War weary or anti-war weary?
ROS sends us a link to the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin who notices that the Obama Administration backed away from it’s lack of serious defensive posture against North Korea on our West Coast. She (Rubin) says that we (Conservatives) shouldn’t be so quick to say “we told you so” otherwise we’ll be playing into the hands of the Left who says that hawks “convey the impression that they want unending conflict”. Yeah, we’ve had unending conflict, in some form or another, since the end of the Second World War.
A lot of that conflict was within our own country. Even in 1920, anti-war commie Eugene V. Debs ran for president from a jail cell where he was cached for opposing World War I. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the communists opposed go to war against Germany, well, until the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets – then they were all for it.
Of course, we all remember the hippies of the 60s and their opposition to the war and more recently the war against terror which even began opposing wars in which we weren’t engaged yet. The VFP, Code Pink and IVAW were protesting a war against Iran back in 2006. I’d submit that we’re more weary of the anti-war profiteers than actual war.
The anti-war crowd gives hope to every tin-pot dictator that he can defeat the US. Hussein’s whole strategy revolved around waiting until the political pressure at home forced us to leave Iraq, like it had in Somalia. Does North Korea really think that it can successfully beat us in an all-out war? Of course not, they only want us to cave into their ridiculously comical pressure and send Jimmy Carter back with bags of money.
The first Gulf War ended too quickly for the anti-war crowd to organize and they didn’t take chances before the second invasion of Hussein’s Iraq. They went there to become “human shields” for his critical war-making industries before the first shots. Three Congressmen went to Iraq and stood on Hussein’s palace roof and declared that Hussein was more trustworthy than our own President Bush. they complained that we were rushing to war, even though it took more than a year and Hussein had countless opportunities to stop the “rush”.
Maybe the American public is more weary of the shrieking harpies in the anti-war Left who only lengthen the wars in which we’re involved by lending comfort and moral support to our enemies. The only reason Iran continues marching forward with their nuclear program is because they know that they have the sympathies of the protesters who will intervene to prevent the Iranians from having to suffer any real consequences.
The only thing more comical than offering al Qaeda or the Taliban at a negotiating table for peace in Afghanistan is listening to the morons who think those talks will actually work.
Category: Antiwar crowd
This isn’t a new phenomena by any means. Von Clausewitz believed that War had three primary: Military, Political and Diplomatic. His theories were studied and tested by fire, and by people like General Giap, who knew damn well that he couldn’t beat the US military on the battlefield, but more importantly knew he didn’t *HAVE* to. All he had to do was hold on and make it as painful as possible and internal forces within the US would begin to put pressure on US politicians (vice diplomats) and eventually he’d be able to exert enough pressure on two of the three primary components of the war effort, the third would inevitably crumble.
Giap knew this. AQI and the Taliban almost certainly know this. And yet, Code Pink and their ilk don’t seem to know that they are, and have been being played like a fiddle for years by the enemies of their country.
Neville Chamberlain did more to hurt the umbrella manufacturers than all other factors combined. And he also demonstrated for the world how hopefulness and an ardent desire for peace at any cost (including sacrificing others to preserve oneself)can lead to self-induced blindness and all-out warfare. This cruel and delusional approach to conflict avoidance has since been institutionalized and a monument built to it on New York’s East River. It’s called the UN.
2/17 Air Cav: on-target. British/French non-intervention during the Rheinland and Munich crises did more to enable both World War II and the holocaust than anything else.
“Those with bleeding hearts often end up with bloody hands.”
That Hiram Mann poem says it all.
No man survives when freedom fails.
Good men rot in filthy jails
And those who cried “appease, appease”
Are hanged by those they tried to please.
Ex-PH2: freedom doesn’t have to fail for those with bleeding hearts to end up with bloody hands – figuratively, or sometimes literally. Many on the left are firm supporters of the Palestinian Infantada and other violence against Israel. How many deaths has the violence emboldened by their support generated in the last 20 years or so?
Don’t know, Hondo. I lost count.
Code Pink and all those like them would have had their heads shaved in France at the end of WW2. There is no moral or literal courage required to stand up and protest about anything in a nation where all your rights are respected and supported by the government. That is a lesson that all of you who have served already know, there are very few places on earth where protesting won’t get you killed. Code Pink can pretend that they are the moral compass of righteous America, but they haven’t a clue as to how the world works in many of the dark places on the globe. When your enemy wants you dead by whatever means possible talking does nothing to deter him. It only allows him the time he needs to gather more strength to finally eliminate you from the earth. It is certainly a wondrous dream that one day all men will consider life as the most precious gift given any of us and act accordingly the reality is in much of the world the lives of many don’t matter to their ruling elite at all. Thus human trafficking, crimes against women, children and weaker humans is a regular occurrence. Knowing this, by what logic does anyone in the anti-war crowd believe that words will keep an enemy at bay? Self-preservation keeps an enemy at bay, the knowledge that we have the strength and will to kill them, their children, their mothers, their fathers, and everyone who acts and believes as our enemy that is what keeps an enemy at bay. We seem to have misplaced this basic fundamental of strength, that sometimes its’ application in overwhelming fashion must be displayed to convey to our enemies that while we find no joy in burning their cities to the ground and killing thousands of women and children if that is what it takes to end a conflict we will burn every city and its occupants until there are no more. We have not displayed that strength in almost 70 years, thanks in large part to the efforts of… Read more »
And yet, Code Pink and their ilk don’t seem to know that they are, and have been being played like a fiddle for years by the enemies of their country.
Oh, they’re not stupid. Evil and despicable, but not stupid. I’d say that the anti-war left is more the anti-American left when dealing with the “no war under any circumstances” bit. Doubly so if they’re playing the “no war for oil” card, because that is much like the race card–stupid, pointless, and counter-productive, not to metion exposes the weakness of their argument, but it doesn’t stop the idiots from throwing it out there anyway.
Now I would say LEGITIMATE discussion of “should we or shouldn’t we” doesn’t fall under their category. By which I mean have we considered the ramifications of going to war, the aftermath, the secondary/tertiary effects of our actions, and have we explored/exploited all lesser means before taking the final step of going to war.
I’m going to give Debs (disgusting commie that he was) this much, we probably should have stayed out of WWI. Germany was almost certainly defeated by the time we came in (the Brits tried and tested strategy of denying the sea lanes to its continental enemies was working), but the end game would have been more drawn out and the Brits and Fwench would certainly not have pursued such punitive terms.
Sparky’s correct about the left though-they aren’t anti-war, they’re anti-American. Bad cess to them.
68W58: I’m not sure I agree. How World War I would have ended under those conditions is an open question.
Without US manpower, it’s IMO reasonably likely that the German Spring 1918 offensive would have succeeded. The British and French were by this point badly depleted in manpower resources; US units were essential in defeating this German offensive and in later regaining the initiative that summer.
A German victory in that campaign would have taken France out of the war and forced Britain to withdraw its forces to the British Isles. By then, Germany had already forced Russia out of the war and had annexed a huge chunk of Russian territory under the Brest-Litvosk Treaty. With France defeated and Britain forced back to the Brisish Isles, Germany would have been able to exploit the resources of those territories.
Given a breather and time to exploit the resources they’d acquired from Russia in eastern Europe, it’s entirely possible that World War I would have ended quite differently in that scenario than it actually did. IMO it’s feasible in that scenario that Germany ends up with a continental empire including much of northern and eastern Europe (and dominating most of the rest), and that England negotiates a peace recognizing that as the new “status quo”.
Hondo, I thought it was the Bolshevik Revolution that took Russia out of the war. I will admit that I am a history buff, but early 20th century is not my strong suit. Time to use some Google-fu.
Hondo-I just don’t think so. Germany was desperate by 1918; there was famine in the Central Powers in the winter of 1917-18, Austria-Hungary was falling apart and the Brits and Fwench were getting all kinds of goodies from overseas. Meanwhile the western allies had developed the tactics for defense in depth which allowed them to more effectively absorb German attacks. I think we overstate our part in defeating the Kaiser-the Brits and Frogs took 850,000 casualties in stopping the 1918 German offensives, so I don’t think it was our manpower that made the difference in stopping the Hun. Certainly with American manpower the allies could dictate terms to the Germans, but I think that was ultimately counterproductive.
Our Medic-Historian above it bang on with it. The Central Powers were on the verge of loosing their two front war when the Bolsheviek Revolution broke out. This allowed massive shifts of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western, but it was too late. By the time we got involved in 1917, most of the combatants had worn themselves out in the grinding trench warfare and the Central powers were preparing for peace talks. Spring of 1918, the Germans made one last hellacious offensive, and were within a hundred miles of so of Paris when fresh American troops reinforced the Allied powers already in place and drove em back, ending in the Treaty of Versailles the following year.
Both the World Wars have been colloquially referred to as ‘The European Civil War’ and there’s even a scholarly debate if WWI and WWI are even truly different conflicts, or a continuation of the same one after a rebuilding and rearming period. The interwar years are a little studied and incredibly enlightening time period…And you can see clearly who learned their lessons from the WWI in WWII…The Germans are fast learners, you gotta give em that.
Oh, and extra points, 68W58, for referring to them as ‘The Hun’…Good style!
68W58, ANCCPT – five observations: 1. The British and French were getting so many “goodies from overseas” by early 1918 primarily because the US had entered the war on their side roughly a year earlier. That doesn’t happen, they get a helluva lot less. And in point of fact, the AEF was largely supplied from British and French sources. US shipping was largely devoted to troop transport (10k soldiers a month by June 1918). 2. Both sides in Europe were hurting badly for manpower by 1917. But in manpower terms, the British and French were in substantially worse shape than Imperial Germany. That’s particularly true after Russia was forced out of the war in late 1917. 3. The primary food shortage in Germany during 1916-1918 was a shortage of grain. Part of what the Russians ceded to Germany at Brest-Litovsk was essentially the entire Ukraine. The Ukraine was (and is) a huge producer of grain and livestock. The Ukrainian 1918 and later harvests would have ended the German (and Austria-Hungarian, though they were militarily irrelevant after 1916) food shortages starting that fall. 4. The Germans knew US manpower would be decisive over the long run. That was a primary reason they launched their spring offensive in 1918 – they knew they had to defeat France before US forces could be deployed and employed in large numbers. Unfortunately for Germany, we managed to get just enough deployed to France and trained (4 divisions) by the spring of 1918 to deny them victory. Remove those US forces and it’s quite likely a different story. 5. Famine did not defeat Germany in summer/fall 1918. They had lost the initiative, were being slowly defeated on the battlefield at that point due to superior Allied resources, and were pushed back. Again, it was the relatively large US contingent (by September 1918, the US First Army numbered 7 divisions and 500k+ soldiers) that allowed the German army to be driven back towards the Rhine. English and French forces could not have done so alone. Bottom line: IMO, it’s about a coin toss as to whether or… Read more »
I had a teacher in High School that was a crew chief on UH-1’s in Vietnam. He said his only regret about the 60’s was,since he was out of country, not being able to shoot any hippies. These days he would have been fired for saying that in front of a class, I thought it was funny as hell.
ANCCPT-thanks.
Hondo-everything you say is true, but I think most of those things can be interpreted differently and produce different conclusions. For instance, the Brits were able to get stuff from overseas throughout the war because they controlled the sea lanes and we were willing to sell to them, this was not an option available to the Germans. Also the Germans had to devote large numbers of men to securing their east, so their new possessions meant that they were not going to be able to bring all of their available manpower to bear. But mainly Germany was trying to prop up two very sick men. Ultimately the Brits and Fwench were able to draw on their empires for resources while Les Boche had to devote resources to keeping up theirs.
I’m on a range at Ft. Chaffee typing on an iPhone, so I can’t post long replies.
68W58: agreed things can be interpreted differently. And we can never know how that alternative history would have turned out.
Hope you have good weather today at the range.
Hondo: All valid points. Now here’s the question. Would a German/Central Powers Victory or stalemate in WWI necessarily have been the worst outcome for the future of the European Continent?
One could make the case that without the crippling and (to the Germans) humiliating reparation and disarmament terms that the rise of the German National Socialist would have had much less traction, without the ‘wounded but not defeated, Germany shall rise again’ mindset that worked so well for the Nazi’s in the thirties. Would borders have changed? Sure. But that’s European history, it’s happened dozens of times. Would the Nazi party still come to power if the Central powers were not totally defeated?
All purely hypothetical of course, butI feel like WWI is one of the less understood conflicts in the last 500 years or so of Western Military History.
@68W58, pop a couple off for me, will you please? Thanks.
Try reading the very extensive volum “Paris: 1919”, which is the entire history of the events leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
It’s thoroughly resarched and shows that the map of the Europe was redrawn to suit the needs of the UK, France, the US and Italy. Before that, it was as it looks today.
ANCCPT: had Imperial Germany won World War I, my guess is that Hitler and the Nazi party never happens. Hitler rode German resentment of Versailles, incompetent Weimar Republic governments, and the Great Depression to power. A German victory in World War I would have removed the first two of those. Without those, I don’t see Hitler ever getting the traction he’d need to become a world figure.
How that would have affected the parts of Europe not in Germany’s sphere is anyone’s guess. I’m guessing France would have done much the same as it did anyway (lost provinces/fear of the Boche). England’s reaction is harder to project, since the threat posed by the greater Germany (with the resources for a true world-class navy) would clash with their historical distain for involvement in European conflicts. If they could have worked out a naval arrangement with Germany, probably cordial relations. Otherwise maybe they support France again.
I’m guessing most of central and southern Europe other than Spain/Portugal would have gravitated towards Germany for commercial reasons.
It’s an open question as to what impact that would have had on the substantially-reduced Soviet Union, and on the future of international communism. My guess is that the Soviets would have been fairly crippled by the loss of the Ukraine and would have been much less willing to support the Comintern during the 20s and 30s. Could easily be wrong about that, though. Maybe they’d have still viewed Comintern as an asymmetric strategy to attempt to weaken external forces that viewed them with suspicion and supported it even more.
How things played long-term would have depended on the quality of government in the resulting German Empire. Good government? Maybe a long time. But Wilhelm was an idiot, and there wasn’t another Bismark on the scene. I’m guessing 2 or 3 decades or so, and then another conflict between Germany and either Russia or France. Both would have had an axe to grind.
@68W58, at least you’re not stuck on Camp Shelby, MS!
Hondo-thanks, it was cold this morning, but fine now.
Ex-PH2, I am not shooting, only playing Doc.
Ok, 68W. Can you ask someone to do it for me, then?
Infidel-Iike Shelby (well, not during August).
Anyway, I agree with ANCCPT-WWI counterfactuals are interesting. I still contend that Germany would have eventually lost, but even if they manage a win or stalemate consider that they would have had to contend with all of the problems that come with control of the Balkans, propping up the Turks and figuring out what to do about the monster they had helped loose on the world in Russia. I think all of that would have limited them in their attempt to emerge as a world power.
Ex-PH2 I will as soon as you give me the flight pattern for your house we talked about the other day.
30 miles north of Chicago, two miles due west of Waukegan.
If you fly over Great Lakes, you’re too far east. 🙂
LOL-I’ll grab the next young troop headed to the firing line and tell him to shoot the 50 meter target for a former sailor who says she likes to dance naked for flights of troops returning from overseas (they can’t kicke off the range, I’m the Doc!).
@23, It could be worse. 68W58 could be stuck on Camp Atterbury like I am. All of us 11B4s are stuck here because all the BCTs are full for our rank and MOS.
@23 I am stuck at Camp Shelby,MS…Then again I am a contractor and have lived in the area for a hot minute.
@29 68W58 — See, this is why I never tell you guys anything.
You probably blew that kid’s mind, you silly man. You’d better post a photo of the 50 meter target.