Finish the War
Charles Johnson
Tue Sep 17, 2002 at 11:44 am PDT • Views: 168
As usual, Victor Davis Hanson gives us the long-range perspective. Really long-range. We’re talking Thucydides here. Finish the War.
There are lulls in all wars. Even successful militaries must take their breath, as they redirect their efforts to additional theaters, reassess past performance, stockpile supplies, seek out new allies and wait for opportune weather.
Wars, by their very nature, are different from the drama of individual battles. Even during infamously bloody conflicts such as the Peloponnesian and Punic Wars, the American Civil War and World War II, there were long periods of relative calm. Indeed, such intervals of apparent peace often mystify historians. In retrospect, they sometimes cannot distinguish the real beginning, duration, or end of a war. Thucydides seems initially to have been confused whether the Peloponnesian War had ceased with the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.) and then restarted a few years later—or, in fact, had constituted a three-decade-long continuum all along.
Like the European theater of World War II—which saw the U.S. invade North Africa, then take months to progress to Sicily, after which there was another pause before Italy and the invasion of Normandy—we are currently fighting a multi-theater conflict on the other side of the world. Our foes are not easily identifiable as nation-states like Germany and Italy; and we have as yet few allies who wish to fight alongside us. We must invade, conquer and pacify an enormous country; Saddam Hussein’s Iraq merely needs to resist and not lose.
Frank says: