- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
This whole article is so stunningly absurd that it makes one almost laugh out loud - but I do concede that there are some points of truth in the article (LeMay was nuts- and we were lucky to have someone as ball less as Gorbachev running the Soviet union as it collapsed) - but very few. It would take too long to refute each one - so I will just move to the point that I think is missed, because it is implicitly stated at the first of the article.
The Pentagon has "lost it's way" because the whole thrust of the last 50 years has been to establish an invincible war machine - one that can fight and win battles quickly - but cannot win a war. James Carrol faults Churchill and Roosevelt for declaring a war for "unconditional surrender" because they had the clarity to understand that the ideology that they were fighting needed to be eliminated - not contained. WWII was terrible - a slaughterhouse - but it DID achieve the destruction of the Nazi & Japanese Imperialistic doctrines as a viable political alternative. And the reason that it did that was not by "reasoning" but beating the other side down to the point that they realized that it was either change or die. You may not agree with that level - but would you argue that Germany and Japan today would be remotely similar to the pacifist states they are if WWII had not been so brutal?
The doctrine of war used to be to impose your will on the other side so they changed. The Pentagon today is "smart war" and "shock and awe" to smash down the armies of whoever is on the receiving end - Iraq, Serbia, etc. What you get is the utter defeat of the armies of your adversary - but not a whit of a change in the attitude of the people. In reality, you just set yourself up for another round at a later date. That is the failure - the mechanism of war has been cleaned up to the point where it produces "results" but not impact.
Now - I am NOT advocating nuclear bombing anyone out of existence here, nor I am an advocate of the rape and pillage school of unbridled warfare. But I am saying that the doctrine of war the Pentagon has been hijacked - to produce a never ending series of "victories" in battle - but never a win with some finality. That is the victory of the “military industrial complex” – a system that produces a military that can never truly win anything.
