WAR AND PEACE

I read two great columns today, but computer problems prevented me from posting about them earlier. Both take a good look at the nature of war and how we view it.

Thomas Sowell looks at the bloody legacy of the peace movement.

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.

"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places -- but who looks at track records?

Daniel Pipes examines a strange reversal in the way parties at war behave.

All these media activities stem from a perception that taking casualties and looking victimized helps one’s standing in the war. Adnan Hajj’s distortions, for example, were calculated to injure Israel’s image, thereby manufacturing internal dissent, diminishing the country’s international standing, and generating pressure on the government to stop its attacks in Lebanon.

But this phenomenon of each side parading its pain and loss inverts the historic order, whereby each side wants to intimidate the enemy by appearing ferocious, relentless, and victorious. In World War II, for instance, the U.S. Office of War Information prohibited the publication of films or photographs showing dead American soldiers for the first two years of fighting, and then only slightly relented. Meanwhile, its Bureau of Motion Pictures produced movies like “Our Enemy – The Japanese,” showing dead bodies of Japanese and scenes of Japanese deprivation.

Proclaiming one’s prowess and denigrating the enemy’s has been the norm through millennia of Egyptian wall paintings, Greek vases, Arabic poetry, Chinese drawings, English ballads, and Russian theater. Why have combatants (and their media allies) now reversed this age-old and universal pattern, downplaying their own prowess and promoting the enemy’s?