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March 12, 2007
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm"
One of our frequent commenters M Simon says on his blog Power and Control:
The usual quit now and avoid the rush folks are out in force at Winds of Change. [Not the post itself, the comments - JSW.] One of them comes up with the clever idea that in geopolitics it is wise to avoid moves whose outcome is uncertain. Of course that cedes all uncertain ground to our enemies. Given that most of life is uncertain that is a lot of territory.. . . Avoid uncertain outcomes? Prediction is hard, especially about the future. What I would like to avoid is certain outcomes. If America or Israel gets hit hard enough a nuclear war will ensue. That is a certain outcome I'd like to avoid.
I understand though. In 1936 all the Europeans wanted to do was to avoid 10,000 certain deaths from a confrontation with Germany. And by golly they avoided that certain outcome. The results of avoidance turned out to be rather uncertain after all. Who at the beginning of 1939 could predict 50 million dead by Sept '45? In January of 1942 was even 10 million dead on the horizon?
Then M Simon gives us a selection of Churchill quotes:
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.
Never, never, never give up.
Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.
Then he says:
Now gentlemen measure yourselves against that kind of will. Do you have the courage to say no defeat is final?So Iraq is going badly.
So what?
Our enemies are stalemated just as much as we are. We only have to fight one day more than they do. However long that takes.
It's the "however long it takes" that gives many people pause. As Ted Koppel says, this is like the Cold War only more so. One of the "more so's" is that we are fighting a Hot War, with troops, and it looks like that will continue for quite a while, or even escalate to Iran and Syria. Some people are just not sure we are up to it, or want to be up to it, or make the ideological adjustment it would take to dig in for the long haul. We do face the same critique from the Left that the Cold War did, the same infiltrations of academia and government, the enemy is not obvious and naming the enemy is open to charges of bigotry, and it's easy to convince oneself that our government is exaggerating the danger for nefarious purposes. The challenge is to convince enough people to commit to "however long it takes."
Judith | 03/12/07 at 12:19 PM | Categories: WWIV
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I'm honored.
M. Simon ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.keshertalk.com/nav-commenters.gif)
| March 12, 2007 06:18 PM
The choice isn't always between peace and war. Churchill's comment on the Munich agreement is still relevant: that the Western democracies had to choose between shame and war. They chose shame. They got war.
Alex Bensky | March 14, 2007 11:58 AM
