Forgetting How War Works

Rachel Marsden
FrontPageMagazine.com

If the West loses the current war against Islamofascism, it will be because some have lost all sense of what war really means. Last week, in my weekly Sun Media column, I argued that it’s really not that big of a deal to make terror suspects like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed essentially do what any kid does at Halloween when he bobs for apples – except in the presence of the CIA, and with the prize in the terrorist’s case being lifesaving information.

That column triggered an email campaign spearheaded by the Daily Kos -- the largest far-left blog in America – which appealed to the Sun’s new editor-in-chief from the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest leftist newspaper. As a result, after 2 years with the Sun and a hundred columns, my writing is now in search of a new home.

Really, has society lost its collective mind to the point where we’ve forgotten how to properly wage a war?

General Paul Tibbet, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan that ended World War II, recently passed away. According to the New York Times, Tibbet told a PBS documentary: “It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”

And now here we are, 60 years later, wringing our hands over how we should treat people who have made it abundantly clear that they would have killed us, if we hadn’t nabbed them first. What’s the alternative that the terrorist sympathizers are looking for? To tickle them until they cry uncle and promise to be good boys?

The UK Mirror reported this week that, according to British intelligence, Islamic terrorists are recruiting kids as young as 15 years old for civilian homicide bombings. (If leftists think that the US Army recruiting videos are seducing, just imagine the appeal of 72 babes for a pimply-faced kid.) And here some folks are, actually thinking that this whole issue of them wanting to wipe us off the planet can be handled in any sort of rational way.

This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed US Congress and made it clear that France is on-board with the war on terror, and will continue to fight in Afghanistan. Imagine that – with even France onside, and Europe turning conservative one government at a time, liberals still can’t bring themselves to join the party.

While Sarkozy was telling Congress that “the prospect of an armed Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable”, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announcing that he has 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges working at full-tilt, and more being added “every week”.

It’s one thing for Sarkozy, the US, and various other players to agree that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to have nukes – which, by some reports, could be ready as early as 2009 – but at some point, something much more has to be done. It’s like the kid playing with matches in the back room. If you don’t go in there and take them away, you know he’ll eventually burn the whole house down.

If the centrifuges keep spinning through any “talks”, and while any sanctions are being debated or imposed, then none of it really does any good, does it?

And where are we headed with a nuclear Iran? Just have a look at Pakistan. A supposedly US-friendly leader cuts a deal with Islamic terrorists to stay out of his hair and keep to themselves in the northern part of his country, rather than having the US take them out (and perhaps even nail Bin Laden in the process). Now, for all his kindness and appeasing of them, they’re trying to get rid of him so the jihadist nutcases can have full control of the country, its law, and its nukes.

War isn’t like divvying up the contents of a condo upon divorce so everyone walks away feeling good. It means people have to die. And sometimes even be forced to bob for apples with the CIA. Sorry, but that’s the way it has always worked. In the words of the A-bomb pilot: “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took.”

Rachel Marsden is a New York based political columnist, political and media strategist, and radio/TV personality. She is considered an expert in both US and int