If it was true then, it certainly is now: There's no way that the United States of America could win another global conflict the size and scope of World War II.
Before you assume that's an insult to our fighting men and women, or a criticism of our military preparedness, or a suggestion that we are somehow lagging in the development of new weaponry, it's none of those things.
No, the hard reality is that our country is entirely incapable of mustering the national unity, spirit of self-sacrifice, and iron-gutted resolve to see such a conflict through to its ultimate end. As a people, we lack the fortitude.
Part of it may be the increased ideological diversity in the country, and part of it may be our access to information. There's a case to be made that even in the 1940s, the American people might not have been willing to stomach the kind of carnage, death, and misery that came in both the European and Pacific theaters, had they been exposed to it on a television set every night.
Certainly, two-week delayed casualty numbers in a newspaper are devastating to read, but they are nothing in comparison to the nightly parade of horror that filled family rooms around the United States during the Vietnam era.
Still, in generations past there was an awareness and comprehension about the painful reality of war that simply doesn't exist today. The advent of smart bombs and laser-guided missiles have trained the public consciousness to believe that civilian deaths should be a thing of the past.
Consider the recent military intelligence operation conducted by Israel against Hezbollah terrorists in their region. Public revelations of what purport to be Hezbollah intelligence documents reveal the staggering number of terrorist casualties caused by the explosion of their radios and personal pagers:
879 Hezbollah terrorists died
291 senior Hezbollah commanders died
509 Hezbollah terrorists were blinded
1,735 Hezbollah terrorists suffered injuries to their reproductive organs
613 Hezbollah terrorists received permanent functional damage
To be clear, I have no way of independently verifying those numbers, but it ultimately doesn't matter. Even if the numbers were far less shocking, the operation by Israeli intelligence constitutes one of the most surgical and precise attacks conceivable in modern warfare.
Literally igniting thousands of personal bombs to go off inside the enemy soldiers' pockets is as targeted as any advocate for minimizing civilian casualties can possibly hope for.
This isn't a massive ground operation that includes messy urban warfare. This isn't shock and awe from the skies with cruise missiles devastating neighborhoods in order to take out cowardly fighters hiding in the basements of nursery schools. This isn't the relentless air raids of World War II that saw over half a million German civilians die as collateral damage in allied bombing runs. No, this is a personal bomb delivered straight to the enemy's waistlines. Unbelievable exactness.
And yet …
Obviously, I understand that Rep. Ilhan Omar is a terrorist sympathizer. Any attack by the United States or our allies (in this case Israel) that results in the death of pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah forces will be interpreted by Omar and company as an unnecessarily provocative act that borders on war crimes. I largely take her criticism with a grain of salt.
But Omar's sentiments are shared by plenty of other Americans who aren't terror sympathizers, but have been trained to believe that any attack in war where civilians die is scandalous and illicit. There is no fortitude, no resolve, to win or to survive.
The underlying sentiment for many such people may be laudable - indeed, we should be wary about hawkish foreign policy that is always looking to solve things with bombs. It would do our leaders well to exercise caution and restraint when the opportunity for military conflict arises.
But when it is called for, like in the case of Israel's fight for survival, or when the safety and security of the world depends on the effective prosecution of war, beware the voices that preach, and the population that believes, it can be done without the loss of innocents.
