FIGHTING TO WIN

THE AMERICAN THINKER:

Fighting to Win

FDR and General George Marshall – like Lincoln and General William Tecumseh Sherman before them – understood that once you make the decision to fight, you fight to win.

“We are not fighting armies but a hostile people,” Sherman wrote, “and we must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war….I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptom of tiring till the South begs for mercy.”

Indeed, this is precisely what Sherman was talking about when he famously said that “War is hell.” He was a decent, honorable man who hated doing what he knew must be done to end the war and stop the killing. Here’s one Sherman quote you won’t see in a New York Times editorial:

“The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

When you’re in the middle of a war, of course you need to think before you act. But there is such a thing as over-thinking, and today we are in serious danger of making this mistake. In war there is nothing – absolutely nothing – that brings victory faster and more completely than the total annihilation of your enemy. Do that and everything else – what the late, great Senator Sam Ervine of North Carolina once called “the complex complexities” – sort themselves out.

Right now we have an unexpected opportunity to obliterate Hezbollah, and by doing so to increase our chances for victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d be fools not to go for it.

RTWT.