VDH Watch 11: Vic says "we" need to get tougher

Our man Vic tells us how to defeat The Terrorists "without losing our liberal soul." In different kind of war, Western World shows too much softness by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services 09/01/05.

I wasn't aware that Vic had "a liberal soul." But you learn new things all the time.

Vic's latest justifications for torture and the trampling on American civil liberties is, well, pretty much the same old thing. The Terrorists are really, really evil and we have to be "tough." "Tough" being defined as outside the law and of traditional American freedoms, it seems.

Vic also has this strange habit of using "we" to refer to people with whom he does not agree. As in this column:

... how confused we are in the West...
... we worry that we have gone too far...
... we in our softness are too far gone to win this war. ...
We in the Western world have often harangued the Israelis...
We also lament the Patriot Act, supposed [sic] Islamophia and new restrictive immigration guidelines. ...

Now, Vic doesn't seem to be confused about what he thinks. (Confused about reality, maybe.) He doesn't think that US has "gone to far" with its preventive war in Iraq and torture in the Bush Gulag. He doesn't think that he and his admired Dear Leader Bush are "too far gone to win this war." ("This war" being the Global War on Terror, or whatever we're calling it this week.) He doesn't spend mucy time haranguing the Israelis about their "security fence." And our man Vic doesn't seem to lament the Patriot Act at all.

Vic, like most war-loving Republican white guys, seems to think that any conflict is a testosterone contest first, last and everything in between. For instance, Vic cites a recent case of a Palestinian suicide bomber who crossed an unfenced section of the Israeli border and wound up wounding 50 people. And Vic tells us, "the would-be killer apparently interpreted recent Israeli magnanimity as a new sign of weakness."

But I have to wonder just why that is apparent. Is this based on an actual investigation? Did the suicide bomber say on a farewell tape, "Israel has been awfully magnanimous with us Palestinians lately. This leads me to the conclusion they've gone soft so I'm going to go do a suicide bombing?" Somehow, I doubt it.

But if you assume it's all a mano-a-mano testosterone battle, you know, "my God's bigger than your God," who needs actual evidence to draw that conclusion?

And, it would hardly seem like a VDH column without at least a sprinkling of bad historical analogies or analyses:

Our forbearers believed that they did not have to be perfect to be good. To them, war, like poverty and depression, was another of the tragedies of the human experience where there were no good choices - the least ghastly being victory at all costs.

Which of our "forbearers" in America advocated "victory at all costs"? Or said that would be "the least ghastly option"? George Washington during the Revolutionary War? James Madison during the War of 1812? James Polk during the Mexican War? McKinley during the Spanish-American War? Lincoln during the Civil War? Woodrow Wilson during the First World War? FDR during the Second World War? Truman in the Korea? Kennedy or Johnson in the Vietnam War?

Roosevelt in the Second World War insisted on "unconditional surrender" as a war aim. In his Pearl harbor speech he used a promise of "absolute victory" at the close. But I don't recall ever seeing where he said that unconditional surrender meant "victory at all costs," much less that such a thing would be the "least ghastly" option.

And did they regard poverty, depression and war as inevitable, as Vic implies, a sort of fated thing that humans could do nothing to prevent? Wilson and Roosevelt certainly didn't see war that way. And also ...

But you get the picture.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]