Words and warfare
Over the Christmas season, I happened to encounter two things which got me thinking about war, in general, and the recent performance of the U.S. armed forces, in particular.
Now understand that I am a libertarian, and I am fully cognizant of the way in which war is used by various elements within and without the government to strengthen the central state and to tempt individuals into sacrificing their liberties in the vain pursuit of security. History has certainly shown that the American government has not always been innocent in these matters.
But if war is not necessarily the battle between good and evil we would like it to be, it is often the case that one side is significantly worse than the other. FDR was a terrible president whose insidious legacy haunts us to this day, but there's no question that any sentient being would prefer to have lived under his stewardship than Mr. Hitler's. In the present circumstance, even most fundamentalist Muslims might prefer to see the United States defeat al-Qaida rather than have to live under the totalitarian rule of these particular co-religionists.
It was disturbing to listen to the translated videotape of Osama and his pet Saudi sheik as they discussed the Sept. 11 attacks. What was most interesting to me, though, was not any question of the tape's legitimacy, the ludicrous poetry or even the theological dichotomy between Osama's holy dreams and the Koran's position on noncombatants. No, what primarily caught my attention was the manner in which the two men went on and on and on and on, as if they hoped to bury the United States under the sheer mass of their verbiage.
I have a theory, you see, which is that any culture's ability and willingness to fight is inversely proportional to the tendency of its people to talk. Anyone who's ever witnessed an Italian soccer game will understand what I mean. The last five minutes of any game, at nearly any level, invariably involves all 22 players on the field shouting at each other, making it impossible for any of them to understand what the two coaches and all the players on both benches are yelling at them. The spectators are also in full voice at this point, but they're mostly occupied with threatening the referee with bodily harm.
Two or three brief spats always liven up the final minutes, usually forcing the referee to distribute three or four cards of various colors. But the altercations never amount to anything, and five minutes after the final whistle blows, everyone is happily lighting one another's cigarettes in a touching display of sporting unity, if not health consciousness. Contrast this with the English game, where the cheers could not be more verbally minimalistic, "England, England, England, England, England ... England!" and even the highest-paid professionals aren't above punching an opponent in the face just because it's there.
Mussolini, of course, enjoyed a daily harangue, but his Six Million Bayonets barely managed to account for a weaponless Ethiopian empire before having their fascist backsides abused by the Greeks. And has anyone ever talked more smack before the big game than Saddam "The Mother of All Rhetoric" Hussein? I find it hard to believe that the Marines are shaking in their boots at the notion of a second round with the feared Republican Guard.
Speaking of the USMC, that finally leads me to the other thing I mentioned earlier, which was reading the biography of Chesty Puller, one of the Marine Corps' more popular generals. General Puller liked to speak his mind, and even managed to get himself into a little hot water with the press from time to time, but the book makes it very clear that this Marines' Marine knew when to talk, and when to fight. He had a few things to say about his experiences in Haiti, Nicaragua, Guadalcanal and the Chosin Reservoir, but he preferred to do his talking after first having had the opportunity to excel at his craft. That, by the way, is Chesty-speak for killing large numbers of enemy soldiers.
Osama and his ilk can prattle on about Allah, American decadence, and American weakness. But Americans, for all our latter-day ignorance about the world and its evil, still understand that a few simple words like "Let's Roll" and "Follow Me" mean far more in the end than a thousand flourishes of rhetoric. That is why we will win this war.