Those who resist, and those who wait quietly for the slaughter

As part of a much longer article about the Democrat’s foolish faith in the NIE leak, J. Peter Mulhern, writing at American Thinker, offers this nicely phrased analysis about the willing fighters and the potential victims in our society:

When you go to war your enemy will enlist people to fight you. You can’t assess progress in a war by counting the number of people willing to take up arms against you.

Shortly before it surrendered, Japan mobilized its entire population to resist to the death the American invasion. The net result of our comprehensive demolition of the Imperial Navy and Army was to harden the resolve and increase the number of our active Japanese enemies. Our fighting then, as now, mobilized more fighters against us. No doubt that’s why the U.S. Navy is still having trouble with those pesky kamikaze suicide attacks.

America’s leftists and their sympathizers don’t understand the utility of fighting in Iraq because they don’t understand the utility of fighting anywhere.

They have decided that if people want to kill us it must be because of something we have done to give offense. For them, it follows that our grand strategy should be to make ourselves inoffensive. We should pay more deference to kleptocratic international bureaucrats, withdraw all our forces from the Arabian Peninsula and gift wrap six million Israeli Jews for their would-be murderers.

Military action is always offensive to the targets of it and, therefore, always counterproductive, at least on Planet Democrat.

As the meek Jews in the German Reich learned, when your enemy wants to exterminate you, you can never be inoffensive enough.

(A random addition here:  I recently learned from my mother that my father’s family originally came from Romania.  I looked up the family name at Yad Vashem’s Holocaust database and discovered that dozens of Romanians with my surname had died in the camp.  When it’s your own name on that list, it suddenly becomes a sobering reminder of the thin line between civilization and madness.)