You Don’t Get to Pick Your Enemies
I’ve Googled and Googled, but can’t find anything showing that Romania ever declared war on the United States in World War II. And what does that have to do with today’s situation in the Middle East? Plenty, if you’ll bear with me a moment.
Romania and Germany were allied in the war against the Soviet Union. Romania supplied pretty much its entire army, based mostly in sectors of the Eastern Front where the German High Command didn’t expect much fighting. (This helped lead to the disaster at Stalingrad, when Soviet divisions ripped through the Romanian lines on the German flank, leaving the German Sixth Army surrounded in the city.) Great fighters the Romanians weren’t. And being tied up on the Eastern Front (or, more correctly, fenced in at Soviet POW camps), they weren’t any threat to us.
So what did we do? We bombed the hell out of Romania’s oil fields at Ploesti.
We didn’t bother taking recon photos to see if Romanian oil was really being sent to German divisions. We didn’t look for a smoking gun or for irrefutable evidence. We didn’t wait for Romania to declare war on us. We simply did the math: the German war machine ran on oil, and Romania was a friendly source of it.
Does that mean the Army Air Force went off half-cocked, causing a human and environmental disaster without clear reason? Hell, no. We did what was militarily necessary, and lost too many lives in the process.
Now what of Saddam and Osama? They are both our enemies. One, through direct declaration and attack, the other through 12 years of failing to live up to a ceasefire agreement and a series of UN resolutions.
I find the evidence of a direct Iraq/al Qaeda connection to be convincing. Maybe you don’t, and that’s OK. The point is, it doesn’t matter. We’re at war. We have two enemies who could collude against us. Letting Saddam off the hook now would be just as silly as allowing Germany the use of Romanian oil in 1943.
As a former Romanian, I guarantee you that Romania would not be able to militarily back up a declaration of war on any country let alone the US. But that’s not your point. Sadly, there are too many people that nothing short of a mushroom cloud above Washington D.C. or NY will convince them we are truly at war. When did people become so complacent?
I know what you mean!
I just don’t understand that. I’ve recently come to realize (duh!) the frustrating futility of arguing with people about what I call the “frothy” facts–who could sell what to whom, who got massacred when, what got moved from the shed and buried behind the palace–when the true disagreement is far beneath the surface, at the root level of belief.
If you’re trying to argue with someone who doesn’t even believe that we’re at war, or thinks that “evil” is a perfectly acceptable description of the Bush Administration, or believes that the imperfections and immoralities of past American foreign policy create ephemeral, indelible stains upon the nation for which we must (somehow) atone…then there’s just no damn point.
It’s like arguing with a fundamentalist about abortion: all of his arguments stem from his belief in the infallible nature of God’s Word. It’s useless to engage with him at the level of public policy debate.
So skip the froth, I say: if you find yourself arguing with someone who doesn’t think we’re at war, dig deep until you find a root belief, and hack at that.
It’s a lot more effective in terms of time spent and satisfaction gained.
I absolutely agree that we can’t wait for a smoking gun …whom ever thought that was an apt metaphor obviously has their head up their ass.
Try googling:
USAAF Gen Carl Spaatz
He was the officer who initiated pre-emptive strikes during WWII, the oil field ploy one of many gambits he planned and carried out.
Someone responded on another blog about the Iraq/al queda ties.
It seems that person was in an argument about said ties. The person was going to write a lengthy response, but decided to google instead. Found stories from the NYT & WP going back about 10 years. Convinced the other person who happens to be an aide to Barney Frank.
The truth is out there for some people, but right in front of the old eyeballs for others.