In an editorial Friday, the Post goaded Trump, calling his response to Assad’s ruthless recapture of his country "pathetically weak." To stand by and let the Syrian army annihilate the rebels in Idlib, said the Post, would be "another damaging abdication of U.S. leadership."[1]The Post does in fact weep tears for the actual jihadis (poor souls) but it's part and parcel of the now-official view of Pompeo and Haley who want to broaden the "trigger" for American action to include military operations that involve civilian casualties from any cause, not just supposed Syrian plans to use chemical weapons.
Maybe time has clouded my memory but wasn’t the U.S. ruthlessly attempting to annihilate the “rebels” in South Vietnam? I certainly hope we were, let me just say. To our credit – and contrary to the fond imaginings of the execrable American left – we were, however, acutely sensitive to the possibility of civilian deaths and Johnson inflicted ridiculous rules of engagement on our troops to avoid them, particularly in North Vietnam. In the end, however, we were insufficiently ferocious even under those ROE and stopped just days short of a North Vietnamese capitulation. Thank you congressional Democrats whose like-minded successors infest the Congress of today.
I’ve written of Bruce Catton’s observation on the progressive grimness of the American War of Southern Independence. Writing of the Union Army, Catton noted that the congenial election of leaders at the outset of the war gave way to men being spread eagled on wagon wheels and lashed for disciplinary infractions. No more democratic ordering of affairs. Message: war is serious business. (Lincoln inflicted his own special brand of tyranny on the home front to dampen down mutterings about the war, but that's another story.)
The realities of lining up and facing ranks of the enemy and hails of small arms and artillery fire became well known to the troops. My great grandfather’s Illinois regiment faced Confederate regiments deployed in a solid wall at Stones River and it simply dissolved in the ensuing battle. Same thing at Chickamauga. Swept away by Confederate infantry.
Sherman’s march to the sea more resembled criminal excess than military operation but it was murderously effective in ending Confederate resistance. WWII involved little of the concern for civilian deaths that so exercises the Post now. The Dresden bombings, the Tokyo fire bombings, and our nuclear strikes in Japan were similarly more vengeance than military necessity (not to mention the latter's subtle hints to Stalin about new realities).
So this sudden hand wringing over civilians in one Syrian war zone oozes with hypocrisy. Clearly, the U.S. doesn’t give a fig about civilian casualties in Syria (or Yemen or Mosul or Fallujah or Raqqah) but only about its strategic objectives to (1) destroy Syria and (2) destroy Iran.
Annihilating “rebels” inside national borders is what sovereign governments do. How they do it is especially no concern of the people who have done their utmost to enable “rebel” death, destruction, rape, theft, and torture. We who have facilitated, directly and indirectly, the death of over 500,000 Syrians are not in any position to preach to a leader and an army who are dealing with the Islamic scum involved and who are clearly strongly supported by the Syrian people. A hypocritical daintiness on the part of the Post, Pompeo, and Haley and official ________ coming from the U.S. are demeaning a serious effort to crucify Syrian terrorists whom, SHMG, we are and have been supporting.
Notes
[1] "Is Trump Going Neocon in Syria?" By Patrick J. Buchanan, AntiWar.com, 9/11/18.
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