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Send in the Marines! (but to what purpose?)
Victor Hanson praises the United States Marine Corps for its exceptional record of achievement since the nation’s founding and defends it from its periodic detractors, who, he says, are again questioning the usefulness of the Marines as they build up a large presence in a particularly troublesome province in Afghanistan. Hanson is confident that the nay-sayers are wrong and that the Marines will once again make an important, even decisive, contribution to our efforts. At the same time he fails to consider whether our mission in Afghanistan—defending a sharia Muslim regime against the sharia Muslim Taliban, both of which are deeply antipathetic and hostile to our civilization, and doing so by means of a patently absurd “winning hearts and minds” strategy—makes any sense. In the usual American gung-ho manner, Hanson is so fired up about our capabilities, that he doesn’t ask about the ends toward which those capabilities are being directed.
Ralph Peters also gets enthusiastic at times about particular aspects of our military policy and actions in Afganistan, but then he pulls back and reminds himself that he doesn’t think we should be in Afghanistan at all (a position he has espoused since shortly after Obama took office). Hanson has no such inner contradictions to resolve. He’s a true believer.
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