HMH: Response to
"December 7, 1941 And September 11, 2001"
Contributed by Bill Faith
The latest Henry Mark Holzer Memorandum. Click here to add your name to his mailing list. September 28, 2006
The following email was sent to me by a gentleman named Monty Warner, a 1978 West Point and Army War College graduate who retired as a Colonel after 25 years of service. As you can see, he wrote in response to my recent article [Click here -- BF] comparing America's response to December 7, 1941, to what we have not done after September 11, 2001.
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[The] problem with post- 9-11-01 is a leader who was unwilling to mobilize and employ the nation's might behind the effort. I can only fathom that the "Fella from Texas" did not comprehend the magnitude of the fight he was engaging. When you take on just the radical fringe of 1.3 billion people spread across half the globe, you are in a fight that far exceeds what we were up against in WWII.
The President calmly told us in the Fall of 2001, "America, you all go on about your business, the military is going to handle this one. [this was his message in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan -- the opening battle of the War on Global Terrorism]"
We listened to him, trusted him, and went about our business -- businesses, hobbies, sports, nascar, investing, etc, etc, etc --- and left it to Him and his clique to get us through this little mess we were in.
America is not big enough, strong enough, or influential enough to conduct a war of this magnitude as a "pick-up" game in the bush leagues (pardon the pun). This war called for us to expend everything we have. It is for all the marbles -- The future of Western Civilization and everything we value.
How foolish. How short-sighted. How naive.
When you commit your Army to a fight, you have committed your nation and everything you stand for (TR Fehrenbach, This Kind of War (Chapters 25 and 40) about the Korean war). You must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to win. The President should have mobilized the nation for the fight he was committing us to. In doing so, he could have and would have mobilized our Allies around the World.
GWB didn't. FDR would have (AND DID).
Now we are paying the price, and the national malaise you draw attention to in your editorial has a culprit -- the inept leadership we had at the time the nation was attacked and who failed to mobilize us. A $13 trillion/year economy and 290 million committed Americans could win this war; a half-hearted, half- assed effort could not and will not!
You need to re-evaluate and pick the right target for your ire. It's not our lack of courage, or our attention span, or a left-leaning press, or judges, or the ACLU. It's simple: We didn't have a George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abe Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan when we most needed one. We need a Leader.
May God bless America and provide us the Leaders of character, insight, and wisdom that we need in these trying times.
hank@henrymarkholzer.com
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