Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Kinder,
Gentler Warmaking
“But
the experience of the twentieth century indicates that self-imposed
restraints by a civilized power are worse than useless.
They are interpreted by friend and foe alike as evidence, not of
humanity, but of guilt and lack of righteous conviction.” —
Paul Johnson*, Modern Times In the fall of 1939, during
the early weeks of what in England was called “the phony war” (the
Germans called it sitzkrieg —
“the sitting-down war”), there was an illuminating exchange in the
House of Commons. Some
Members of Parliament were putting pressure on Sir Kingsley Wood, the head
of the Air Ministry, to bomb German munitions stores in the Black Forest.
Sir Kingsley was shocked. “Are
you aware it is private property?”
he protested. “Why,
you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!”
Essen was the home of the famous Krupp munitions factories. Four years later the Royal Air
Force fire-bombed Hamburg, completely levelling eight square miles of the
city and slaughtering 40,000 people — most of them civilians — in one
night alone. Six months later
came the destruction of Dresden, a joint operation with the USAF, in which
135,000 people were incinerated or buried alive.
The children of Dresden were in carnival costumes, as it was Shrove
Tuesday. From Sir Kingsley
Wood to “Bomber” Harris (Arthur Harris, Churchill’s wartime chief of
RAF Bomber Command, a strong proponent of massive aerial bombing), you see
the coarsening effect of war, the moral slide that always occurs,
especially when people come to feel that the existence of their country is
at stake. I’m not sure it can be
plausibly claimed that the USA’s existence is threatened by the Taliban,
but I am sure that as the war proceeds and our own casualties mount we
shall see — and, indeed, experience in ourselves — some of that moral
coarsening. At the moment we
are still in the Sir Kingsley Wood stage:
taking care to drop one food package for every bomb, terribly
concerned that our enemies and “coalition partners” understand that in
spite of being driven to do some moderately unpleasant things we are, none
the less, still really, really nice people at heart.
Chances are this won’t last.
If Paul Johnson is right, as I believe he is, we should hope it
doesn’t. Nice doesn’t win wars. The folly of this kinder,
gentler war-making is already being pointed out by a few dissidents bold
enough to put a boot through the sheetrock wall of Emotional Correctness
the media have been busily erecting since September 11th.
Did you see The O’Reilly
Factor last Friday? O’Reilly
himself was off, and the program was hosted by John Kasich — a capable
presenter, but one who punches well below O’Reilly’s weight.
One of Kasich’s guests was Leonard Peikoff of the Ayn Rand
Institute. Clearly and
forcefully, yet politely and reasonably, Peikoff put the case for total
war. War, he pointed out, is a violent conflict between two
nations, which comes to an end when one of those nations has brought the
other to its knees and stripped its people of any will to continue
fighting. You do that by the
severe application of brute force, not by dropping food parcels.
It wasn’t food parcels we were dropping on Tokyo and Berlin in
1945, he observed. Sir
Kingsley Kasich was plainly shocked.
What about the root causes? he
asked indignantly. Didn’t
this whole situation arise in the first place because America had failed
to share her bounty with the rest of the world?
Peikoff swatted this down with the scorn it deserved.
America’s bounty, he pointed out, was created by Americans, who
are under no moral obligation to share it with anyone else, especially
since that sharing can only be accomplished by letting our government
impose ever more taxes on us. Peikoff — who, as far as I
am concerned, could run for mayor at this point — did not add, probably
just because he didn’t have the time, that a massive and ruthless
application of force, breaking the enemy's will as swiftly as possible, is
actually the more humane policy in the long run.
Recall the story about the man who decided to cut off his dog’s
tail. He thought that a
single one-time blow with the cleaver would be too traumatic for the poor
creature, so instead he adopted a policy of cutting off a half-inch from
the tail each day. That is
pretty much how Lyndon Johnson conducted the bombing of North Vietnam —
sparing the cities, sparing the dykes, approving targets personally.
That ended, let me remind you, with the USA losing the war, run out
of Vietnam with her own tail between her legs, and with those who had
trusted in the might and goodness of America hanging on to helicopter
skids, or left behind to be hustled off into concentration camps...
and with all the people of Southeast Asia stuck under the rule of
corrupt Leninist gangsters, bereft of liberty, law and property, down to
the present day. It would, of course, be
grossly politically-incorrect of me to refer to the United States of
America as a Christian nation. I
hope no-one will mind too much, though, if I state that she is still, even
in this hedonistic age, a Bible nation.
Now the Bible gives us such insights as we are permitted to have
into the mind of God; and the mind of God, like pretty much everything He
created, turns out to have two sides.
There is the thundering, irascible, vengeful yet ultimately just
God who is most visible in the Old Testament; and then there is the
embracing, forgiving, loving God who is more in evidence in the New
Testament — yang and yin,
the Daddy God and the Mommy God. (Yes,
yes, I know that is an outrageous over-simplification.
Just let me make my argument before you fire off that angry email
setting me straight on points of theology.) Americans have, at various
times, favored either one or the other of these aspects of the Almighty.
In wartime, the Old Testament God tends to get more of a hearing,
for obvious reasons — there are rather a lot of wars in the Old
Testament. One of the small
blessings we have received in this terrible time has been to hear The
Battle Hymn of the Republic being sung in public, full throat.
Just listen to the words, the imagery, of that most stirring of all
America’s patriotic songs: “Trampling”
... “wrath” ... “fearsome” ... “terrible”.
This is not Oprah’s God. This
is the God of the Old Testament, the God of Joshua
and Judges; the God of Ehud and
Jephthah; of Samson, who, in his war against the Philistines “smote them
hip and thigh with a great slaughter”; of Gideon, who, let it be well
recalled in this context, when the men of Israel begged him to become
their king, said: “I will not rule over you ... the Lord shall rule over
you”; of Saul and David, of whom the chronicler recorded with bleak
simplicity that: "Saul
hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands." These are early days yet,
though. We are still in New
Testament mode at the moment, giving over valuable air-cargo space to food
packages to be dropped to people who, supposing they ever receive them,
will gobble them up with the sole intention of making themselves strong
enough to join the ranks of our enemies.
We are singing The Battle
Hymn of the Republic but we are not hearing the words.
The sword has been wonderfully swift, but not very terrible. I predict that, if there are further attacks against U.S.
territory on the scale of the September 11th outrages, this will change.
We shall turn to the God of the Old Testament, and narrow down our
focus to a single war aim: victory,
regardless of how much that victory might hurt the feelings of our
enemies, or even of our friends. Then
we shall smite those enemies hip and thigh, laying waste their cities and
fields with our most terrible weapons.
When we have won, we shall, of course, do all we can to help
rebuild what we have laid waste, in the spirit of magnanimity and
foresight that created two stable, prosperous nations out of post-WWII
Germany and Japan. But first,
we have to win. --------------------------------------------------- |
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