Have we become too civilized to defeat anything but the enemies' military?

We currently see Israel engaged in a war, a religious war of the peoples. One side is telling themselves, and the others who listen to them saying so, that IS so, and has been so since 1948, or was that 1924, or was that 1683, or maybe 632?



We saw it in Iraq, on the highway of death in Kuwait in 1991, and across Europe, the Islands of the Pacific, and across the pacific. We saw it in pictures of no man's land in 1918. We saw it over and over in the Middle East in the turret less hulks of thousands and thousands of tanks and the rounded up, and cut off armies of thousands of Egyptians and Syrians.


But a military victory presages VICTORY and defeat of the enemy only when the society and polity behind it recognizes it's defeat.

In a military victory alone we go on and on about the people not being our enemy. But in a true victory the enemy society and culture are crushed.

In 1918 we were on the verge of an obvious outright military victory, and to preserve the German society and culture an armistice was achieved. The real result of that was at hand by 1936. Alternatively, in 1865 the entire southern society lay in utter ruin.

In 1945 Tokyo and Berlin and all the major cities of the cultures they represented looked like Richmond.

By contrast we have Gaza in 2008

And Baghdad 2003

While we have quieted the urgency of the violence in Iraq (with military force backed by political action, and a determination here) the issue remains, the modern model of war as WE PRACTICE IT is a civilized medieval version of chivalry which never existed.

Israel uses precision bombs with but 50lbs of explosives so as to attempt to not harm the neighbors of those who have sworn unabashedly to kill them and eliminate their nation, but those neighbors are those who brought those sworn people to power.

Is it possible to use our modern model of war to win a societal, and certainly in Israel's case religious war made against you?

Germany and Japan are different today because their societies WERE COMPELLED to recognize that their model of the the way to live has been unsuccessful. But no religion reinforced the view that that way of life was compulsory.

Today the violent and racist demonstrations around the world falsely accuse Israel of perpetrating another Jenin in all Gaza. But the haunting question remains...can this war ever end until those who support the HAMAS's and Hizballahs, and the Al Qaeda's and the IRGC's and mullahs, and the MMA's and ISI's are themselves so crushed that those who want their children to have another kind of life recognize the FACT their culture is DOOMED, and will only kill their children, their hopes and their dreams.

Note the large sign hanging outside Admiral Halsey's office during the Solomon Islands campaign, a moment after Coral Sea, Bataan, Midway, and the invasion of Guadalcanal, and a moment when things wre in doubt. Is this what it takes to win a societal endeavor? Th yellow thing is over the line to me, but the sentiment about the task is ..... (fill in the blank)

And are we willing to undertake such actions anymore in our own defense, even in the abstract?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I am certain they need to be asked