World Wars, Then And Now

Victor Davis Hanson compares and contrasts the Pacific Theater of World War II with the President Obama’s implementation of the War On Terror Man-Caused Disasters:

Footnote on World War II

There are plenty of inexplicable things about WWII, especially the Pacific “second” theater. If one were to examine in depth the First Marine Division, it is almost inexplicable that a mere few months after Pearl Harbor it could go head-to-head with battle-hardened Japanese brigades in Guadalcanal, without adequate air and naval support, and beat the Japanese on their own turf. Where did such men come from? For the answer about the Old Breed, read E.B. Sledge.

And where in just a few months, by say late 1943, did all these brilliant designs and new planes come from? The Hellcat, Corsair, Helldiver, Lightning, erc, that were not just as good as Japanese head-start models, but suddenly far better? How did an American aeronautical industry, without wartime experience, design and produce the world’s best fighters (cf. the Thunderbolt and Mustang) in less than 30 months? And more amazingly, how does a peacetime country in a little over two years begin to produce hundreds of B-29s and an entire fleet of Essex carriers ex nihilo? It’s quite inexplicable. Each time I restudy the Pacific theater it become even more mysterious, absolutely inexplicable. I wish only that Obama had not spent his Sundays lapping up liberation theology from Rev. Wright but had read instead With the Old Breed, Guadalcanal Diary, or Goodbye, Darkness to understand why his country is what it is, and why it ensures him such a forum of respect and influence.

Footnote on Guantanamo

Now that Obama’s has apparently broken his promise and won’t close Guantanamo within the year, a kindergarten question arises: did he think Bush/Cheney dreamed up a Stalig to torture people and win them leftwing hysteria?

Is it just possible that after 9/11 they quickly learned there were no good choices in dealing with the epigones of Mohammed Atta—they were neither criminals to be tried nor soldiers in uniform to be accorded the Geneva protections (as Eric Holder once himself chest-thumped)? In such a nether world, Guantanamo was always a bad choice among worse alternatives. That is proven by Obama’s failed nine-month long quest to dream up something better. Now that Guantanamo has no more campaign value, Obama apparently has thrown the old Close the Gulag under the bus too.

Yet Obama did a lot of damage in the meantime, demagoguing the facility and besmirching the careful work of those who must guard the sort of people who, as we saw the last week in the U.S., are trying to kill us.

Read the whole thing.™