Posted by
Old Bill on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 10:44:10 PM
If we take a look at Vietnam today, it should be clear that victory in war, as distinct from victory in battle is simply imposing our will on our enemy--by whatever means is necessary; by whatever means, in fact, is effective. If we can impose our will without killing anyone, without, that is, going to war, that is just great. If we must impose our will by killing some of our enemies, without losing a single American life--as we did in the bombing campaign that led to American victory over Serbia in the Kosovo War, saving the lives of untold hundreds of thousands of Kosovars, that is also good.
If we can impose our will on our enemies without killing any unarmed civilians, killing only their armed fighting men on the field of battle, we feel good about that. But if the only way we can impose our will on our enemies is by killing their armed fighting men, and if unfortunately the only way we can kill enough of their armed fighting men to break their will to resist and force them to surrender is by doing things that also kill large numbers of their civilian populace, that is tragic, and we do everything we can in such cases to keep casualties among their civilians to a minimum--but it is still necesssary, morally justified, and we as a people have done it befor and had better be ready to do it again if we hope to survive as a people, let alone as an independent nation.
But wait--war gets even worse than this. Not only do we sometimes have to wage war in such a way as to cause the tragic and unintended, but unavoidable deaths of enemy civilians, but sometimes we even have to make war in such a way that we kill friendly civilians. During WWII, American and British bombs killed over 60,000 French civilians.
Now, some of those French civilians were undoubtedly enthusiastic supporters of Vichy, collaboraters, and traitors to France as well as friends of Hitler and the Nazis; but most of them were as much on our side as my father, an American soldier--and by the way, he too was wounded by a bomb dropped by the US Air Force. In fact, over half the men in his company were wounded or killed by the US Air Force, in a little town in Germany in spring, 1945. War is hell, and not only because the enemy shoots at you. C'est la guerre.
No army in history has worked so hard as the American army to avoid hurting the people we are trying to save and protect; but war never goes exactly the way it should. Remember this.
What, you may ask, gives us the right to kill people in order to impose our will on them? Indeed, what gives anyone the right to kill anybody, ever? Well, I insist that
defending innocent people, who were minding their own business, not trying to rob, murder or enslave anyone, and who are suddenly and viciously attacked by someone trying to rob, murder or enslave
them justifies the defender(s) in using deadly force against the aggressor(s)--and all the killing, wounding, destruction and high taxes which result, are the fault of the bad guys--the
aggressors.
Now, when I speak of imposing our will on the enemy, I do so in a general way, universally applicable to any side in any war, in order to give a verbally concise, logically comprehensive definition of victory in war. I do not endorse war, victorious or otherwise, for any immoral purpose.
On the contrary, I loathe war, even when it is morally justified and absolutely necessary. War is expensive, causing high taxes and deficit budgets leading to future taxation to retire war debt, war is messy and a general damned nuisance, interfering with people's educations, careers, and vacations, and worst of all war causes lots of people to be wounded, crippled or seriously killed. Not all of them bad guys who deserve to be.
Nevertheless, war is sometimes necessary--because of the even more horrific results of not going to war. The victors of The Great War--the war fought against the German kingdoms 1914-18 to prevent the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs from conquering all of Europe--could have prevented World War Two from ever happening had they only fought Germany as soon as Hitler and his Nazis established their dictatorship in 1933, putting an end to German democracy and the safeguards it provided not only for German citizens' rights, but for peace in Europe. But they did not.
The democracies could have prevented World War Two by fighting the German Nazi regime when they abrogated the Versailles Treaty, revealing their huge (and illegal) military build-up which had proceeded, as an open secret railed against only by the lone voice of Winston Churchill--but they did not. They could have prevented World War Two by attacking Germany and overthrowing the Hitler regime in 1936, when the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland, endangering France--but they did not.
They could have prevented World War Two by declaring war on Germany in 1938, when the Wehrmacht marched into Austria, or perhaps even as late as September of 1938, when Hitler demanded the mutilation of Czechoslovakia to feed his lust for lebensraum. But they did not.
The democracies, hamstrung by their love of peace, and their refusal to face the obvious reality of their enemy's lust for war, failed utterly to defeat their enemy's policy, failed to compose an alliance including all the victorious powers of the Great War, and tell the Nazis in clear terms that they would have to disarm and live democratically within their borders, without murdering hundreds of thousands of their own citizens behind a screen of sovereignty--or else. Or else the Allies would declare war.
We know with certainty that had Hitler been confronted by such resolve, he would have yielded--in fact, he and the Nazi regime would probably have been overthrown by the German Army, and democracy (on the Weimar model) restored. After the war, in a fascinating little book entitled "Table Talk", Putzi Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler's close confidants, relates this revealing anecdote: Hitler, after the beginning of the war, while it was still going well and he could bear to make admissions, was asked what he would have done if Neville Chamberlain and the French Premier, at Munich, had threatened to go to war in defense of Czechoslovakia. He replied: [the following is a paraphrase from memory] "The General staff were convinced we could not win such a war. If I had met steel, I would have stopped."
Instead, he met Neville Chamberlain. As Churchill put it later, "We have had to choose between war and dishonor. We have chosen dishonor now--and we will have war soon enough." The allies failed to win the struggle against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in the best way-- by skillful diplomacy which could have defeated the Axis' policy of aggression without actual fighting; instead, we were forced to win WWII in the worst way--by attacking our enemies' farms, towns and cities.
But it was better than losing.