Time for a new kind of war

The above figures show how much war has changed in the past generation. Conventional warfare where there is hand-to-hand combat has been replaced with a more insidious type of combat. The enemy blends in with the population at large and can strike at any time with a well-placed bomb along a roadside or a spurt of sniper fire from a building. In this kind of war, civilian casualties are far greater than in older conventional wars.

Another interesting statistic reported yesterday was that 46% of those killed in the war were from small communities of 40,000 or less even though those communities make up only 27% of the American population. This is not surprising. I reported in an editorial 3 years ago that the number of men from Minonk who lost their lives in World War II was twice the national average.

The prisoner abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad casts a pall over this year's Memorial Day. I believe most Americans do not approve of tactics in which prisoners are tortured. It is unfortunate that it happened because it goes against the notion that Americans are fair-minded and principaled. It reinforces the thought that Americans have become bullies of the world. However, I feel that such treatment of prisoners is not uncommon. I think that persons in a war environment become a different person and do things they normally would not do either due to the stress of their situation or because of the need for revenge against lost comrades. Prisoner abuse is not new to our military either. Look what happened at Andersonville in the Civil War when American soldiers were abused by their fellow countrymen. In fact, a Minonk native, John January, almost starved to death in that prison.

Killing civilians is not new either. Allied bombers strafed the streets of Dresden, Germany in World War II and mowed down civilians as they were trying to escape from the fires. Most historians say that the bombing of Dresden was not militarily necessary and the killing of an estimated 100,000 civilians certainly was not. So much for generational differences on how we treat our enemy. Political correctness was not an issue in World War II when we were fighting to save western civilization. War has always been brutal. A humane war is an oxymoron.

I supported the war against Iraq initially because I was led to believe by our leaders that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction that he would use if he were not stopped. So far, that threat has not been proven. Instead, we have succeeded in eliminating Saddam Hussein but it doesn't appear that we are any safer now than when we started the war.

It is my opinion that the only war we should be fighting is against the Al-Qaida. Who pays these radical Muslims to fight the "Infidel"? Why can't we cut off the head of the snake and capture Osama bin-Laden, the master mind and funder of the Al-Qaida? Why not use subversive techniques and intelligence gathering to track down the Al-Qaida leaders one at a time instead of trying to use brute military force that results in civilian casualties.

Conventional warfare as we know it is outmoded. We could go in and obliterate Iraq and the whole Middle East if we wanted to but it would result in enormous casualties that the world and most Americans would not accept. Instead, we are engaging in limited warfare with one hand tied behind our backs to make it a level playing field. Iraqi insurgents can cut the heads off of American civilians but we cannot torture prisoners. It seems so odd. We can kill an Iraqi soldier with impunity during combat but prisoners are protected by the rules of the Geneva Convention. War doesn't make sense and that's the point. There are no rules in war for the Al-Qaida but there is for us.

We must stay the course in Iraq and try to get other nations involved to handle the transition to a semblance of democracy. To do otherwise would definitely be a victory for the terrorists. Unless we are prepared to fight with both hands and are willing to accept large casualties, future conflicts should be limited to fighting the terrorists the same way they are fighting us - through subversion. We need a coordinated effort of all nations to fight terrorism. We need fewer bombers and more undercover agents who are competent enough to come up with good intelligence and can infiltrate the nests of the Al-Qaida and wipe them out, one at a time until no one is left to pay the bills for the terrorist activities. Unfortunately, this may not happen during my lifetime.