DEMOCRACIES WILL NOT FIGHT LONG WARS

Don Surber does a pretty good job of trashing the NYT Editorial advocating the abandonment of Iraq and the people who have dared stand up for freedom there. He's correct only if one doesn't recognize the problem all democracies have with any and all wars.

He and everyone else bypasses a fact about any and all democracies, namely that none will fight a protracted war. Period. What? What about WWII? I am an old fart and remember growing up in WWII and I have a vivid memory of coming home from school one day to the sound of my father’s voice saying, “that son of a bitch, that son of a bitch,” this to the accompaniment of my mother’s screams and curses. The SOB my father was referring to was his old boss in Washington D.C., FDR; my mother’s agonized wails were directed similarly. The cause of this angst? A now famous picture on the cover of Life Magazine LEFT of the hundreds of dead GIs on the beach of Tarawa (entire piece is HERE). Within an hour the neighborhood was alive with cursing screaming people, all of whom seemed to want to kill Roosevelt. From that moment on the “body count” was the subject of much discussion, all of it bitter. Now all of you have been taught that the USA was 95% behind the war 100%. Not true, plenty of people wanted a negotiated settlement, opposed the concept of “unconditional surrender,” and were already fearing what would happen when we invaded Japan. (Parenthetically you can look up the editorial condemning the A-Bomb in US News and World Report, just one of many calling Truman to account.)

Consider too the Japanese “strategy” of defending every inch of ground to the last man, never surrendering an inch without a fight to the death. Their stated purpose was to make winning the war so costly and so enduring that the American public would throw in the towel; their belief was that nobody here would stand for a million deaths on Japanese beaches.

It is my opinion that the Japanese were correct. Had there been no atomic bomb their army would have successfully sued for a negotiated peace, one that would not allow “foreigners” on their soil. The Emporer and the Army would have retained their power, while Japan gave up all territory.

No real democracy will put up with a war that takes forever and incurs high casualties, especially a war that has been conducted as badly as this one. The Times may be the mouthpiece of cowardice and surrender but that voice is inevitable in a Democracy.

And we do have a country of baby boomers and their offspring that is narcissistic to an extreme not imagined twenty years ago; a generation interested only in themselves and their “wants.” This generation “wants” to be left to smoke dope, fuck all the time, and listen to music. Fighting for freedom ain’t in their universe.