QUOTE: Jonah Goldberg:
"As Walter Russell Mead has written, there is a Jacksonian tradition in America which demands victory. As Mead noted: "When their blood is up, Americans are the fiercest warriors on earth." We killed 900,000 Japanese civilians in the last five months of World War II --and that's without counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a sobering fact for those who fear that killing a few thousand Iraqi civilians might "cost us the peace" in terms of permanent Iraqi resentment). Limited wars, by Mead's reckoning, fatally wounded three presidencies since 1945 --Truman's, Johnson's, and Nixon's. Plus, the first President Bush's high approval ratings after the first Gulf War eroded quickly in part because it was perceived that we had quit the game at halftime. But no president in U.S. history has ever been punished for seeking total victory. "
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
No comments:
Post a Comment