Does the West No Longer Have the Stomach to Fight?
John Podhoretz in the NY Post thinks that the west may be too "moral" to win wars any more. He may be right:

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?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left's insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right's claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country's leaders?

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

Cathy Young in the Boston Globe is not quite ready to jump on the bandwagon:

[S]uch a discussion is a slippery slope. Where one person sees a need to acknowledge our dilemma, others will argue for cutting the Gordian knot by abandoning some of our scruples. This has already happened, to some extent, in the discussion of torture. And some of Podhoretz's colleagues at National Review have been quite outspoken about thinking the unthinkable. In June, one of the magazine's columnists, John Derbyshire, wrote that he had been wrong to support the war in Iraq because the Bush administration was too wimpy to wage it properly....

Most of us, I hope, wouldn't want to be part of a nation seen as capable of such acts. In fact, it troubles me that we are now part of a nation where such commentary is not beyond the pale of civilized discourse.

In fact, even concerning World War II, there are legitimate questions about whether some Allied actions were truly justified.

Moreover, as blogger and international affairs specialist Gregory Djerejian notes in a critique of Podhoretz, the danger we face from terrorism today is hardly comparable to being at war with Hitler's empire.

If fear makes us squander our moral progress, it will be a tragic paradox indeed.

Perhaps both Podhoretz and Young should consider this exchange with the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, on Fox News yesterday (my paraphrase). When asked about asymetric warfare and civilian targets, Gillerman was asked, "If a Hezbollah sympathizer allowed Hezbollah militants to store weapons in his house, would that man and his family then be considered combatants by Israel?"

Gillerman offered this sober bromide: "Anyone who goes to sleep with a Hezbollah rocket or missile in their house should not expect to wake up in the morning."
- posted by Base10 @ 12:24 PM