The American Spectator

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(Page 6 of 12)

THE WINDS OF WAR br> Re: Jed Babbin's No Torquemada, He : /p>

During WWI, my father-in-law was a BAR gunner with the 2nd Infantry, all the way from Normandy to Bohemia. As was routine although not officially admitted, his unit had two sets of orders for prisoners; one, "take them back to the trucks" when there was time to accept small-scale surrenders, and another, "take them down to the end of the road," when there wasn't. The latter ended with a couple of bursts of automatic weapons fire, which is why my father-in-law got picked for it.

Nobody liked it but there were times when you just couldn't spare the time or personnel to take a couple of Germans back without endangering the mission or your buddies. Germans who surrendered in large formed units were safe, as were any who made it back to the rear echelon; those who gave up in small numbers up at the sharp end had a 50-50 chance of being shot. Field interrogations were also often quite rough, involving beating or sticking a gun in their ear and telling them to talk or die.

It was a war, not a tea party or even cops conducting a criminal investigation.

So now we learn a few female soldiers in Iraq are roughing up prisoners and doing other naughty things. So what? The operative word here is "soldiers." Why is it worse for women to do this stuff than men? They're citizens, with a citizen's rights to vote and hold office and own property; hence they have a citizen's obligations, one of which is fighting for the country in time of war. And this group all volunteered, knowing what they were getting into, for which all honor to them.

p>War means fighting, and fighting is not a nice activity; it means killing people and breaking things, and a risk of death and mutilation. So unless you're a pacifist, which I'm not, I really don't see what you're getting your knickers in a twist about. br> -- S.M. Stirling /p>

Indeed, Mr. Gonzales is no Tomas de Torquemada, the First Grand Inquisitor of Spain. Neither was John Ashcroft. But that's irrelevant to the Democrats, liberals and leftists who wish ill to our country and who remain stuck to -- and most comfortable with and unthreatened by -- the Clinton administration's serve-our-enemies-with-legal-papers approach to the war on terror.

It would appear that they would rather sacrifice the public health and welfare domestically, as well as that of our soldiers abroad, rather than embrace that we are fighting a war unlike any other in American history.

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