Politically Correct Wars

Times sure have changed.  In the American Revolutionary War, we called British troops "redcoats" and "lobsterbacks".  In World War I we called the enemy "Krauts" and felt no shame.  In World War II we were doing our best to kill "Japs" and in Vietnam, before John Kerry became Hanoi's Ambassador to Washington DC, we were fighting "Gooks".  It is a simple fact of war that killing the enemy requires a certain level of dehumanization.

For the vast majority of Americans, it would be difficult to pull the trigger on Joe who has a wife, a couple of kids and a widowed mother who sends him cookies once a month.  Therefore, we have to decide if we want to win the war or empathize with our enemy.

Think about the documentaries you've seen over the years regarding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  You've seen the interviews with the Japanese citizens, mostly children, who were scarred forever by those blasts.  Imagine if the American public had seen interviews with these people before the bombing.  Imagine that an NBC newsreel crew had been in Hiroshima in April and May of 1945. 

We would have seen the wife of a Japanese infantryman killed on Guadalcanal.  She would be holding her young son on her lap, with a picture of her husband beside her.  The reporter would have asked her what she was going to tell her son about his father.  She would have said that he was a brave man, but she didn't understand why the United States wanted to control Asia in the first place.  There would have been many similar interviews and when shown to movie audiences in this country, the American people would have begun to question why we were doing what we were doing.

There would have been no atomic bomb dropped.  In fact, there might not have even been support for an invasion of Japan.  President Truman, still getting his act together after FDR's death might be pressured to negotiate a peace agreement with the Japanese Empire.  One can only imagine how the following fifty years would have unfolded.

Fortunately, none of that happened.  We simply thought of Japan as the enemy and maintainedour resolve to achieve COMPLETE victory. How times have changed.

President Bush can't even call our current enemy what it really is, Islamofascism.  He has to use veiled phrases like "enemies of freedom".  He has to repeatedly make pronouncements that this "isn't a war against Islam".  We are constantly reminded about the sensibilities of the "Arab street".  Hands are wrung over collateral damage.  The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib is more important than the brutal sawing execution of Nick Berg.  We are told over and over that we must not allow our rage to control us.

Political correctness and pop psychology are more important today than winning.  We have to be sensitive while fighting an enemy who has no such sensitivity.  This attitude will get us beaten.  Our enemy believes that beheading is a proper response to humiliation.  Our enemy doesn't hesitate to call us "evil".  Yet, our modern culture wants us to repeatedly engage in self examination and recrimination, EVEN while they're shooting at us.

Don't get me wrong.  Compassion and love of humanity are two of the things that make our nation great.  However, there is a time and a place for everything.  We showed compassion and humanity after World War II to Germany and Japan and they thrived for decades because of it.  However, we waited until we had completely defeated them before we showed it.

Let's win the war, THEN worry about being politically correct.  Otherwise our political correctness will only serve as an epitaph on our national tombstone.