Tuesday, 25 July 2006
Uncle Jimbo: Are we too nice to fight a real war?
Contributed by Bill Faith

Johnny Podhoretz gets an amen from the congregation for his piece about whether we (the civilized West) have the capacity to effectively wage war anymore. He wonders if the restrictions that we place on ourselves have limited our ability to inflict an actual defeat on an enemy and relegated us to simply stopping immediate threats, but leaving the entity threatening us viable.

WHAT 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?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

[...]

[Read on here.]

Contributed by Bill Faith on July 25, 2006 at 02:10 PM | Permalink

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