America and Israel: Winning the War that Can be Won and Losing the One that Can't

The only way for Israel and America to win the War on Terror is to just give up. Not give up winning the war but give up trying to grasp the moral high ground. We can either hold the strategic high ground or we can try to clamber up on the moral high ground.

Holding the strategic high ground means that we are defending our nations and the world against a ruthless and genocidal enemy. In past times this would be considered the moral high ground as well but today holding the moral high ground means being the designated victim.

The Jews were considered to be holders of the moral high ground after the Holocaust because we were the murdered who didn't do much in the way of fighting back against our murderers. As soon as we founded the State of Israel, we were informed that we had lost the moral high ground once we had begun to fight back against the 100 million Arabs determined to kill us. By resisting our murderers, we were told, we had become just another bunch of murderers.

We are repeatedly told that the world loved America after 9/11, when the world was being treated to scenes of courageous rescue workers digging through the rubble, grimy survivors heading in lines uptown and over the bridge breathing through masks. We made great victims. But when we began fighting back, then we were informed that the world no longer loved us anymore.

As with Israel, America was sternly lectured on how we had lost the world's love by actually lifting up weapons and pursuing our killers. We had been loved as victims and despised as defenders. The truth behind this idyllic facade of pacifistic devotion is that neither America nor the Jews were ever loved, not after the Holocaust nor after 9/11. For a brief moment though it had become somewhat shameful to hate people who had gone through hell. So the hatred was pushed down a little, overlooked at least in public because it was politically incorrect to sneer openly during that time.

Once America and Israel began fighting back, they could be safely hated again. All the prejudices, vendettas, bigotries could be resurrected from the halls of European capitals to the beer gardens and pubs. Everything that had been briefly concealed during the funeral orations was unveiled again and cast at the door of Americans and Jews.

"Look how you made us hate you," they proclaimed, "we tried to love you but you just wouldn't let us. Now we hate you again and it's your fault!"

If this kind of rhetoric smacks rather obviously of the drunken husband smacking his wife around and telling her it's her fault, plenty of Americans and Israelis are deluded enough to want to play the part of the battered wife fervently apologizing for defending ourselves and having such evil things in our possession as soldiers and armies to protect ourselves with. They look forward to a bright golden future when we abandon such things and then the world, or at least our European brethren will finally love us.

Stockholm syndrome is truly a painful thing to watch. When people take on the point of view of the oppressor, they believe it makes them better, morally superior. The brainwashed wives of cult members look down on the police who liberate their children from being raped. College professors and journalists sneer at the troops who stand between them and the same fate as Daniel Pearl. They accept the hypocritical justifications of the enemy as gospel. "We have sinned and we must atone for it," they recite.

When they control the debate, people are drawn baffled into an unproductive and unfair argument with them that cannot be won. It cannot be won because its very premise is biased. Its premise assumes that whatever America or Israel to to fight terrorism is bad and whatever the terrorists do may not technically be right but it is understandable in light of their sufferings and deprivation and of American\Israeli oppression. You can no more prove otherwise to them than you can prove to any bigot that say, the Japanese aren't bad people. Bigots selectively interpret information and selectively process it. Logic is useless against bigotry and the perspective of the educated classes in America and Europe is saturated with bigotry they refuse to acknowledge.

Stockholm Syndrome spreads when these educated classes pressure the government and the military to make further concessions, use greater restraint, all in the belief that the criticism can be somehow appeased. But of course it's impossible to please someone who is prejudiced against you from the start. Israel pulls back further and further, piles on more firing regulations on soldiers, takes greater and greater care to avoid harming civilians; yet instead of making things better, they not-so mysteriously become worse.

Whatever restraint Israel or America show is exploited as a strategic weakness by the enemy. If we show that we will work hard to avoid harming civilians, then the Muslims will use civilians as human shields. If we demonstrate that we are horribly upset when children are killed, they will use children and they will stage attacks themselves in which children are killed, just to shock and horrify us and make us question our morality and purpose. In the end the weaknesses we reveal are responsible for their tactics.

Human shields would not exist if we showed that we could not be manipulated that way. Female suicide bombers would not exist if being from chivalric cultures, we did not demonstrate that we treat women with greater concern and respect than men. Children as human shields would not exist if we had shown once that it doesn't matter to us. Instead we wear our hearts on our sleeves and reveals chinks in our armor with which to hurt us. The enemy which cannot defeat us military, can defeat us psychologically by constraining our tactics and making us question ourselves, until we retreat and that has been their goal all along.

And what of the educated classes, the chattering liberals who ceaselessly demand restraint. If anything they only become more infuriated. Concessions to a liberal have the same effect as concessions to a terrorist. When Israel pulls back, the media runs more stories on the poverty and deprivation Israel leaves behind. When Israel sets up a barrier as a passive defense, they cry it is an 'Apartheid Wall' and dedicate enormous pressures to demanding that it be pulled down. When Israel simply uses checkpoints to prevent the entry of terrorists into Israel, the media does endless stories on how degrading and humiliating checkpoints are (presumably unlike checkpoints anywhere else in the world which are spectacular fun.)

In fact it seems to be passive defenses, checkpoints and the separation wall, that have inspired far more fury than Israel's bombings. The futility of believing that the public relations battle can be won or that Israel's critics are sincere in any remote way becomes obvious in that fact alone. When passive defenses are the subject of more criticism and outrage than active ones that actually kill people, it demonstrates the complete absence of any moral compass to the criticism. It is not about anything Israel does. It is about the fact that Israel exists and still isn't dead.

The media is infested, the universities are infested, the battle cannot be won on those fronts. Rather than being a gloomy dispatch this should be good news. It is liberating to give up on pleasing people who can't be pleased to focus on what counts. Winning the war as wars should be won. Actions speak louder than press releases. Strength triumphs over weakness. A people will in the end back leaders who fight an enemy and ignore the anti-war whining. It is only when the leadership fails that the anti-war propaganda begins to succeed.

Wars are not won through restraint or seizing a pacifistic moral high ground which you've been tricked into competing for, while the enemy brutally butchers your men. Wars are won by destroying the enemy through superior firepower. America and Israel have that. The only reason we're losing is because we've allowed our hands to be tied by world opinion, by the chattering of our liberal classes. We tie the hands of our soldiers behind our backs, come down on them for the least infraction and expect them to win and throw up our hands in defeat when they don't.

Wars are won by doing whatever it takes to win them. If the enemy comes up with a strategy you demolish it. If the enemy uses human shields, then you teach him that human shields will not protect him. Hundreds may die in the process but far more will be spared in the long run once the enemy realizes that hiding behind women and children will not protect his troops anymore. No Middle Eastern regime has ever been defeated by an insurgency, because no Middle Eastern regime will tolerate one. The infitada ended on the Jordanian side in a matter of days because the Jordanians did what the Israelis wouldn't, they shot to kill. Over 20 years of killing, rockets bombarding Israeli towns and thousands dead on both sides could have been spared if we had done the same thing. But we don't learn.

We can win the war and survive and gain the true moral high ground that comes from protecting our people and insuring the survival of our nations. Or we can delusionaly continue chasing the moral high ground of the liberals like wanderers lost in a desert stumbling toward an oasis that grows further away with every step. We can break free of this self-inflicted Stockholm Syndrome and survive or clasping our phony morality, perish.