By Bruce Walker

Sherman was right:  War is
Hell.  The current war against the Judeo-Christian world waged by al-Qaida
and other radical Moslems is no different.  War is Hell and Hell is full
of torments.  Our role, as children of a Loving God, is to make that Hell
and those torments as quick, as slight, and as limited as possible.  But
it is not our power to end pain, to make peace, or to stop torture. 

We cannot stop a Holocaust
without inflicting pain.  We cannot end the Gulag without hurting
people.  We cannot free slaves without the horror of civil war.  We
can be silent, passive, and helpless in the face of evil, and, perhaps,
survive.  But we cannot stop evil without fighting evil, and that battle
cannot be conducted without hurting people.

There have been many
hypothetical questions raised about the conduct of great democratic leaders in
wars against past evils.  Was Truman a “war criminal’ for dropping two fission
bombs on Japanese cities?  Did Churchill authorize severe methods to
extract information from German soldiers?  All of this rather misses the
point.

Churchill authorized the
fire-bombing of Hamburg, which resulted in the burning to death of many tens of
thousands of innocent German women, children, and old people.  Truman
authorized the slow starvation of Japan by submarine blockade.  The
victims of these actions were more innocent than al-Qaida operatives, the pain
they endured was much greater than water boarding, and the number who suffered
was incomparably greater than the handful interrogated by American intelligence
forces.

Who, in war, is not a war
criminal?  George McGovern dropped heavy bomb loads on innocent
Europeans.  Jimmy Carter was perfectly prepared, if the order had come, to
incinerate many millions of innocent Soviet citizens as a naval officer on
nuclear submarines.  Clinton ordered the bombing of Serbia, which
tormented many innocent Serbs, and Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan,
who will use bullets and bombs to inflict much more pain on our enemies than
they ever endued in American military custody.

In the struggle between good
and evil in this life, evil will use violence to force good men to use violence
as well.  The critical questions are not whether this violence constitutes
something which decent, sane men would consider as “torture.”  It
does.  War itself is torture.  Men in combat suffer in ways which
make water boarding look like a roller coaster ride in a theme park.  War
maims, burns, starves, cripples, traumatizes, humiliates, and destroys. 

We pretend that there are rules
in war, but that is all we do “pretend.”  Decent, sane people, forced into
war, can only make their own rules.  These rules are fairly straightforward
and easy to understand.

Inflict the pain on the guilty
as much as possible and on the innocent as little as possible.  America
does this better than any nation in the history of the world.  Desert
Storm in 1991 was the first example of “smart weapons,” the much-maligned
“gold-plating” of American weaponry.  Since then our forces have used such
precision in combat that even when our own troops lives are in jeopardy, we
have tools and technologies which allow us to almost surgically take out the
bad guys.  This, of course, is just what our interrogation was intended to
do. 

Nazis, Soviets, or Japanese
imperialists  did not look carefully and cautiously those who held vital
war information or those who might fight them when they interrogated. 
Instead they used savage violence with a broad brush.  They slaughtered
the general population of villages until information was provided. 
 They, and radical Moslem enemies as well, do not care about who is
innocent, who is a combatant, or who has crucial information. 

Inflict only as much violence
as is necessary to win.  The intelligence and security organs of
totalitarian regimes tortured without reference to guilt, to hidden secrets, or
even to potential civilian hostility.   They starved, beat, froze,
and did things much worse not because that level of coercion was needed, but
because it was in the nature of their evil.  The purpose of the
brutalities of these regimes was, specifically, to cause human suffering.

Violence, force, pain, terror –
 these are all dreadful aspects of life which we associate with torture
–  can only be minimized and not eliminated.  We do that when the
elements of coercion are targeted only on the guilty, when we only use what is
necessary, and when we grasp that goodness should always win these
battles. 

On September 11, 2001,
thousands of innocent men, women, and children were tortured to death – that is
the blunt fact – and since then America has operated using its own,
compassionate rules of combat  to liberate captive, tortured populations
in Iraq and in Afghanistan using the mildest means at our disposal.  If we
grow sallow, puerile, vain, and pompous, then the suffering on planet Earth
will not diminish:  It will, instead, return with a vengeance. 

________________________________________________________________________

Bruce Walker is the author of
two books:  Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his
recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on
Christianity.

http://outskirtspress.com/swastika_against_the_cross  

http://outskirtspress.com/Sinisterism