In keeping with the theme of what the old folks remember

Arnold Ahlert has an opinion piece in the New York Post.  I agree with him.  I hadn't seen this when I wrote Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember 9/11 if I had I would have posted his column, he says and expands on the theme.

What Our Grandparents Knew

Dec. 7 and Sept. 11 are iconic American anniver saries. Both days represent our greatest failures to understand the true nature of evil. And while each day will be treated with a similar veneration reserved for national tragedies, there is one aspect that truly divides them: resolution.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Four years later, they surrendered unconditionally. If one posits that the war against radical Islam began in 2001 (at least for us), we are in the midst of a nine-year-old conflict that shows no signs of resolution.

How is this possible? In terms of manpower and machinery, Japan was a far more formidable foe than the various umbrella groups that make up Islamic jihadism. Why are we having more trouble defeating them?

Because we've "sanitized" warfare. The same nation that detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki no longer believes in victory, if such victory requires too much "collateral damage," a k a civilian casualties.

Sounds enlightened, does it not? Who could possibly prefer relentless onslaught and destruction over "winning hearts and minds" and "nation-building?"

Yet consider how out of phase such thinking is. How do you win hearts and minds or nation-build before the enemy is defeated? How do you convince Afghans during the day to risk their lives siding with us, when the Taliban kills them at night -- because they still can?

How do you maintain the morale and well-being of American men and women in harm's way by purposefully prolonging war?

How many lives would be saved by military ruthlessness?

War is ostensibly a last-resort option. It's supposed to be something so dreadful that it should be avoided at all costs. Do Americans ever wonder how far Islamic jihadists would continue to go if their every provocation were met with an annihilating response? Our grandparents knew the answer to that question.

Dec. 7 is a day of remembrance. Sept. 11 is an open wound -- courtesy of Politically Correct Warfare.

atahlert@comcast.net

D-Day, Remember it with reverence

If you are as old as I am you remember D-Day.  You remember the anxiety everyone felt for every newscast on the radio. You remember seeing the newsreels at the movie theater, or as we called it in my young days, the picture show. You remember knowing your favorite uncle was there and in the middle of it.  We didn't know at the time how very involved he was.

You remember that in the Pacific that other uncle was commanding one of the PT boats, and you were very proud of him. But you knew how very hard the battle of the Pacific was being fought, so you listened anxiously for news of that front, too. 

Remember them and their comrades.  Very few of them are left to tell the story.

D-Day, the sixth of June. Remember.

A Moral Delimma? Not in my mind.

Jonathan Tubin in Commentary Magazine has a article concerning a PBS American Experience program.
 The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War

Tonight, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral....

....It is telling that the documentary treats the achievement of air superiority over Normandy before the D-Day landings in France as the Allied Air Forces' greatest achievement.....

The most devastating line of the film is its last, in which historian Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, confronts the moral dilemma of killing civilians in a righteous war against an immoral opponent. While the question of the deaths of civilians is one we must ponder, Conrad insists, “The most unethical act for the Allies in World War II would have been allowing themselves to lose.”

This is a concept that applies not only to the war against Hitler but also to the one that America is currently fighting against Islamo-fascists. 

Read it all, it is very interesting, especially for us who are old enough to remember WWII and all it entailed.