The noted contrarian Christopher Hitchens is fond of saying that
heat is not the antithesis of light, but rather the source of it.
Therefore when you want to shed light on a subject one should
debate it hotly. That’s exactly what John Podhoretz has been trying
to do since his July 25th New York Post column — titled “Too Nice to Win? Israel’s Dilemma —
appeared. Specifically, the author asks whether the West hasn’t
become too nice to protect its own interests.
What, asks Podhoretz, “if liberal democracies have now evolved
to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because
they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that
dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national
interests?” His references were to the recent outcry over civilian
deaths in southern Lebanon, and the continuing insurgency in Iraq,
and how that reaction compared to, say, the relative indifference
over civilian deaths in World War II.
Podhoretz doesn’t have any easy answers; he simply wants to get
the debate going. Instead the author has spent his time fending off
idiotic accusations that he favors genocide. A spurious charge and
a distraction from the real issue at hand.
Podhoretz’s mistake was to put a philosophical query more suited
to the Greek Akademeia before political pundits and college
professors who seem only interested in spotting political
incorrectness. Beyond that, the left cannot be bothered to debate
the point since it objects to the original premise — that the West
is “too nice.” Too nice? The West is evil. It is imperialist,
decadent, greedy, wasteful, racist, etc., etc.
Second, Jpod’s thesis assumes that the West’s morals and values
have evolved, that we are more civilized and decent folk than, say,
in 1865 when William T. Sherman burned Atlanta, or 1945 when Truman
bombed Nagasaki, both total victories that left the Confederacy and
the Japanese so demoralized they were ripe for a complete
transformation. As it happens it’s effectively impossible to
measure something as intangible as moral evolution. Were the
Germans of 1939 more morally evolved than the Germans of Frederick
the Great’s day? Who can say?
Podhoretz believes that the West’s humanitarian focus (the value
of the individual above all) is the highest achievement of our
civilization. This is reflected not only in our generous dispensing
of welfare to foreign governments — aid that often allows them to
put off genuine reforms — but in that unprecedented beneficence
which reduces history’s greatest military power to that of a
peacekeeping and despot removal service.
But some have argued that the West has gone too far in its
humanitarian concerns. Is it any more virtuous to stand idly by —
as the West did in Bosnia and Rwanda — and do nothing during a
genocide? Where is the virtue in allowing Hezbollah time to regroup
and rearm? Perhaps the debate should be whether the West is
becoming too nice or too wimpy? “We are perceived,” writes pundit
John Derbyshire, “as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its
victories and permits its mighty military to be held to standoff by
teenagers with homemade bombs…”
The alternative, of course, is to adopt the “total war strategy”
of the enemy, and while conservatives resist the moral equivalancy
of the left, they too are unwilling to “squander our moral
progress” by employing such measures.
IMAGINE IF DURING World War II the American people had been shown
images of the firebombed ruins of Tokyo and Dresden and the tens of
thousands of homeless Japanese and German refugees. Would we have
had the stomach for Hiroshima? Probably not. In that case could not
our so-called “moral progress” be simply the result of saturation
media coverage? What if our victory in World War II was due to a
sort of out-of-site, out-of-mind mentality at work? And since we’re
being brutally honest here, wasn’t much of our victory over Nazism
— our “Good War” — the result of our ally Stalin’s atrocious and
brutal war in the East?
With the stalemate in southern Lebanon these questions have been
raised anew. Why couldn’t one of the greatest military powers in
the world defeat a rag-tag army of jihadis? Wasn’t Israel’s
unwillingness to wage total war — to annihilate the enemy at all
costs — the reason for the stalemate? How long before Hezbollah is
back, with its rockets and its camera crews? Won’t Israel’s
reluctance to completely annihilate its enemy lead only to more war
and more bloodshed ad infinitum?
In a postscript Podhoretz concluded, “I think it’s fair to say
that we would rather our civilization die than that we commit such
acts.” The irony is that if we lose our civilization to barbarians
we too will slip back into barbarism. Then and only then will be
able to confront our enemies on equal footing.
