What America can learn from World War 2 in the fight against Terror and rising Powers
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and the Middle East.No one including, very likely, the insurgents themselves believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
The Need for Unity and Clarity against our enemies
America and the democratic West faced the European-based totalitarian ideologies of Nazism (National Socialism), Fascism, and Communism, and triumphed over them all. Another totalitarian ideology has arisen in recent decades, this time not in Europe, but the Muslim Middle East, called Islamism. It is a political perversion of Islam, albeit it is rooted in Islamic traditions and scriptures.
What makes this 21st Century Islamist totalitarian ideology different from the other destructive ideologies of the 20th century is the adoption of multiculturalism and political correctness (PC) in the democratic West that have tied the West’s hands in combating this evil.
During World War Two, the Western allies did not mince words about the Nazi (German) and Fascist (Italy and Japan) enemies they faced. American G.I.’s knew exactly who the enemy was, and so did the homefront, which supported its fighting men and women. The American government helped define the nature of the enemy to the general public. The British and Commonwealth governments did the same.
In the cultural sphere, Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the existing media (printed press and radio), supported the war efforts and helped define the enemy America was fighting. And although the leftist influence in academia was growing as early as the 1940s, the culture in general respected patriotism, Liberal values and traditions.
The Cold War that pitted the West against Soviet Communism was fought with similar clarity. The West rejected the so-called “science” of Communism as a totalitarian tract that destroyed individualism and personal initiative. It saw Communism as a system that rejected religion and social stability.
President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” that locked its people up, preventing freedom of movement and thought. Reagan expressed in his March 8, 1983 speech a truth that the Obama administration refuses to accept about Islam. He said, “I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates an historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers for what they are. We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s.” What was true about Communism is true about Islamism.
There are those who differentiate between Communism and Islamism by saying that one (Islamism) is a religion, whereas the other is supposedly a political system. In reality, both are totalitarian systems. Both are radical ideologies that divide the world into the select and the profane. Both deny individuality and suppress free will, treat manmade dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force. The ideologies of Communism and Islamism reject commonly perceived morality and insist that right and wrong are determined not in terms of Liberal values, but rather by the interests of their specific groups. For the Communists it is the proletariat, and for the Islamists, the ummah.
In recent decades, U.S. administrations have treated the defense of freedom as an alternative to ideology. Instead, America and the West need to confront Islamism as an insult to sanity. Likewise, we need to emphasize our own beliefs in universal Liberal values and Human Rights that distinguish between right and wrong.
Today, however parts of the government, the sycophantic media and academia do not support the efforts to define and defeat radical Islam or Islamism.
The opposite is true. The media and academia have employed political correctness and multicultural standards that obscure and obfuscate the dangerous nature of Islamism, hiding behind such “civil society” organizations as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), MSA (Muslim Students’ Association), etc., that are supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Many of these organizations have intimidated Americans with concocted charges, including “Islamophobia” and racism, and have been allowed to “re-educate” U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the military on “how to deal with Islamism.” The FBI can no longer talk about Islam, and they can’t talk about jihad. The U.S. has permitted “the fox to guard the chicken coup.”
Victor Davis Hanson wrote that “Obama operatives suggested that radical Islamists were no more likely than any other groups to commit acts of terrorism. In fact, the very idea of terrorism not to mention a war against it was supposedly a Bush administration construct unfairly aimed at Muslims. ”
Obama, according to Hanson, “sincerely believed that there was no intrinsic connection between Islamism and terror; or, if there was, Islamic radicalism was no more dangerous than right-wing or supposedly Christian-inspired terror. Or if Islamic radicalism did arise, it might be mitigated by multicultural sympathy and outreach, mostly by contextualizing the violence as an inevitable result of prior Western culpability.”
A Washington Post editorial (April 25, 2012) slammed the Obama administration. “The notion that there is a legitimate form of Islamism reflects serious intellectual failing on the part of the Obama administration. President Obama seems to believe the Islamists are legitimized simply by participating in the political process” The editorial goes on to say that
No matter what the source of the delusion, no political movement that exalts the Koran can peaceably coexist with the concept of freedom at the root of Western governance. Islamist notions of democracy are constrained by the strictures of their religion. Radical Muslims reject the humanistic values that gave birth to modern Western government; the self-evident truths regarding everyone’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are infidel heresy to the Islamists. There are no inalienable rights under political Islam, only submission to the will of Allah.
America and the West cannot defeat Islamism and its terrorist components as long as many in our political sphere insist on using euphemisms such as “overseas contingency operations.” Obama rejected George W. Bush’s own euphemism of “War on Terror.” In both cases, the terms used obscure the enemy we are fighting with nebulous euphemisms. The Obama administration prefers to avoid using the term “Long War” or “Global War on Terror” so as not to offend Muslims. Words such as “terror” or “war,” let alone adding the word “Islamic,” are strictly verboten by the Obama administration.
In December of 2011, the administration released a strategic plan for dealing with domestic terrorism. It made not a single mention of radical Islamism. And, in 2010, the Pentagon released an 86-page report on the Fort Hood shooting. Though the perpetrator was a radical Islamist who corresponded directly with top al-Qaida terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, the report labeled the attack “workplace violence.”
As long as we in America (and of course in Europe) are shackled by political correctness and an array of misleading euphemisms, we will not be capable of defeating radical Islamism. We might have to give up our way of life on the altar of multiculturalism and PC because of the cowardly and morally feeble, self-proclaimed “educated classes and political elites” who have lost the will to defend our civilization.
How the modern media would have covered WW2.
Winning Wars require the Deaths of Civilians
By the time World War II was over entire cities had been devastated and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Allies in one of the last wars whose virtue we were all able to agree on. The civilians were not limited to enemy German and Japanese civilians, but included French civilians in occupied territory, Jewish prisoners and numerous others who were caught in the war zone.
The Most Notorious Examples of these US Bombing Campaigns were the bombing of Dresden in 1945 which killed 25,000 Civilians or the Bombing of Tokyo which left 75,000–200,000 Civilians dead. Its Estimated 241,000–900,000 Japanese Civilians in total died due to US Bombing Raids. For Germany 353,000–635,000 civilians killed.
To the professional pacifist these numbers appear to disprove the morality of war, any war, but they were the blood price that had to be paid to stop two war machines once they had been allowed to seize the strategic high ground. There was no other way to stop the genocide that Germany and Japan had been inflicting on Europe and Asia except through a way of war that would kill countless civilians.
A refusal to fight that war would not have been the moral course. It would have meant that the Allies would have continued to serve as the silent partners in genocide. The same thing is true today.
As we can see the way that American soldiers and Afghan civilians paid the price for Obama’s morality.
As Daniel Greenfield wrote in The Great Betrayal, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased… 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint. This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”
“By 2011, the ISAF forces were responsible for only 14.2 percent of Afghan civilian deaths, while the Taliban were responsible for 79.8 percent of them.” The Taliban had demonstrated that their reach was growing and American restraint did not save civilian lives, rather it cost even more lives by empowering the Taliban who were hard at work taking them.
American soldiers were killing fewer Afghan civilians, but more Afghan civilians were dying. The rules of engagement allowed the Taliban to win which meant that they would be able to kill more civilians. Instead of helping Afghan civilians, we were causing more of them and more of us to be killed.
Obama’s moral approach to war was what the Jewish sages had called the “righteousness of fools.”
This issue takes on a renewed urgency as the United States confronts ISIS genocide in Iraq and Syria. To stop ISIS, we will have to do what we were unwilling to do when it came to fighting the Taliban. We will have to hit them and hit them hard.
War is ugly. It is made moral by why it is fought, not by how it is fought. If we are fighting a war to prevent mass murder, our moral obligation is to win it as quickly as possible. Not as cleanly.
Our attempt to streamline the ugly parts into a drone taking out a terrorist target with no collateral damage is a moral fiction. Civilians die in drone strikes as in any other form of attack and believing that we can have our moral cake and eat it too has convinced some that any other kind of war is immoral.
If we had set out to win World War II as cleanly as possible the price for our morality would have been paid by our own soldiers as well as by the countless victims of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
As we can see the way that American soldiers and Afghan civilians paid the price for Obama’s morality.
The White House was panicked enough to relax the rules on “near certainty” allowing more freedom of action against ISIS, but it’s also not nearly enough. ISIS is not a group of terrorists hiding in caves. It operates like an army. It sustains its forces by maintaining a constant forward momentum. This is something that it has in common with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, both of whom were running fragile military and economic enterprises that depended on a steady stream of new conquests.
The lesson that we should take away from Afghanistan is that finicky attitudes about civilian casualties only end up costing more civilian lives.
Ending a war requires the use of decisive force. The alternative is the miserable situation in Israel in which it hurts Hamas enough to buy some time, but not enough to stop another war two years later.
Sparing terrorists to save civilians is morally and practically backward. Terrorists kill civilians. Sparing terrorists means that more civilians will die.
On the battlefield we have to be willing to accept that if we use large scale bombing to go after a military group that uses civilians as human shields, there will be large numbers of civilian casualties. But that number will be far less than what it would be if ISIS gets to carry out its genocides and continues to drag out the war across the region.
On September 10, 2001, Bill Clinton said that he could have had Bin Laden taken out if not for the collateral damage in Kandahar. As a result of his inaction, 3,000 people in the United States and countless civilians in Afghanistan died. By trying to prevent 300 civilian casualties, he actually caused ten times and then a hundred times that many civilian casualties.
We can’t afford any more Clinton moralizing that sacrifices the World Trade Center to spare Kandahar and then has to bomb Kandahar anyway. We can either learn the lessons of Afghanistan or continue losing thousands of Americans to wars that never end.
War is ugly. It is made moral by why it is fought, not by how it is fought. If we are fighting a war to prevent mass murder, our moral obligation is to win it as quickly as possible. Not as cleanly.
Our military has the resources to shatter ISIS, but political correctness has penetrated so deep into the Pentagon that, even should a president issue the one-word order, “Win!,” our initial actions would be cautious and halting. We’ve bred a generation of military leaders afraid of being prosecuted by their own government for the kind of errors inevitable in wartime. Instead of “leaning forward in the foxhole,” our leaders lean on lawyers.
If lawyers had had to approve our World War II target lists, we couldn’t have won. War is never clean or easy, and the strictures imposed on our military today just protect our enemies. Collateral damage and civilian casualties are part of combat and always will be. The most humane approach is to pile on fast and win decisively which results in far less suffering than the sort of protracted agony we see in Syria.
The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital. Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler. The jihadis must be crushed. Start with their “Berlin.”
Kill ten thousand, save a million.
Unthinkable? Fine. We lose.
If we fought World War 2, the way that we fight ISIS and Terrorists, the Nazis would have been allowed to kill everybody in Europe to avoid inflicting any collateral damage on civilians.
The Necessity and Precedent of Military Tribunals and Military Prisons
Critics commonly suggest that, given the foregoing ground rules, military tribunals are little more than kangaroo courts where defendants have no chance of receiving a fair hearing. This may well have been true in Stalin’s Russia, but by no means has it been the case where Western democracies are concerned. Consider the post-World War II Nuremberg trials of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany, architects of the Holocaust.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg acquitted three of the twenty-two major defendants; sentenced four others to twenty years in prison or less; and sentenced three to life in prison. In other words, nearly half of those accused were spared the death penalty.
Similarly, United States military tribunals, which were composed solely of American judges, tried 177 other Nazi officials and members of the SS, convicting 142 and executing only 12. It can be reasonably argued that military jurors are less likely than their civilian counterparts to render decisions rooted in “inflamed passions” rather than in solid evidence. Finally, we must acknowledge that those who serve as jurors in the civilian trials of accused terrorists may, if they render “guilty” verdicts, be extremely vulnerable to violent retribution from affiliated terrorist and militia groups another argument against civilian trials for terrorists.
For those who are concerned about legal precedent, it must be understood that the use of military tribunals for the adjudication of war crimes is in no way a departure from past practices. As noted earlier, military commissions were used commonly during the Civil War. Prior to that, General George Washington employed such tribunals during the American Revolution in the late 18th century. In the era following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, military tribunals were first convened by Major General Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, to adjudicate the alleged war crimes of American troops and Mexican guerrilla fighters alike.
World War II also saw the use of military courts, the most famous case involving eight marines of the Third Reich (one of whom was an American citizen named Herbert Haupt) who rode a Nazi U-boat to the east coast of the United States, where, laden with explosives, they disembarked and set off toward various locations with the intent of bombing railroads, hydroelectric plants, factories, department stores, and defense facilities across the country.
The saboteurs were wearing no military uniforms or identifying emblems when they were captured, meaning that they were, in the eyes of the law (as defined by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, quoted earlier in this article), “unlawful combatants.” Refusing to grant the perpetrators civilian jury trials, President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly created a secret military commission to hear their cases. All eight were convicted and sentenced to death, though two turncoats later had their sentences commuted to life in prison.
From Wikipedia:
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a military tribunal for eight German prisoners accused of espionage and planning sabotage in the United States as part of Operation Pastorius. Roosevelt’s decision was challenged, but upheld, in Ex parte Quirin (1942). All eight of the accused were convicted and sentenced to death. Six were executed by electric chair at the District of Columbia jail on August 8, 1942. Two who had given evidence against the others had their sentences reduced by Roosevelt to prison terms. In 1948, they were released by President Harry S. Truman and deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.
Trials by military commissions would permit the United States to prosecute terrorism cases much more quickly and effectively than would civilian trials.
The World War II evacuation and relocation of Nisei were carriec out In part because of the inability of law enforcement authorities tc detain suspected subversives who were U.S. citizens. Countless West Coast Nisei were regarded by the U.S. intelligence community as potentially subversive, but the civilian legal system did not permit them to be detained in the absence of individualized evidence that they had committed crimes.
Only one Nisei that we know of, Kenji Ito, was charged with an espionage-related crime. The jury, not privy to smoking-gun classified evidence against Ito found him not guilty of failure to register as a foreign agent (set Appendix D). Had it not been for evacuation and relocation, Ito and untold numbers of other suspected subversive Ethnic Japanese would have been allowed to remain in vulnerable, militarily sensitive areas while we were at war.
Some say that is as it should be.According to this argument potential enemies even suspected terrorists captured or battlefields abroad should never be detained unless they an charged with a criminal offense and tried for that offense within the U.S. criminal justice system. Not only must suspected terrorists be charged with a crime, civil liberties purists argue, but the crime they are charged with must be related to terrorism. In the wake of September 11th, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service detained hundreds of Middle Eastern illegal immigrants who had been referred to the FBI for possible terrorist ties, critics griped that the apprehensions amounted to racial profiling and selective law enforcement.
The idea of prosecuting suspected terrorists the way we would prosecute burglars or drug dealers seems to make sense in principle, but just as the Ito case showed the limitations of wartime jury trials during World War 2, jury trials for War on Terror suspects are fraught with peril.
In ordinary civilian trials, there is no significant cost to sharing everything the government knows,” notes Johns Hopkins international law professor Ruth Wedgwood. But this dons not hold against the background of al Qaeda’s stated ambition of mounting new attacks. Affording accused at Qeede operatives the Sixth Amendment right to a public trial threatens to compromise classified information necessary to prosecute future terrorist trials.
Other rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment the right to subpoena witnesses and compel them to testify, the right to an attorney can interfere with interrogations of captured suspected al Qaeda agents. These interrogations have yielded a tremendous amount of useful information, according to Defense Department officials.
Moreover, in civilian courtrooms, prosecutors are severely restrained from closing off classified information under the existing federal Classified Information Procedure Act. Anonymous testimony and intelligence based on hearsay are often inadmissible in civilian courts. And while the lives of those immediately involved in, say, a mob trial might be endangered, the entire nation could be at risk when we allow suspected members of a terrorist network to partake in the discovery porocess.
The Need for National Security
While we should never be contemptuous of civil liberties, we ought not make a fetish of them either. When we are at war, certain infringements (e.g., military tribunals for suspected al Qaeda operatives, NSA Surveillance and Guantanamo Bay), while regrettable, are justified.
In a Time of War, the survival of the nation comes first.Civil liberties are not sacrosanct. The “Unalienable Rights” that our founding fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence do not appear in random order, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness cannot be secured and protected without Securing and Protecting Life first.
No one was exempt from the hardships of World War II, which demanded a wide range of civil liberties sacrifices on the part of citizen and noncitizen, majority and minority alike. Ethnic Japanese forced to leave the West Coast of the United States and relocate outside of prescribed military zones after the Pearl Harbor attack endured a heavy burden, but they were not the only ones who suffered and sacrificed.
Enemy aliens from all Axis nations not just Japanese were subjected to curfews, registration, censorship, and exclusion from sensitive areas. Thousands of foreign nationals from Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere were deemed dangerous, interned, and eventually deported.
Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104);
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas. (Executive Order 9066)
This order applied to all enemies and so Germans and Italians (to include those of American citizenship as well as Jewish refugees from Germany!) were also interned. However, there were only 14,000 combined interred while there were 70,000 Japanese (to include American citizens) interned.
American public opinion initially stood by the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, with the Los Angeles Timescharacterizing them as “good Americans, born and educated as such.” Many Americans believed that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable.
But, six weeks after the attack, public opinion along the Pacific began to turn against Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, as the press and other Americans became nervous about the potential for fifth column activity. Though the administration (including the President Franklin D. Rooseveltand FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage on behalf of the Japanese War effort, pressure mounted upon the Administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans. Civilian and military officials had serious concerns about the loyalty of the ethnic Japanese after the Niihau Incident which immediately followed the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a civilian Japanese national and two Hawaiian-born ethnic Japanese on the island of Ni’ihau violently freed a downed and captured Japanese naval airman, attacking their fellow Ni’ihau islanders in the process. (Internment of Japanese Americans, Niihau incident)
Hundreds of Italian and German naturalized citizens received exclusion orders banning them from military zones on the West, East, and Southern coasts of the U.S. Every resident of Hawaii not just those of Japanese descent was subject to martial law.And beginning in September 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, more than 10 million young American men of all backgrounds were conscripted into our nation’s armed forces. Approximately two-thirds of the 292,000 Americans killed and 671,000 wounded in the war were forced to serve.
In the post-September 11 world, the belief that civil liberties must never be compromised has become a dangerous bugaboo. But in times of crisis, civil rights often yield to security in order to ensure the nation’s survival. What is legal and what is necessary to preserve the Republic sometimes diverge.During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, which enabled him to detain thousands or revels and suspected subversives without access to judges.
In defying a Supreme Court order to restore habeas corpus, Lincoln refused to let “the government itself go to pieces” for the sake a single law.As for civil liberties, Lincoln noted that the Constitution “is not in [its] application in all respects to be the same, in cases of Rebellion or invasion, involving the public safety, as it is in times of profound peace and public security.’
Indeed, the Third Amendment forbids soldiers from being quartered in private homes without the consent of the owner during peacetime but allows it in wartime. The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches, but the parameters vary in times of tranquility and turmoil. During World War II, Roosevelt possessed an outlook similar to that of Lincoln, prompting his attorney general Francis Biddle, to write, “The Constitution has not greatly bothered any wartime president.”
The difference between past wars and the current war, as many critics such as former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis decry, is that the one we are fighting now is seemingly eternal .The argument from this quivering quarter of the punditocracy posits that since no conclusion is in immediate sight, any loss of liberty is unacceptable, since such loss would be interminable. “Civil liberties have often been overridden in times of crisis and war as in the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast in World War II,” Lewis acknowledges. “Those occasions were followed by regrets and apologies. But how will we protect civil liberties in a war without end?”
One answer is that civil liberties, however important, are not sacrosanct. If we insist that the unparalleled personal freedoms we enjoyed prior to September 11 never be abridged, not by one iota, then our ability to thwart future terrorist attacks will be severely compromised. The result may be tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. In an age of unyielding terror coupled with weapons of mass destruction, we must steel ourselves for the possibility of a long-lasting reduction in the overall level of individual liberty we have heretofore possessed.
Those who have sought to cut off vital debate over these matters invoke the internment card and shriek that “the terrorists have won” if we curtail civil liberties. Wartime presidents can’t afford to indulge such nonsense. Their first duty is the nation’s preservation, not self-flagellation. As commander in chief, Roosevelt resolutely understood and what Bush knew then: A nation can’t stand for anything unless it is still standing. For defending this unalterable truth, America need never apologize.
While some people who cannot remember the past are merely condemned to repeat it, the civil liberties absolutists want to force us to commit new mistakes that previous generations were wise enough to avoid. If these forces prevail, Americans cannot expect the high level of homeland security that their parents and grandparents benefited from during World War II.
FDR understood the American story as that of a long struggle characterized by old fights on new grounds. “In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most nations,” he said. “But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.”
Appeasing the Enemy Never Works
In the 1930s, economic crisis and rising nationalism led many to doubt whether either democracy or capitalism was preferable to alternatives such as fascism and communism. And it is no coincidence that the crisis of confidence in liberalism accompanied a simultaneous breakdown of the strategic order. Then, the question was whether the United States as the outside power would step in and save or remake an order that Britain and France were no longer able or willing to sustain.
It was in the 1920s, not the 1930s, that the democratic powers made the most important and ultimately fatal decisions. Americans’ disillusionment after World War I led them to reject playing a strategic role in preserving the peace in Europe and Asia, even though America was the only nation powerful enough to play that role. The withdrawal of the United States helped undermine the will of Britain and France and encouraged Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia to take increasingly aggressive actions to achieve regional dominance.
Most Americans were convinced that nothing that happened in Europe or Asia could affect their security. It took World War II to convince them that was a mistake. The “return to normalcy” of the 1920 election seemed safe and innocent at the time, but the essentially selfish policies pursued by the world’s strongest power in the following decade helped set the stage for the calamities of the 1930s. By the time the crises began to erupt, it was already too late to avoid paying the high price of global conflict.
Without a benevolent hegemon to guarantee order, the international scene can quickly degenerate into chaos and worse. The 1930s turned out as badly as they did because Britain abdicated its international leadership role and Uncle Sam refused to pick up the mantle.
Until Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, or, in the case of the United States, until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, received opinion in the West was that it was better to make deals with dictators rather than to stand up to them. After his agreement with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain told the British people: “I think the Government deserve the approval of this House for their conduct of affairs in this recent crisis which has saved Czechoslovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon.” Most Britons applauded. Critics like Winston Churchill, who argued that war was preferable to surrender, were written off as cranks.
It was in the 1920s, not the 1930s, that the most important and ultimately fatal decisions were made by the liberal powers. Above all, it was the American decision to remove itself from a position of global responsibility, to reject strategic involvement to preserve the peace in Europe, and neglect its naval strength in the Pacific to check the rise of Japan. The “return to normalcy” of the 1920 U.S. election seemed safe and innocent at the time, but the essentially selfish policies pursued by the world’s strongest power in the following decade helped set the stage for the calamities of the 1930s. By the time the crises began to erupt in that decade, it was already too late to avoid paying the high price of global conflict.
The tragedy of World War II was that 60 million people perished to confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy a fact that should have been self-evident in 1941 and in no need of such a bloody proof, if not for prior British appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration.
First it was the Europeans who sought an escape from the tragic realities of power that had bloodied their 20th century. At the end of the Cold War, they began to disarm themselves in the hopeful belief that arms and traditional measures of power no longer mattered. A new international system of laws and institutions would replace the old system of power; the world would model itself on the European Union and if not, the U.S. would still be there to provide security the old-fashioned way.
But now, in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is the U.S. that seems to be yearning for an escape from the burdens of power and a reprieve from the tragic realities of human existence.
Until recent events at least, a majority of Americans (and of the American political and intellectual classes) seem to have come close to concluding not only that war is horrible but also that it is ineffective in our modern, globalized world. “There is an evolving international order with new global norms making war and conquest increasingly rare,” wrote Fareed Zakaria of CNN, borrowing from Steven Pinker of Harvard, practically on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Islamic State’s march across Syria and Iraq. Best-selling histories of World War I teach that nations don’t willingly go to war but only “sleepwalk” into them due to tragic miscalculations or downright silliness.
For a quarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than great conflict, that nations with McDonald’s never fight one another, that economic interdependence and nuclear weapons make war among great powers unlikely if not impossible. Recently added to these nostrums has been the mantra of futility. “There is no military solution” is the constant refrain of Western statesmen regarding conflicts from Syria to Ukraine; indeed, military action only makes problems worse. Power itself isn’t even what it used to be, argued the columnist Moisés Naím in a widely praised recent book.
History has a way of answering such claims. The desire to escape from power is certainly not new; it has been the constant aspiration of Enlightenment liberalism for more than two centuries.
The impossibility of war was conventional wisdom in the years before World War I, and it became conventional wisdom again at least in Britain and the U.S. practically the day after the war ended. Then as now, Americans and Britons solipsistically believed that everyone shared their disillusionment with war. They imagined that because war was horrible and irrational, as the Great War had surely demonstrated, no sane people would choose it.
What happened next, as the peaceful 1920s descended into the violent and savage 1930s, may be instructive for our own time. Back then, the desire to avoid war combined with the surety that no nation could rationally seek it led logically and naturally to policies of appeasement.
The countries threatening aggression, after all, had grievances, as most countries almost always do. They were “have-not” powers in a world dominated by the rich and powerful Anglo-Saxon nations, and they demanded a fairer distribution of the goods. In the case of Germany, resentment over the Versailles peace settlement smoldered because territories and populations once under Germany’s control had been taken away to provide security for Germany’s neighbors. In the case of Japan, the island power with the overflowing population needed control of the Asian mainland to survive and prosper in competition with the other great powers.
So the liberal powers tried to reason with them, to understand and even accept their grievances and seek to assuage them, even if this meant sacrificing others — the Chinese and the Czechs, for instance — to their rule. It seemed a reasonable price, unfortunate though it might be, to avoid another catastrophic war. This was the realism of the 1930s.
Eventually, however, the liberal powers discovered that the grievances of the “have-not” powers went beyond what even the most generous and conflict-averse could satisfy. The most fundamental grievance, it turned out, was that of being forced to live in a world shaped by others to be German or Japanese in a world dominated by Anglo-Saxons.
To satisfy this grievance would require more than marginal territorial or economic adjustments or even the sacrifice of a small and weak state here or there. It would require allowing the “have-not” powers to reshape the international political and economic order to suit their needs. More than that, it would require letting those powers become strong enough to dictate the terms of international order for how else could they emerge from their unjust oppression?
Finally, it became clear that more was going on than rational demands for justice, at least as the Enlightenment mind understood the term. It turned out that the aggressors’ policies were the product not only of material grievances but of desires that transcended mere materialism and rationality.
Their leaders, and to a great extent their publics, rejected liberal notions of progress and reason. They were moved instead by romantic yearnings for past glories or past orders and rejected Enlightenment notions of modernity. Their predatory or paranoid rulers either fatalistically accepted (in the case of Japan) or positively welcomed (in the case of Germany) armed conflict as the natural state of human affairs.
By the time all this became unmistakably obvious to the liberal powers, by the time they realized that they were dealing with people who didn’t think as they did, by the time they grasped that nothing short of surrender would avoid conflict and that giving the aggressors even part of what they demanded Manchuria, Indochina, Czechoslovakia only strengthened them without satisfying them, it was too late to avoid precisely the world war that Britain, France, the U.S. and others had desperately tried to prevent.
This searing experience not just World War II but also the failed effort to satisfy those who couldn’t be satisfied shaped U.S. policy in the postwar era. For the generations that shared this experience, it imposed a new and different sense of realism about the nature of humankind and the international system. Hopes for a new era of peace were tempered.
American leaders and the American public generally if regretfully accepted the inescapable and tragic reality of power. They adopted the posture of armed liberalism. They built unimaginably destructive weapons by the thousands. They deployed hundreds of thousands of troops overseas, in the heart of Europe and along the rim of East Asia, to serve as forward deterrents to aggression. They fought wars in distant and largely unknown lands, sometimes foolishly and sometimes ineffectively but always with the idea almost certainly correct that failure to act against aggressors would only invite further aggression.
Because of the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, to suggest sending even a few thousand troops to fight anywhere for any reason is almost unthinkable. The most hawkish members of Congress don’t think it safe to argue for a ground attack on the Islamic State or for a NATO troop presence in Ukraine. There is no serious discussion of reversing the cuts in the defense budget, even though the strategic requirements of defending U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East have rarely been more manifest while America’s ability to do so has rarely been more in doubt.
But Americans, their president and their elected representatives have accepted this gap between strategy and capability with little comment except by those who would abandon the strategy. It is as if, once again, Americans believe their disillusionment with the use of force somehow means that force is no longer a factor in international affairs.
In the 1930s, this illusion was dispelled by Germany and Japan, whose leaders and publics very much believed in the utility of military power. Today, as the U.S. seems to seek its escape from power, others are stepping forward, as if on cue, to demonstrate just how effective raw power really can be.
Once again, they are people who never accepted the liberal world’s definition of progress and modernity and who don’t share its hierarchy of values. They are not driven primarily by economic considerations. They have never put their faith in the power of soft power, never believed that world opinion (no matter how outraged) could prevent successful conquest by a determined military. They are undeterred by their McDonald’s. They still believe in the old-fashioned verities of hard power, at home and abroad. And if they are not met by a sufficient hard-power response, they will prove that, yes, there is such a thing as a military solution.
This lesson won’t be lost on others who wield increasing power in other parts of the world and who, like Vladimir Putin’s autocratic Russia and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s fanatical Islamic State, have grievances of their own. In the 1930s, when things began to go bad, they went very bad very quickly. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 exposed the hollow shell that was the League of Nations a lesson acted upon by Hitler and Mussolini in the four years that followed. Then Germany’s military successes in Europe emboldened Japan to make its move in East Asia on the not unreasonable assumption that Britain and the U.S. would be too distracted and overstretched to respond. The successive assaults of the illiberal aggressors, and the successive failures of the liberal powers, thus led to a cascade of disasters.
The wise men and women of our own time insist that this history is irrelevant. They tell us, when they are not announcing America’s irrevocable decline, that our adversaries are too weak to pose a real threat, even as they pile victory upon victory. Russia is a declining power, they argue. But then, Russia has been declining for 400 years. Can declining powers not wreak havoc? Does it help us to know that, in retrospect, Japan lacked the wealth and power to win the war it started in 1941?
Let us hope that those who urge calm are right, but it is hard to avoid the impression that we have already had our 1931. As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.
Conclusion:
If Modern Day America swapped places politically and culturally with 1942 America, we probably would have lost the war.
We have a media in this country that roots for the enemy. These rules that are now applied to war.I’m talking about our own men and women in uniform in Afghanistan, in Iraq previous to that are so absurd, so confining, so self-defeating.
We now have commanders responding to civilian leadership that is so whacked out that we have men and women in uniform, in combat, who are expected to die before they kill the enemy in a certain way. In a certain way. You’re only allowed to fight in a certain way.There is no way we would’ve won World War II with generals and admirals of the sort we have today with a president of the kind we have today. There’s no way. With the media we have today, which maybe reporting Information about our movements.
There’s no we could have pulled off a D-day. I don’t believe it. It would be on the front page of the New York Slimes or the Washington Compost. And what would they do? Start adding up the number of civilians we killed in Berlin. The number of civilians we killed in Okinawa. Or the allies. And then compare them now wait a minute. We’re killing more of them than their killing of us. No fair. You’re overwhelming the enemy, no fair! Well, they started it. Too bad. Well, they’re Nazis. Oh well, so be it.
Listen to the arguments. Listen to the moral relativism which is immoral on its face. No, there’s no way that we could have won World War II. No way we could pull off some of these battles with a Democrat party of the sort we have today, with a media of the kind we have today and really a suicide wish. These are wars. We are sending somebody’s son or daughter overseas. To be killed or kill. To be killed or kill. They’re not going overseas as part of the Peace Corps. You send somebody’s son and daughter overseas, into combat, you give them every advantage to win and to win
To understand the present, we must understand the past. For Guidance in the War on Terror, we should look to our Grandparents, Parents/the Greatest Generation for guidance.
