To Win a War, Fight One

by Daniel Greenfield • October 11, 2023 at 3:00 am

For Israel, winning this war means destroying Hamas, its leaders, its terrorists and its supporters by any means necessary, and securing the territory they operated from so that it cannot be used to stage more attacks. Pictured: IDF soldiers prepare to remove the bodies of four Israeli civilians who were murdered Saturday by Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza, Israel, on October 10, 2023. (Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

As highly civilized people, we're lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.

We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that's because we don't fight them. Instead, we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists, and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.

To win a war, you have to fight one.

If your enemy is fighting a war and you're fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.

Police actions, nation-building exercises, and the like have vague and poorly defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones.

Wars are either won or lost. That's why modern governments rarely like fighting them.... Once you declare a war, you know you have to win.

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