|
Prelude to War (2006 = 1941)
Via Instapundit:Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America's willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel? The most threatening answer is that America waits to be bloodied because it has lost its will to defend itself after five years of chasing rogue-state-sponsored gangsters and after three years of occupation in failed-state Iraq against Tehran- and Damascus-backed agents. A grave possibility is that America is now drained, bowed, ready to surrender to the tyrants of Tehran. Then again, perhaps America has been here before, and it is part of America's destiny as the New Jerusalem that we rarely start wars but that we are unusually good at finishing them. At least so far - though the MSM bitched about the end of WW II as well. My treasured evidence that America knew what was coming is Life Magazine, Volume 11, No. 23, dated December 8, 1941, which means it was printed and distributed a week before Pearl Harbor. The astonishing 13-page cover photo essay by Clare Boothe on Commander of the Far East General Douglas MacArthur is complete with maps showing America's strategic challenges at Manila, including the daunting air and sea mileage from San Francisco to Manila and from "Tokio" to Manila. "Will the Island of Luzon then become the great theater of war, and General MacArthur the outstanding khaki-clad figure in it?" asks Boothe. "Or will peace descend upon the Pacific while the U.S. plunges into the war across the Atlantic?" Interesting - I did not know that. ----- What this all means to me today is that America was expectant of the crisis that fell on December 7, 1941; and yet America remained reluctant to say out loud that war was unavoidable, inevitable, already under way the nation holding back as if the obvious war plans in Berlin and Tokyo were going to vanish like a lightning storm. When the Japanese fleet did maul our Pacific fleet, the Roosevelt administration was rattled and the public was grim. It will be the same for us when this premonitory waiting lifts and the main action begins, both frightful and logical. The Lebanese Front, the Iraqi Front, the Afghan and Kashmir Fronts, or the Haifa blitz will no more solve themselves than did the China-Burma Front, the North African Front, the Atlantic Front, the London blitz of 65 years ago. Who will publish the last magazine before the day of infamy comes again? Doesn't matter. Unlike that 1941 Life, the present-day one will be lying its ass off right up to the fateful day - and making excuses for the enemy thereafter. (Assuming anyone at the magazine survives the attack, which I quite frankly hope they don't.) Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2006-08-10 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=162499 |