RUSH: I’ve often told you of a philosophy that was explained to me by a good friend of mine when I lived in Sacramento, B. T. Collins, a Vietnam vet who sadly has passed away, but he wrote a letter to the editor of the Sacramento Bee one day.
This was when I guess the Contra wars were going on, or something was going on, and he was frustrated at all the leftist limp-wristed philosophies he was reading in letters to the editor. So he wrote one himself and basically said, ‘You people need to understand the purpose of armies. The purpose of armies is to kill people and break things,’ and I thought, ‘Yep, that pretty much sums it up as briefly as it can be summed up, as succinctly as it can.’ The fewest words required to make a point the more powerful the point, and I thought, ‘That really did it: ‘the purpose of armies is to kill people and break things.” Well, there’s a new yardstick that has evolved now. Nathan Hale, writing in the AmericanThinker.com — now, this is a pseudonym for ‘a professional whose firm serves many liberal clients.’ That’s what it says in the slug line as to who ‘Nathan Hale’ is. But basically his point is…
Let me just read a couple quick passages from his piece here. This ran on April 6th. ‘At a very young age I had the good fortune to learn a life lesson that appears not to have taken hold among the Democrats’ elite, nor much of the legacy media and only scarcely among academics. As a very young child I was fascinated by all things military. In my free time, I read of the great campaigns, famous generals and the development of military technology. In reading the histories of wars, I noticed a consistent pattern: there always seemed to be many more wounded than killed in combat. In WWI, for example, some 204,000 Americans were wounded and around 53,000 were killed. WWII saw 292,000 killed Vs. 670,000 wounded.’ Now, if I may pause for a moment, I often speak to young people, and actually everybody about their historical perspective.
Here we are in Iraq, and we’ve got what, 3300 deaths now, something like this and I don’t know what the wounded numbers are. They’re higher than that, but everybody is having a fit, blowing a gasket. ‘This is unacceptable! Why, this is outrageous! We’ve gotta bring the troops home. We’ve gotta keep ’em safe!’ We had 670,000 wounded in World War II, and 292,000 killed. Something’s changed in our culture. We’re more concerned about the future of polar bears than we are our own country. It’s absurd. By the way, I got a great Global Warming Stack. It is so cold in Alaska, not only are the fire hydrants freezing and cracking, the otters cannot get in their little playgrounds of water because they’ve frozen over, and otters are being eaten left and right by other predators that they could normally escape by going in the water. The cute little sea otters, you know they get back on their backs and they wave their paws at us and we think, ‘Oh, they’re trying to say how much they love us!’
They’re being devoured because of all of this freezing up there, in the midst of these threats of global warming! An MIT professor, by the way, has come out and said that there’s no such thing as a perfect temperature. The earth is always warming and cooling. It’s as I have always said. This guy is going to be run out of MIT before the week’s out because he’s going against the grain. I have it at the top of the Global Warming Stack. Anyway, something’s happening here. We’re more concerned about all these nebulous things over which we have no control than we are over things that really matter, things that affect us. So now we have, in this war in Iraq, 3300 deaths, a few more than that wounded, and people can’t deal with it. It goes right to the point here that this Nathan Hale guy is making. He says, ‘Korea and Viet Nam saw similar statistics in that roughly three times as many men were wounded as killed…. If the objective of war is to slaughter the opponent, wouldn’t it make sense to destroy their ambulances, their medical support and their hospitals [so the wounded will die]? That way, those who were merely wounded would die and the casualty counts would be higher and victory for our side assured.’
‘My uncle…something of a scholar and intellectual,’ he went to the War College, said something that was significant. ‘We do not target medical resources, because the objective of an army is not to slaughter the opponent but to break his will to fight. That bears repeating: The objective of military action is not to kill the enemy, but rather to break his will to fight. Years later, in an academic study of ‘conflicts other than war’, terrorism and ‘low intensity conflict’, I learned that this principle is actually taught at all levels of our military. From the lowest level squad tactics to the curriculum of the War College, military people are repeatedly taught and seem to simply understand that their job is to break their opponent’s will to fight. If this thought is so obvious to our military leadership and extends to the lowest level Marines and Soldiers ‘stuck in Iraq’ as John Kerry would say, why is this concept so foreign to the leadership of the Democrat Party? How can our media ‘experts’ fail to understand this simple thought mastered by privates and corporals who didn’t attend Ivy-League J-Schools? And any rugby fan who has seen the Maori dance performed by the New Zealand All Blacks, or any sports fan who has witnessed the trash-talking before a big game or boxing match understands intuitively that the concept of beating your opponent mentally is often as important as beating him physically.’
The reason why this stood out to me is, I just asked you point-blank, ‘Have we lost our will to fight?’ Have the terrorists broken our will to fight? Have they broken the Britons’ will to fight? You’d have to say yes. I’m talking here about a majority of Americans, but clearly this guy is dead on the money. The Democrat Party has no will to fight, and they never have had since World War II and FDR. It seems to me frighteningly so that more and more Americans have simply lost the will to fight. ‘Oh, this is not worth it!’ We’ve lost the will to fight, and instead we now focus on saving the polar bears and the otters and all these things we really can’t affect. Most people know this, but it makes them feel like they matter and makes them feel important, and it also fulfills the need for people to think they actually can be destructive, because that is a perverted sense of having power, or feeling that you have power. Imagine some ten-year-old comes out of Algore’s movie, a ten-year-old, ‘My gosh, I matter! My mommy and daddy are destroying the polar bears, and destroying the earth.’ That gives you a sense of relevance and bigness and power, and it sells, even if it’s the destructive kind of power.
But in things that really matter, I challenge anybody to argue with this: ‘Have we lost our will to fight?’ Is that really not what troubles so many of you? Not the US military. I’m talking about the American people in supporting this kind of thing. The US military has not lost its will to fight. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about from Dingy Harry on down to Nancy Pelosi, throughout liberal America for certain, but how many of these so-called ‘independents’ and ‘moderates,’ the brainchild of this country, we’re told, have had their will to fight broken by the Drive-Bys and the Democrats and four or five years of constant pummeling of the entire effort? While this is happening, here go the Iranians, proclaiming today National Nuclear Day and doing the exact same things that we went into Iraq to stop. Now we don’t have the will to stop the Iranians, it doesn’t appear. I’m not talking about President Bush.
I’m just imagining here. If the president said, ‘We’ve gotta do something about this and I’m meeting with military commanders to start to plan strategy,’ can you imagine the hellfire that would erupt from the Drive-By Media and some of the people in this country over this? So not only is the purpose of armies ‘to kill people and break things,’ it is to break the enemy’s will to fight — and that’s what high numbers of wounded accomplish, and you look at the reports coming out of Iraq. We never hear about death tolls, death numbers, wounded reports of the enemy, never — other than when US Marines are portrayed as rapists, then we hear about the casualties. But we never hear about the casualties the enemy are taking. All we hear about is the casualties we’re taking, and after four or five years of this daily pummeling, some people are throwing up their hands and saying, ‘It’s not worth it. I can’t handle it.’ They’ve lost the will to fight.