Stardate 20021007.2010

(Captain's log): This keeps happening. I receive some provocative letter from someone, end up answering it, and then realize that it would make a good post. Here's another one. In response to my article yesterday (which also happened that way) about German friendship, Georg and I exchanged a couple of letters. Here's his second and my response to it:

There are some thoughts on your position to the "Arab culture" and to the war against it.

First of all, you're right that the Allies who ended the 2nd World War brought peace and prosperity to the conquered countries, Germany and Japan (not so much to Italy though).

But the Allies weren't just the Americans, but also the British and the Russians (and later the French were also included). German ended up being divided into four Zones, administrated by the USA, by Great Britain, by France and by the Sowjet Union. The winning of the war was a conjoint effort.

That's true, but most of the ideas of how to deal with the aftermath of the war were dictated by Washington. France and the UK went along, and the USSR didn't. The UK was weary, and France wasn't really a nation yet. On the other hand, Stalin had ambitions.

So the US put its policies into effect in western Europe, and the USSR did in eastern Europe. History clearly shows which was more successful.

This time the USA is willing to start and win this war with or without the others. Even though this time the enemy is much bigger than in the 2nd World War.

By the time the Allies entered the war Germany and Italy were already fighting for 6 years and had suffered a lot of losses and damage from the war.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "Allies" and by "enter the war". Not to mention dating exactly when the war began. Some historians consider the war to have started in 1931 with the Mukden incident in China. But the consensus start is the invasion of Poland in 1939, and the UK was "involved" in the war within days (during the Sitzkrieg). The UK's actual combat in the war began in 1940 with the invasion of France. The US began to actively fight against Germany in the summer of 1941 (long before Pearl Harbor).

That surprises some people, but the US Navy was an active belligerent in the Battle of the Atlantic, and more than one American warship was torpedoed in that time by U-boats. Most famously, USS Reuben James was sunk more than a month before Pearl Harbor, with a loss of 115 lives. It's also possible that one or more U-boats was destroyed by the US Navy, but I don't know that any records exist to prove it.

In some senses our current enemy is bigger, and in other senses it isn't. The calculation of balance of power is different, as is the calculation of the danger the enemy represents. In this case, our enemy is more dangerous to us if we remain passive than if we actively engage them militarily. In the 1990's we were passive and the attacks became more and more bold and destructive. But if we choose to engage them, we're vastly more powerful than they are in conventional military terms, even though they have more people relative to us than did Japan and Germany and Italy at the time of World War II. (Wars aren't decided by the number of people involved on both sides. It's more complicated than that.)

There are ways in which the lessons of World War II talk to us now, but there are a lot of ways in which those lessons are now irrelevant. It's important to learn from the past. For instance, we still learn a great deal from study of the Mongols, because in many ways they laid the groundwork for modern mobile armor. But you always have to be careful to realize when the lessons of the past no longer apply, so that you don't become distracted by them. There's a flip side to Santayana's famous advice: you can become a prisoner to study of the past, convincing yourself that you can never succeed where anyone else has failed. By the same token, what was possible to someone else in the past may no longer be possible now.

And in many ways, the current situation is unprecedented. No nation on earth has ever had anything remotely like overwhelming military superiority that the US has now. In fact, there's never been a nation in history whose military power was so overwhelming worldwide as modern America. There are good sides to that and bad sides, and the fact that we're vastly more powerful than anyone else doesn't mean we're omnipotent.

But we are very powerful, and it's an asset we paid for at very high cost, and the reason it's there is to be used when we face a major danger which can't be dealt with any other way, and I think that's exactly the situation we're in now, which is why I advocate this war.

In your email to me you wrote that "[...] it was necessary to try to work with the UN [...]".

So in your opinion there is the USA and there are the United Nations and either one doesn't have much business with the other. Even though the UN was founded "to maintain international peace and security; to develop friendly relations among nations; to cooperate in solving international economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems and in promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; and to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in attaining these ends. " (Taken from Basic Facts about the United Nations.