Rumsfeld v. Kristol

Kristol thinks that talking about a “struggle against violent extremism” is a step down from the “war on terror.” They are one and the same. The president constantly reminds us that this is a new kind of war.

It isn’t to diminish the war effort, as Kristol suggests, but to strengthen it, that the president and the secretary of defense describe it as a broad effort against an extremist, “murderous ideology”–one that must involve all the elements of national power.

Kristol also mistakes determination for defeatism in Iraq. “The new administration mantra,” he writes, “is that the insurgency can be beaten only politically.” This “new mantra” is in fact an elementary principle of modern counter insurgency operations and certainly is the key to success in Iraq. The Iraqi people will defeat the insurgency when they starve it of what it needs most–domestic credibility.

Kristol seems to argue that a political process is not enough and points out that the insurgency survived the successful elections of January 30. By the insurgents’ own acknowledgment, their failure to prevent those elections was a major setback. The tally is clearly on the side of the Iraqi people; every political milestone on the road to self-government has been met.

Iraqi self-government will succeed not because of military force, but because of the power of the emerging Iraqi government to persuade Iraqis that there is no more hopeful alternative future than freedom and self-government. Recent polls show that Sunnis are increasingly turning against the insurgency, with many Sunni leaders acknowledging that the time has come to join the political process. This surely marks yet another setback for the insurgents, whose only program appears to be wanton murder in order to grab headlines.

As the president recently suggested, the insurgents can kill innocents, but they cannot hope for victory. As Iraqi security forces stand up throughout the country, common Iraqis can see that their fathers, husbands, and sons are defending them in their own neighborhoods. Kristol may think it is defeatist to show confidence in the growing capability of the Iraqi security forces, but the Iraqi people–according to most surveys–do not share that view.

Lawrence Di Rita

Pentagon Spokesman

Washington, DC

The Bomb

Richard B. Frank’s “Why Truman Dropped the Bomb” (Aug. 8) initially made me uneasy, because like millions of Americans, I have been bombarded for years by politically correct “critics” who hold that America was the bad guy vis-à-vis Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fortunately, Frank impressively upheld The Weekly Standard’s reputation for integrity.

I had a special interest in the matter, because in August 1945 I was the navigator on the U.S. Navy advance-base oil tanker Caribou stationed in Guam. Everyone, more or less, knew that planning for the next “big one” (an invasion of the Japanese mainland) was underway. Considering how tough our victories in Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been, Operation Olympic would involve frightful casualties–Allies and Japanese–one of which might very well have been me. Thus, the consequences of the events of August 6 and 9 were received with relief.

Over the years, on a number of occasions, I’ve spent time going over in my mind just what I thought about Truman’s decision, and Ialways come to the conclusion that, all things considered, he did the right thing.

In that regard, I have always appreciated the comments of the South African Laurens Van der Post on the subject. He was a colonel in the South African Army who organized anti-Japanese guerrilla units in Java in 1942. He was captured by the Japanese and spent the next three years in prison under increasingly brutal conditions.

When the prisoners heard on their clandestine radio of the dropping of the bomb, they were both exhilarated and quite worried. They knew the Japanese were losing the war and that the bomb was a massive blow to the Japanese military position. And they knew, given those facts, that the lives of the prisoners in Southeast Asia were in serious jeopardy. With the Japanese unconditional surrender, however, this issue became moot: Van der Post and tens of thousands of his fellow prisoners throughout Japaneseoccupied territory were freed.

On August 6, 25 years later, Van der Post appeared on a British television program, originally to talk about South Africa. The interview preceding Van der Post was with a Japanese doctor, a survivor of Hiroshima whose wife and children died in the blast. When Van der Post saw what was occurring, he persuaded the producer of the program to drop Africa from the agenda and to let him talk, on air, with the doctor.

He briefly told the doctor his prison camp experiences and then said that he himself was alive today because of the doctor’s family sacrifices at Hiroshima. To the hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners, the sacrifice of the doctor’s wife and family was not in vain, he said. Van der Post closed by saluting the doctor not as a survivor of Hiroshima, but as a savior of the New Japan and a victor over the “old Japanese order.”

David E. Connor

Peoria, IL

When discussing Truman’s decision to use the bomb, it is also important to remember the Allied war aims with particular focus on rectifying the failures of World War I based on the lessons drawn from the ineptness of the Treaty of Versailles. Namely, we should remember the failure to achieve total victory; the failure, rooted in Wilsonian self-determination, to institute regime change; and the failure of a U.S. retreat into isolationism rather than maintaining a permanent military presence.

Versailles was a treaty simultaneously severe enough to anger the Germans but too weak to contain them. It was built on weak commitments without credibility, overseen by a League of Nations with neither the adequate force nor the necessary will to defend those commitments.

The necessity of total victory meant either a full-scale mainland invasion of Japan–which, based on the casualties at Okinawa and the Japanese will to fight to the end, meant combined casualties over a million–or the use of the atomic bomb. Second, even if the Japanese were considering surrender, as “Magic” has revealed, it would not have been unconditional, nor would Japan have accepted regime change.

Remember that even after the first bomb was dropped, the Japanese did not consider their chance of victory hopeless. It was not until after the second bomb was dropped that they agreed to an unconditional surrender.

Only through total victory were the Allies able to correct the failures of World War I, through unconditional surrender, regime change, and a permanent military presence. Use of the bomb also signaled to Japan, Germany, and the Soviets that the United States clearly and credibly was committed to using the necessary will to defend itself with adequate and overwhelming force.

If one were to believe the underlying assumption, as did many statesmen and military commanders at the time, that a mainland invasion would be too costly to maintain continued domestic support for the war effort and that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end, use of the bomb was in accord with the Allied war aim of total victory and unconditional surrender, as well as morally superior to its alternatives.

Andrew R. Marcellus

Burlington, VT

Richard B. Frank replies: Mr. Marcellus provides a shrewd assessment of the realities of 1945 with parallels to today. FDR advocated “unconditional surrender” precisely because of the “lesson of World War I.” He was determined to leave the German people with no doubt whatsoever that they had been thoroughly defeated militarily from without, not by some “stab in the back” betrayal from within.

The whole concept of total defeat of Germany also plainly fitted with the gradual erosion of restraint of the use of aerial firepower against cities in Europe that formed the key backdrop for both the use of massed incendiary attacks against Japan and later the use of the atomic bombs. Both Germany and Japan were in the grip of myths of warrior supremacy, particularly over the supposedly soft, decadent, and materialist democracies. Their absolute defeat eradicated this mythology root and branch.

Judge Dork?

In “John Roberts’s Other Papers” (Aug. 8), Matthew Continetti calls Judge Roberts a nerd. But a nerd is generally a person who spends too much time on abstractions related to math and science. I would call someone who reads way too many history books a “dork.” Having been a nerd since fourth grade and a dork for the last 10 to 15 years, I think I know the difference.

Fortunately, Roberts’s record as a dork is the “worst” flaw I can find in an otherwise excellent nominee. Perhaps if I were a “liberal” or a “dufus” (same thing, no?), I might have a different view of his record of applying the Constitution rather than concocting new laws from the bench.

Doug Hall

South Bend, IN