America’s Disconnect with War and the Need for War - Repost

This is a repost of a blog post from March 2008 as a part of a Best of 2008 series:


America’s Disconnect with War and the Need for War -

In today’s Web Recon I highlighted an article by Rebecca Hagelin entitled Paying the Price to Wipe Out the Enemy. She writes in part:

People forget that we’re not at war with Iraq -- we’re at war in Iraq. We’re not fighting a nation or a government with a designated leader. We’re fighting terrorists who scurry among Middle Eastern countries and hide out in caves.

Yes, they get cover and support from rogue dictators and are led by individuals we can identify. But you don’t negotiate with mass murderers like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. These are fanatics who strap bombs on children, target civilians in neighborhood markets, and burst into universities and seminaries and blow people away. You don’t hunt them down to have a chat. You hunt them down so you can rid the world of them and their evil.

This is the major difference between “liberal” America and “conservative” America when it comes to war and prosecuting war. “Liberal” America believes that by talking and negotiating we can protect our country from future attacks and avoid war, whereas “conservatives” tend to believe that we must be willing to stand up and defend ourselves to ensure our own safety. The major flaw with liberal America’s theory as Ms Hagelin points out is that in this war there is no government to negotiate with, unlike the Cold War when we could open a line of communication with Moscow and see a noticeable result along the Berlin Wall, talking with Pakistan or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or any of the Middle Eastern Nations produces no end result as it pertains to Al Qaeda or the Taliban or any of the other numerous militia and terror groups operating around the world.

We can talk to the Middle East nations until the cows come home and at best we might be able to slow or cut off “official” funding for the insurgent groups but we can’t negotiate a peace settlement with a government that does not speak for them. We might as well discuss a peace agreement between the US and North Korea by calling up the Italian Embassy in London. It just isn’t going to get us any meaningful results, in liberal America though that would be considered a meaningful achievement though, because for them it’s more about the process than the results. Talking about “it”, is always good, doing something about “it” is bad. Why: because doing something might mean offending someone, and in liberal America we can’t offend anyone, well anyone that identifies themselves as a liberal that is.

The next reason liberal America can’t even discuss the need for war is because liberal America is so caught up in the PC Culture that it’s now impossible for them to even distinguish between necessary violence and senseless violence. Violence against women, violence against homosexuals, violence against the environment, violence against the homeless, everyone and everything is protected from some sort of violence. Nowhere in their world is it acceptable to engage in violence to enforce a rule or a law or to even protect yourself against violence - all violence is bad and war is the ultimate in violent acts so it must be the ultimate in badness. The populace must be disarmed so it can’t be violent and even the police have to adopt non lethal methods of subduing and eliminating threats. Liberal America has spent 40 years driving itself towards an utopian America that can never be achieved without the very institutions they hate and fear, and they can’t come to grips with their failure.

For them war and the military cost too much to be worth it. For the rest of America, the monetary cost is negligible based against the alternative. The US brought about peace in Europe not by talking alone but by also projecting an armored fist, an armored fist that by its presence returned a peace dividend in the form of a collapsed Soviet Union and an opening up of Eastern Europe. Liberal America wasted that peace dividend by gutting the military and now all the talk in the world can’t protect us from the evil that still resides.