Occasionally, an op-ed piece strikes a note so precise and correct, it resounds in the imagination for days. That's the experience I had, at any rate, reading Arthur Herman's essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Iwo Jima," which dealt with one of the bloodiest battles of World War II--a ferocious fight against Imperial Japan that began 50 years ago today.
Herman notes that the 36-day contest over a 7.5-square mile speck of Pacific ash capped an "island-hopping" campaign, whose death toll, military blunders and poor showing by American troops make anything that has happened in Iraq resemble the 1949 John Wayne flag-waver, "The Sands of Iwo Jima." The battle itself was horrific: 6,800 dead, thousands more wounded--a causality ratio of one out of three Marines. All for an island, Herman notes, "whose future as a major air base never materialized."
The historian goes on, however, to draw a moral point from the battle, which sheds light upon our current conflict. I hope the reader will excuse the lengthy excerpt, but my prose could never serve this subject as well as Herman's:
The lesson of Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to Machiavelli: that sometimes free societies must be as tough and unrelenting as their enemies. Totalitarians test their opponents by generating extreme conditions of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak democratic nerves will crack. This in turn demonstrates their moral superiority: that by giving up their own decency and humanity they have become stronger than those who have not.
Free societies can afford only one response. There were no complicated legal issues or questions of "moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima: It was kill or be killed. That remains the nature of war even for democratic societies. The real question is, who outlasts whom. In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery, based on [Joe] Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests. In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.
Today some in this country think the totalitarians may still win in Iraq and elsewhere. A few even hope so. Only one thing is certain: As long as Americans cherish the memory of those who served at Iwo Jima, and grasp the crucial lesson they offer all free societies, the totalitarians will never win.
Interestingly, some similar stirrings are taking place on the left--at least the responsible left. In the current New York Magazine, uber-yuppie Kurt Andersen muses over liberal's "moral-ideological-emotional bind" concerning Iraq. The left, he proposes,
is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.
Anderson's link between Reagan and Bush II in this matter is interesting: I still remember how over one million people marched in the streets of New York to Central Park to protest Reagan's push to place Pershing missiles in Europe (no doubt Andersen was among them)--a policy at the time I supported, and which, it turned out, did much to topple the already-decrepit Soviet Union.
Anderson continues:
Like “radical chic,” a related New York specialty, “liberal guilt” once meant feeling discomfort over one’s good fortune in an unjust world. As this last U.S. election cycle began, however, a new subspecies of liberal guilt arose—over the pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration. But with Bush reelected, any shred of tacit moral rationale is gone. In other words, feel the guilt, and let it be a pang that leads to moral clarity.
Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.
He then draws his own conclusion from this observation, one I've waited decades to hear:
At a certain point during the Vietnam War, a majority of Americans--those of us who were in favor of unilateral U.S. withdrawal--were in a de facto alliance with the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong and the Soviets. Unpleasant but true...
Unpleasant but true, indeed. One respects Anderson for his forthright self-criticism. Still, given the stark facts of history and effects of the anti-war movement, this sort of head shrugging tsk-tsk-ing is too easy. To see the real implications of U.S. abandonment of Southeast Asia, one must go to Vietnam and talk to the people who spent years in "re-education" camps for serving the South Vietnamese government--or for having relatives who served the American "puppets." Remember, too, the millions of people who risked their lives to flee their "liberated" nation in fragile boats.
Then go to Cambodia and visit a former high school called Tuol Sleng, now a museum to the holocaust the Communist Khmer Rouge unleashed on their people. Take a moment to absorb the rooms lined with photographs of dazed Cambodians taken by their Communist "liberators" moments before they were executed; stand before a map of the nation fashioned entirely from human skulls. Then travel 15 miles out of Phnom Penh to visit one of the nation's killing fields. Look at the tower of Cambodian skulls--many of them children--whom Pol Pot's butchers clubbed to death with rifle butts in order to save bullets. See the bones rising up from the shallow graves and slaughter pits, hear the endless recording of the Buddhist prayer for the dead. And think: this is what happens when America loses its staying power. This is what happens.
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