Mark Steyn has a sobering opinion piece in the Chicago Sun-Times that should be required reading. He starts out tearing apart a commenter who threw the "chickenhawk" nonsense that the left is so fond of these days at Katherine Jean Lopez of the National Review Online. From there it progresses.
In fact, the notion that "fighting" a war is the monopoly of those "in uniform" gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein's chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.
Nations go to war, not armies. That one insight may be what is, and has been, missing for so long in discussion of this war we find ourselves in. Not just the war in Iraq, but the ongoing war with those who would kill us all.
No one can argue with U.S. military superiority. America has the most powerful armed forces on the planet. The Pentagon is responsible for 40 percent of the world's military spending, and outspends the next 20 biggest militaries combined. It's responsible for almost 80 percent of military research-and-development spending, which means the capability gap between it and everyone else widens every day.
So why doesn't it feel like that?
In Iraq, the leviathan has somehow managed to give the impression that what previous mid-rank powers would have regarded as a little light colonial policing has left it stretched dangerously thin and bogged down in an almighty quagmire. Even if it were only lamebrain leftist media spin, the fact that it's accepted by large numbers of Americans and huge majorities of Europeans is a reminder that in free societies a military of unprecedented dominance is not the only source of power. More importantly, significant proportions of this nation's enemies also believe the spin. In April 2003 was Baby Assad nervous that he'd be next? You bet. Is he nervous now?
We approach war with one hand tied behind our back. At times it appears we tie them both behind us. We hobble ourselves while our enemies commit unspeakable acts of all out brutality. Our loud left makes sure the rules are applied differently to us as opposed to who we are fighting. The enemy gets a pass on the rules America is held to. And this encourages the enemies and make them think they can win in the end. But any realistic assessment, by any reasonable person would reveal the absurdity of that idea. They cannot win, we can only lose. There is a vast difference.
…As John Podhoretz wondered in the New York Post the other day: "What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?"
That's a good question. If you watch the grisly U.S. network coverage of any global sporting event, you've no doubt who your team's meant to be: If there are plucky Belgian hurdlers or Fijian shotputters in the Olympics, you never hear a word of them on ABC and NBC; it's all heartwarming soft-focus profiles of athletes from Indiana and Nebraska. The American media have no problem being ferociously jingoistic when it comes to the two-man luge. Yet, when it's a war, there is no "our" team, not on American TV. Like snotty French ice-dancing judges, the media watch the U.S. skate across the rink and then hand out a succession of snippy 4.3s — for lack of Miranda rights in Fallujah, insufficient menu options at Gitmo.
Our enemies understand "why we fight" and where the fight is. They know that in the greater scheme of things the mosques of Jakarta and Amsterdam and Toronto and Dearborn are more important territory than the Sunni Triangle. The U.S. military is the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. But it's not enough, it never has been and it never will be.
Have we lost the ability to carry on and win? I don't think so. But my fear is, and has been all along, that we will continue to hobble ourselves until we are forced to face the fact that we have let little monsters grow up to big monsters. Instead of stopping them easily when they are still small, we will have to pay a far greater price later. That is the fear I live with every day. You can see it at work in Israel right now. In the 70's Israel faced small numbers of terrorists killing their Olympic athletes. Now they face Hezbollah with rockets that can rain terror down on their cities. What do you think the outcome will be when one of those rockets contains something other than explosives laced with ball bearings?
We hobble ourselves at our peril. If we lose the ability to see ourselves as a nation at war, we will end up paying a larger bill later on.
