Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

UPDATES MOVED TO THE BOTTOM!
Note: Because of the relevance of this post to the McCain Al Qaeda Civil Rights bill just passed by the Senate thought to bring it up to the top! It was originally posted June 18, 2005

Simple question, on Flt-93 were the passengers fighting to save our way of life or their own lives? If you say they were also fighting to save the lives of those on the ground, I can agree with you but both of us know they weren’t fighting to save “our way of life”. While it is possible to fight a war to save “our way of life” that is a secondary goal to simply saving our lives. Those folks jumping off the 110 floor were not wishing someone to fight for their “way of life” they were simply wishing they could have lived another day.

While some might argue that our war against the Nazis was a war to save “our way of life” those in the concentration camps of which there were millions more than simply Jews were wishing for someone to fight to save their lives. Wars to save a “way of life” seem almost frivolous since we have to ask men and women to face such horrors as war. Seems like the only time you have the “right” to ask anyone to risk their lives and face such horrors and even to commit them is when your life itself is at stake.

Lets not fool ourselves, war is not some cricket game where the guys in the white hats follow all the rules and win fair and square. There is not a single US war fought that was fought politely with rules. We made them up as we went. I wouldn’t dare believe I had the right to ask a man to risk his life so that I could sleep well at night knowing that the war was fought politely. All I ask of my soldiers is win and come back to your families and if they manage to achieve those goals I will buy them rounds and listen to what they have to say.

So as you might imagine I’m not in agreement with this post by Jeff…thats ok but I wanted to look at some of his points a bit closer.

The Shape of Days: A tightrope over an abyss, and the vital importance of doubt I’m going to make a lot of people mad by saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway: I think Dick Durbin was absolutely right.

On Tuesday, on the floor of the United States Senate, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin read an excerpt from a report filed by an FBI agent who visited the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Then he said, “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.” These words sparked a firestorm of controversy that rages still.

But he was absolutely right. If you read a description of the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo to the average American, that individual almost certainly would think it sounds like something out of the Holocaust. That’s because in sixty years we’ve had the luxury of forgetting the ghastly details of the Holocaust — Hitler’s euthanasia program that killed 200,000 deformed, disabled or handicapped Germans; Eichmann’s “Final Solution” which killed six million Jews and displaced countless others; the seemingly endless series of other organized campaigns of mass displacement and genocide that resulted in the deaths of anywhere from five million to twenty million others.

I don’t have the same low opinion of the average American. Certainly most of the people over 60 are very much aware of the reality of Hitlers concentration camps and the Soviets Gulag. To declare that Dick Durbin had the slightest justification to make that specious claim is to think Americans are idiots and that the lowest common denominator defines us all. Had Dick Durbin had the audacity to speak like that during WW2 President Roosevelt would have had him censured if not thrown into jail.

Yes, reasonable. To the average man on the street, who knows no more about the Holocaust than what’s taught in America’s high schools, the difference between one prison and another is essentially meaningless. There are no degrees of bad. Bad is bad.

One of the things I most loved about President Reagan was he assumed the best about Americans and he was usually right. I never sell them short.

The question to ask is whether what we’re doing at Guantanamo Bay is right or wrong.

Uh oh….starting to get to the meat of my disagreement. The question is whether what we are doing is RIGHT OR WRONG in Gitmo?!?!?!? This is moral equivalency to the nth power.

On the one hand, if we descend to public torture and executions and abandon our ideas of justice and propriety, we abdicate our claim to cultural superiority.

Yea Im hoping that Jeff isn’t implying that this sort of thing is going on at Gitmo. Course his point sorta gets lost into that moral equivilancy morass if its not bad stuff like spikes and death and cigerettes. Course that last bit sends me back to the first part of this post. In this war we are not claiming our culture is superior, we are merely claiming our right to live. Big difference.

This war, as much as any war in our nation’s history and more so than some, is a war of survival. If we choose not to fight, our culture will be overwhelmed by the totalitarian Islam that gathers like a wave in the poor corners of the earth, poised to surge out and bury the liberal democracies of the West. But on the other hand, if we fight this war too thoroughly and too well, our culture will vanish because we’ve chosen to abandon it.

Jeff and I could quibble about the extent of the threat, I believe this is by far the worst threat we have ever faced, but that isnt really important to the point. We are generally in agreement that this war is pretty damn serious. I don’t know why Jeff believes that it is the poor parts of Islam that threaten to attack us. It is not poverty that drives them.

But the last sentence is absolutely without any basis in reality. There is nothing in our history to support such an outlandish statement and on the face of it the sentence strikes me as absurd. “If we fight the war too thoroughly and too well our culture will vanish” comes right after saying that we are fighting a war of survival? This ignores our fight in WW2 which no one accuses us of fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Where we killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands and shot prisoners regularly and we managed to hold on to our “culture”. War is not about anything except winning. I prefer to not tie my soldiers hands down with rules, my thinking is that I dont want them to feel guilty should those rules get in the way of winning.

Its a lot easier to hold on to your culture if you are alive. This was a discovery made by some obsure lad early on in our country’s history.

Let us not succumb to the soft bigotry of low expectations and in so doing let all the things that make our culture worth saving slip from between our fingers. And let us not allow ourselves to be crushed under the weight of intolerably high expectations, squeezing our will to fight right out of us. Let us instead choose the narrow path. Let us wage this war with a heavy burden of doubt, questioning always, keeping ourselves perched delicately at the summit of man’s achievement

hehe…I’m sorry but the things that make our culture worth saving are staring back at me at the dinner table and from the mantle in tens of picture frames. My children make this culture worth saving, my family makes this culture worth saving, my friends, their friends, those soldiers who risk everything to allow my family to live, make this culture worth saving.

Lets NOT wage this war with a heavy burden of doubt, we don’t have the resources to spare to have doubt. Arrogance goeth before the fall to paraphrase a useful thought. Let us not be so arrogant that we believe that any burden we place in front of our soldiers they can surmount, let us instead clear the decks to fight those who are intent on murdering those children that stare back at me across the table. Should I have to commit unspeakable acts to allow them to have a life I shall gladly carry that burden.

And let us remember the generations to come who will curse our memories if we fail to rise to the challenge that faces us, if we slip off the tightrope and plunge into the abyss.

Well screw them if they do, since without our fighting to save ourselves they wouldnt exist. We are fighting a war. We are not playing cricket, rules are for games, not wars. I refuse to burden down my soldiers with rules or beliefs I bring to the table…it is not my right to ask them to fight for me by my rules. I only ask that they win.

Sorry Jeff I have found many of your other articles to be extremly well thought out but I sincerely disagree with you on this issue. Perhaps though I have misunderstood you if so please let me know how.

Wizbang’s Jay Tea has more but not along the same lines.
Update: Jeff responds and I take that post to task as well. Michelle Malkin jumps into the fray by highlighting Jeff’s original post. Instapunk leaps into the fray as well.

Wizbang’s Jay Tea jumps in with a clarification of an earlier post and tries to make the same point that Jeff tried to make. That we are the good guys and that we shouldn’t be doing those things that Dick Durbin and Jeff sort of hinted we might be doing. Getting back to the apparent belief of people who should know better that there isn’t much that separates us from our enemy. This also ignores the history of WW2 where we fought like tigers and acted like lambs when it was over. He also falls for the trap of allowing people like Markos of Daily Kos to define the middle ground. Finally it is beside the point that sometimes what some might call torture works. I disagree with nearly his entire post and point.
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