need to see the declared enemy as a genuine threat to the nation. At the end of the day it proved impossible to convince young people – who had no memory of communism’s ominous, inexorable march since 1945 – that North Vietnam was an enemy worthy of our steel (and their lives). Quirky Asian dudes running around the jungle in funky outfits, halfway across the world, could not be taken seriously as a threat to America. Besides, weren’t they just “freedom fighters” trying to liberate their country from colonialism? (Their college profs said so.) Absent a perceptibly dangerous threat, the war could not gain the public support needed to fight it. Unlike December 8, 1941, young men were not lined up at recruiting stations the day after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Ultimately, like the Nazi colonel’s valet, we lost faith in a war that seemed to go on and on, but was never won. Now, early in the twenty-first century, we find ourselves fighting a new enemy – International Islamist Terrorism. The enemy is not clearly identified with one country, but is ubiquitous and amorphous. He is both “out there” and among us. This makes him difficult to fight. On the Credit side of the ledger, the enemy has done everything possible to convince us that he is wicked, ruthless and dangerous. He attacked us without warning in our own country, on a shocking scale. Further, his attempts to frighten us with depraved atrocities – e.g., televised beheadings, and the like – have convinced most of us that he is a threat worthy of war. Perhaps he thought we could be scared away from fighting, like Spain. But he had no idea whom he was dealing with. Islamist Terrorists’ non-comprehension of our national character has actually reinforced, not diminished, our determination to make war on an enemy who poses a clear, tangible threat to our persons, living spaces, and livelihoods. This is why the Democratic Party’s 2004 anti-war election strategy – jumbled as it was with sporadic, confused military posturing by Senator Kerry – could not succeed. The great political center of the country was already convinced that Islamist Terrorism is a dangerous and mortal enemy which must be crushed and eradicated. That conviction was born of horrific, indelible images of two Towers – struck, burning, crashing down, and reduced to smoking rubble. We are at war because the American public cannot erase those images from its collective mind. Notwithstanding that strong motivation to fight, another condition for keeping us in the conflict for the long haul still applies. The American people have shown that they will endure hardship, privation and loss, but they must seeprogress. The war must have a visible direction. It must move ahead toward victory. My Pop often recalled the early days of World War II, before he entered service. “Timoshenko moves ahead,” (i.e., the noted Russian General) he would sonorously declaim. This was the frequent report from the Russian Front, heard on the nightly news. The nation – the world, really – needed to hear that somewhere there was progress toward a desired conclusion of the war. America still needs to hear Timoshenko moves ahead when we are at war. Once, our news media furnished that report. They were on our side. The jury is out on whether this is still true, so it is more important than ever that our wars be conducted such that the message of progress can be unambiguously heard from friend and foe alike. Much has changed since the far simpler days of fighting Nazis and Kamikazes, but we still have dangerous enemies. Americans can still wage war effectively, but we have our limits. Let us pray that our leaders understand and respect those limits. This is not a war we can just quit and walk away from.
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