American Dominance is Being Challenged

I've enjoyed reading the Economist less and less these past few years, as the formerly august news magazine has succumbed to collectivist progressivism.

But I'm amazingly pleased with this analysis. It's good.

See, "Great-power politics: The new game."

'The eight year experiment with the Obama administration will be a cautionary tale on multiple levels concerning America’s socialist elite and their palace guard stenographers...'

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "SO, THAT DIDN’T WORK OUT WELL..."

Meaning, the Obama-media's nearly 8-year fetish with collectivist leftism hasn't turned out too well. Sadly, it's going to take at least a decade of mainstream, if not conservative, government to unwind the catastrophic damage.

Focusing on Economic Growth Should Be at Top of Policy Agenda for U.S. Leaders

From David Petraeus and Michael O'Hanlon, at USA Today, "Recipe for American success":

As world leaders gathered and debated each other at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, most of the attention seemed to be on hot spots.  Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, conflict zones in Africa and East Asia, and the latest news from Afghanistan got lots of discussion. In many respects, this was inevitable, and necessary. Indeed, our own careers have been largely shaped and dominated by such pressing issues.

In another respect, however, we need to remember that in a world of troubling headlines, less dramatic and more structural developments could determine the future of the global order even more than the latest crises. Many of these concern technology and economics.

While military might was a necessary ingredient in the West's victory in the Cold War, it was more like a moat than a battering ram — it provided time and protection for the inherent strengths of the Western democratic and economic systems to prevail. This is likely to be just as true in the future.

A few basic realities about the modern world need to be remembered. The post-World War II international order set up by U.S. and other key world leaders 70 years ago produced more economic growth in more places on earth, benefiting a far higher percentage of the human race, than had any previous global order in any period in history for which we have data.

As policymakers and leaders establish priorities for 2016 and beyond, attention to economic fundamentals should play as big a role in their thinking as crisis management and domestic political maneuvering.

Indeed, economics can even shape crisis management, if often with a lag effect. Economic sanctions established by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and many others brought Iran to the table over its nuclear weapons program (an accurate observation whether one likes the actual deal). Sanctions, together with the fall in global oil prices, might not have yet limited assertive (and illegal) Russian interventions, but they could well constrain President Vladimir Putin in the years ahead. China's policies in the East China Sea and South China Sea, even if sometimes more assertive than we would like, have exhibited at least some restraint that might reflect an awareness in Beijing that we could introduce sanctions against China if things got out of hand.

Meanwhile, the North American shale revolution and the North American economic revolution more generally have improved U.S. growth prospects and the fundamental strength of the U.S. economic foundation. They have also helped Mexico provide more jobs to its own workers, reducing demographic pressures and actually making the immigration problem easier to address (even if we have not yet managed to address it appropriately and comprehensively). 

More.

Is the West Dead Yet?

From VDH, at National Review, "The West - Is the Decline Cyclical?":

The West is paradoxically dominant on the global stage and eroding from within.

Never has Western culture seemed so all-powerful.

Look at the 30 top-ranked universities in the world; they are all American, British, or European — albeit these rankings are based largely on the excellence of their science, engineering, medicine, and computer departments rather than their English and sociology departments.

The American West Coast changed the world’s daily lifestyle with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

The worldwide reach of schlock American pop culture is frightening. Hollywood psychodramas, rap vulgarity, reality TV, crude body tattooing and piercing, and the sorry, unhinged Miley Cyrus find their way up the Nile and around Cape Horn.

The United States, even with recent defense cuts, has more conventional military power than nearly the rest of the globe combined. American oil entrepreneurs have changed the global energy calculus.

Millions flee their homes to enter Europe — not Russia, China, or India. Ten percent of Mexico lives in the United States. Polls in Mexico suggest that half the remaining Mexican population would prefer to head north into the U.S., a nation to which, polls also suggest, they of course are hostile.

Immigration is a one-way Western street. Those who, in the abstract, damn the West — as much as elite Westerners themselves do — want very much to live inside it. The loudest anti-Western voices in the Middle East are usually housed in Western universities, not in Gaza. Jorge Ramos is a fierce critic of supposed American cruelty to illegal immigrants — so much so that he fled Mexico for America, became a citizen (how is that possible, given American bias against immigrants?), landed a multimillion-dollar salary working for the non-Latino-owned Spanish-language network Univision, and then put his kids in private school to shield them from hoi polloi of the sort he champions each evening. Now that’s the power of the West.

The alternatives are uninviting. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Pervez Musharraf, and Mohamed Morsi all resided in the West for long periods of time until political power beckoned at home. Putin’s Russia is a geriatric and unhealthy kleptocracy. China will never square the circle of free-market capitalist consumerism and Communist state autocracy. India, like Brazil, is always corrupt and always said to be full of potential. Neo-Communism has all but wrecked Latin America. The African nations are still tribal societies beneath a thin statist veneer. The Middle East is now mostly pre-civilized. (The Asian Tigers have escaped these fates by becoming mostly Westernized.) And, in our wired age, the maladies of the Third World are all instantly known and contrasted with the civilized alternative in the West.

But as in mid-fifth-century Athens and late-republican Rome, there are signs that the West is eroding — and fast. The common Western malady is age-old and cyclical. It was long ago described, over some thousand years of decline, by an array of Classical scolds, from Thucydides and Aristophanes to Tacitus, Petronius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Procopius. In the case of modern America, Britain, and Europe, the sheer material bounty spawned by free-market capitalism and legally protected private property, combined with the freedom of the individual, creates a sort of ennui. Boredom is the logical result of that lethal mix of affluence and leisure.

It is not just that Westerners forget who gave them their bounty, but they tend to damn anonymous ancestors who worked so hard, but without a modern sense of taste and politically correct deference. Of course, so far, Western civilization presses on, despite the periodic sky-is-falling warnings that echo the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and H. G. Wells. But does it press on as it did before?

 Still more.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Tested at Top Speed (VIDEO)

At CNN:

Magical Thinking and the Real Power of Hiroshima

From Jeffrey Lewis, at Foreign Policy, "A few thoughts on the psychological effect and utility of nuclear weapons":

HIROSHIMA, Japan — I am in Hiroshima, as is my usual practice in August. I am a member of the governor of Hiroshima prefecture’s Roundtable on Nuclear Disarmament. Each year, the city and prefecture mark the bombing with both a high-level dialogue about the state of things and public events about our nuclear predicament.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the bombings, which feels like a big moment to take stock of where we are, how we’ve gotten here, and where we’re headed.

Hiroshima is a better place to do that thinking than Washington, D.C. The weather isn’t particularly nice in either place, but Washington’s August is doubly marred with nakedly ideological polemics on the bombing. You’ll hear that the bombings ended the war and saved millions of American lives, or that President Harry Truman knew the war was over and was just trying to frighten the Soviets, a move that starts the Cold War. I don’t think the historical evidence supports either view or even the stark duality both views presume, but what is really galling about these arguments is that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reduced to the role of mere extras at their own murders.

I find a visit to Hiroshima deeply centering. It offers a chance to think again about the history of the bombing and to put the people who suffered most back at the center of the story.

It is easy to argue about the bombings with hindsight. We know the bombs worked and that they inflicted terrible suffering on the people of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Our entire modern debate about whether the bombings were intended to end the war or frighten the Soviets is premised on our contemporary conviction that nuclear weapons are awesome in the traditional sense of that word.

But Robert Oppenheimer and others didn’t know that. They were not sure, in advance, that a nuclear explosion would inspire awe. If you look back through the documents, you can see scientists worrying about picking a target to show the bomb’s best effect. There is even a dark passage where Kyoto is discussed as a target because the highly educated population would be better positioned to grasp that this bomb was different. “From the psychological point of view,” the document notes, “there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.” Consider that Oppenheimer’s first question to Gen. Leslie Groves after the bombing was whether it had occurred after sundown. He was still worried the locals wouldn’t be able to tell it was not a run-of-the-mill bombing unless the big fireball turned night into day. Groves explained that a night bombing hadn’t been feasible. The locals still noticed.

Our modern conviction that nuclear weapons are different only came later. While the construction of the norm against nuclear weapons, I think pride of place goes to John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker, it was eventually published by Alfred A. Knopf press. The fact that I was assigned this text repeatedly in high school and college probably explains my choice of careers. I have a slim 1946 first edition that is one of my prize possessions.

The creation of this norm was slow and contested. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried very much about a growing taboo against nuclear weapons use. They worried the taboo would deny the United States a weapon that they believed was essential to meeting defense commitments around the world.

Over time, we’ve come to see nuclear weapons as Hersey saw them, as the ultimate expression of material and spiritual evil of total war. The bomb has come to represent the ability of our civilization to destroy itself and our nagging fear that our political and social institutions are inadequate to save us from the abyss.

This norm, really this fear, helps explain why nuclear weapons have not been used again in anger in the intervening 70 years. One might point to deterrence, but nor have we used the bomb against states with no nuclear weapons. Even Eisenhower hesitated in response to suggestions nuclear weapons night help relieve French forces trapped by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

The implication of this norm, of course, is that we can’t actually use nuclear weapons. It’s hard, for example, to imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on the Iraqis we claimed to be liberating from Saddam Hussein. That’s certainly what Air Force Gen. Chuck Horner, who ran the air war during the 1991 Gulf War, concluded. Asked by an interviewer whether he considered using nuclear weapons, he responded, “You could use nuclear weapons but for what targets? The nuclear weapon’s only good against cities; it’s not any good against troops in the desert. I mean it takes too many of ’em, so the problem you have is, you have a war where if you kill a lot of people, particularly women and children, you lose the war no matter what happens on the battlefield.” Nor, obviously, did the United States use nuclear weapons in 2003.

I once had the opportunity to ask a four-star general a pointed question: Are there any targets that the United States cannot destroy without nuclear weapons? I got an interesting response, one that I found a bit convoluted and that involved a nearby chair as a metaphor. He said something like, “Take this chair — there are a lot of ways I can destroy the chair as a chair, but does destroying the chair have the unique psychological effect of using a nuclear weapon?” I wasn’t quite sure I was as intimidated by our ability to nuke the chair, or even the whole dining room at Restaurant Nora, but I took that to be a “no.” There are no such targets...

That's a little soppy for me, although he's absolutely right about the norm against nuclear use. No rational state will use nuclear weapons today. That's one reason why you want keep them out of the hands of state leaders in, say, Pyongyang and Tehran.

Still more at that top link.

And ICYMI, "The Defeat of Japan Was Anything but Inevitable. Dropping the Bomb Was the Right Thing to Do."

The Defeat of Japan Was Anything but Inevitable. Dropping the Bomb Was the Right Thing to Do

Screw the fascist leftists attacking the U.S. for defending its interests in August 1945. The numbers from the Battle of Okinawa are enough to justify the bombing alone. And remember, women and children were being armed with bamboo spears. The home islands were prepared to fight to the last. Is that what leftists want? Is that what they would have preferred? Millions of Japanese would have died, to say nothing of the quarter-million Americans who would have been killed in the invasion.

Realism. It's what's for dinner.

An outstanding essay, from Francis Pike, at the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Rethinking ‘The Bomb’ 70 years later":

Was dropping the “A” bomb moral, and did the technology it demonstrated make American victory in the Pacific war inevitable?

In the postwar period, some commentators have averred the United States need not have dropped an atomic bomb. They argue that it was only dropped to demonstrate American power to the Soviets and that it could have been demonstrated on unoccupied land. Furthermore, it is suggested that the bombing of a civilian city was a war crime. In other words, it was an unconscionable and immoral act.

Some contemporaneous commentators such as Adm. William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Chester Nimitz, Gen. “Hap” Arnold and Adm. Bull Halsey thought the use of the atomic bomb was barbarous and unnecessary. These views are not convincing; the Japanese government in August 1945 was a very long way from accepting the unconditional surrender both President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, had demanded, and which the vast majority of Americans supported. Time and again, the U.S. military had been proved wrong in its anticipation of a Japanese surrender.

Japanese diplomats may have been keen to call time on Japan’s military adventurism but the die-hards were still intent on victory. Even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, Japan’s war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, suggested, “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” Japan’s ultranationalist army leaders had built a death cult that was incomprehensible to Western logic.

Waiting for American soldiers on the shores of Japan’s four main islands were 2.5 million troops plus a vast civilian reserve. Japan had assembled a force of 11,000 planes and thousands of suicide boats to thwart the American invasion and Adm. Onishi, the main architect of the kamikaze campaign, believed victory on land was possible “if we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives.”

As some 12,000 Americans had been killed at the Battle of Okinawa when faced with just 80,000 Japanese troops, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff realistically estimated that the conquest of mainland Japan would cost 267,000 U.S. lives. Meanwhile, the War Department estimated up to 800,000 dead – more than double the American deaths in Europe in World War II. Japanese casualties, based on the universal refusal of their troops to surrender, were estimated at 3 million dead plus 5 million to 10 million civilians.

Presented with these forbidding numbers, no president of a democratically elected country could have spurned the use of the atomic bomb. Not using the bomb would have been greeted with utter incomprehension by nearly all Americans. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson observed, “No man … could have failed to use it [the A-bomb] and afterward have looked his countrymen in the face.”

For the GIs about to ship out to Japan, it was a reprieve. As Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old officer recalled, “We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Furthermore, with only two atomic bombs available, a demonstration could not be afforded. Lastly, while the conspiracy theorists are adamant the bomb was used as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, the reality was that at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman was urging Stalin to attack Japan so that America alone would not bear the burden of its defeat....

Keep reading.

Atom Bomb: The Logical Outcome of Total War

From Alonzo Hamby, a review of Charles Pellegrino's, To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima, and Susan Southard's, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, at the Wall Street Journal:

‘The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin told Britain’s House of Commons in 1932. “The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” Baldwin was no warmonger. His purpose was to underscore the indiscriminate horror likely to come from the air in an era of big military airplanes carrying large payloads of explosives. His declaration reflected the thinking of theorists ranging from the Italian general Giulio Douhet to the popular novelist H.G. Wells. It also acknowledged the truism that wars are ultimately between peoples and societies, not just armed forces.

War came within a few short years, and the bomber was its most feared weapon. In Europe, Germany showed the way—first in Spain with Guernica, then in Britain with the Blitz against London, Coventry, Hull and other cities. Revenge followed in the form of British and American bombers plastering German population centers with equal indiscrimination. Japanese bombers killed or wounded thousands of Chinese at Shanghai in 1932 and wreaked havoc at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

In late 1944, Japan began to be attacked by the most formidable of the World War II bombers, the American B-29. Japan’s defenses were weak and its provisions for civilian shelters grossly inadequate. Its wood-and-paper buildings were terribly vulnerable to incendiary bombs. Few had basements to which their inhabitants could retreat. On the night of March 9, 1945, more than 300 American B-29s raided a working-class area of Tokyo that was laced with small factories. The incendiary bombs set off firestorms that laid waste to nearly 16 square miles of the city and killed approximately 100,000 civilians and left the survivors demoralized.

Other Japanese cities endured ordeals similar to Tokyo’s. Two, however, were relatively untouched—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their inhabitants never realized that they were being saved for a terrible new weapon. The reprieve came to an end on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, in each case with single atomic bombs that probably produced fewer deaths than the Tokyo firebombing but spread greater fear.

Charles Pellegrino’s study of Hiroshima, “To Hell and Back,” and Susan Southard’s “Nagasaki” give scant attention to the larger military and diplomatic issues of the atomic bombings. Instead they recount the ordeals of ordinary and altogether sympathetic citizens coping with a sudden, devastating event that destroyed the world they had known. The lucky were killed instantly, some simply vaporized. Others displayed mute testimony to the event. Mr. Pellegrino describes one such example, drawn from the account of a survivor: “A statue, standing undamaged, . . . was in fact a naked man. . . . The man had become charcoal—a pillar of charcoal so light and brittle that whole sections of him crumbled at the slightest touch.” Another survivor, we are told, gathers the bones of a young woman, resolves to return them to her parents and manages to catch the last train to their home—in Nagasaki.

Ms. Southard gives us similar stories and provides photographs of aged Japanese still bearing horrible physical scars from their burns. She notes that the scars could also be psychological—feelings of “bitterness and outrage,” the mockery that could come with disfigurement. For some, she writes, the “fear of illness and death never ceased.” Both authors describe the harrowing effects of radiation sickness.

The maimed survivors of each city devoted much of their lives to evangelizing against the bomb. It is easy to write off such narratives as exercises in victimology, but it is also important to understand the effects of nuclear weapons in an age when they have become vastly more powerful and have been developed by nations of dubious responsibility.

What is missing from both books is context. Neither author properly discusses the factors that went into the American decision to use the bomb. Nor do they venture an opinion on whether the bomb shortened the war. They focus on the ways the bomb affected civilians who had to cope with a catastrophe.

“To Hell and Back,” one may remember, appeared in an earlier form, in 2010, as “The Last Train From Hiroshima.” The publication of that book was suspended when the authenticity of one of Mr. Pellegrino’s sources—a man who claimed to have been on a plane accompanying the Enola Gay bomber on its Hiroshima mission—was called into question. That source and his assertions are gone from the new book. A foreword notes that he had indeed “tricked” the author, who later admitted his mistake.

In a preface to “To Hell and Back,” Mark Selden, a scholar of East Asian studies, declares that Mr. Pellegrino’s narrative “encourages us to reflect anew on the ethics and horrifying outcome of World War II strategies of massive civilian bombing, whether by Germany, Japan, or England, or by American fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His statement reminds us that the atomic bombs were the logical outcome of a style of war taken for granted on both sides by the summer of 1945. Britain suffered heavy bombing and massive property destruction, but civilian deaths for the nation were less than 45,000. The port city of Hull (population, 320,000), roughly analogous to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, endured damage to an estimated 95% of its housing stock but lost only 1,200 civilians. Unlike Britain, Japan seems to have made little or no provision for the protection of its civilian population.

Were the bombs necessary to compel surrender? U.S. policy—laid down by Franklin Roosevelt, followed by Harry Truman and supported by most Americans—was uncompromising. The U.S. would accept only unconditional surrender, to be followed by military occupation.

In Japan, advocates of a last-ditch resistance could not promise victory but could guarantee heavy casualties for the invaders. The last battle of the war—Okinawa—made the point. Okinawa was a small island, and the U.S. possessed overwhelming ground, naval and air superiority. Even so, the battle raged from April 1 to June 21, 1945, with 92,000 Japanese troops fighting to the death and kamikaze planes inflicting significant damage on the offshore American fleet. U.S. casualties (killed and wounded) were approximately 45,000.

The experience made an impression in Washington. The Japanese home islands were next. Japan’s leaders made no secret of their plans to wage a dogged resistance that would mobilize the civilian population, right down to teenagers armed only with clubs and sticks; and the leaders clung to the fantasy of a negotiated peace brokered by the still-neutral Soviet Union. They rebuked their ambassador in Moscow for telling them that the Russians, who were moving troops to attack Japan in East Asia, would be of no help.

American military planners focused on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu as a first target, to be followed by an invasion of the island of Honshu and a final campaign across the Tokyo plain in 1946. Meeting with his military chiefs in Washington on June 18, 1945, President Truman expressed his hope of “preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” A month later, the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert. Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly followed.

Critics of the atomic bombings often assert that Japan was “ready to surrender.” Clearly this was not the case...

No, it was not the case, at all.

But keep reading.

Thanks to Readers Who Bought Bruce Levine's, Fall of the House of Dixie — BUMPED!

Thanks to those who purchased Levine's excellent Civil War history through my Amazon links.

I don't blog for the money, as folks well know. But it's nice to see a few sales here and there through Amazon, and it's a lot of fun for me posting the links, because I love books so much.

Thanks again.

Here's the link: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

And thanks to all my readers at American Power. I've still got about a month off until school starts up again, so I'll have some robust daily blogging until then for sure.

The PKK: America's Marxist Ally in Iraq

This is a great piece.

I read it ungated on my iPhone last night, but it's behind the subscription wall now. No matter, just click through at the Google link and you can read it.

See, "A Personal War: America's Marxist Allies Against ISIS."

Joe Scarborough's Epic Pro-America Rant

Via Free Beacon, "BEASTMODE: Joe Scarborough Goes on Epic Pro-America Rant."

American Hegemony Is Here to Stay

Never heard of this Salvatore Babones dude, but this is great.

This is the "BIG ARTICLE" - please read, everyone - "American Hegemony Is Here to Stay" @thenatlinterest http://t.co/nQstPrdSvX

— Salvatore Babones (@sbabones) June 11, 2015

Britain is Experiencing Same Decline as Rome in 100 BC

At the Telegraph UK, "Dr Jim Penman believes Britons no longer have the genetic temperament that sparked the Industrial Revolution":

Britain is experiencing the same decline as Rome in 100BC, with the collapse of civilisation inevitable, a scientist has warned.

Dr Jim Penman, of the RMIT University in Melbourne, believes Britons no longer have the genetic temperament to advance because of decades of peace and a high standard of living.

He claims that the huge success of the Victorian era will not be repeated because people in the UK have lost the biological drive for innovation.

Instead, Britain is existing in a period similar to the decades before the fall of the Roman Republic where social tensions were rife, the gap between the rich and poor was increasing and extremism was growing.

And when added to a growing distaste for military action, which has seen huge cuts the armed forces, by the end of the century the UK will no longer have the power, or will, to protect itself against a serious invading force, he predicts.

“There are certainly parallels between 100BC in the Roman Republic where things are starting to get pretty dodgy,” he said.
“It was a time when democracy was moving towards despotism, and in Britain we now see that politics is becoming much more about individuals rather than political parties. It’s about personalities. The two party system has started to break down.

“We live in a golden age where there have been no major wars in Europe for three quarters of a century. But the economy is stagnating and we’re having fewer children.

“And once European countries can no longer defend themselves, the end of national independence cannot be long delayed.”

The U.S. can't be far behind.

RELATED: "The Complexity of American Power."

IMAGE CREDIT: Thomas Cole's "The Destruction of Empire."

USS Theodore Roosevelt Aircraft Carrier — By the Numbers

This is cool, via Telegraph UK:



And at London's Daily Mail, "Towering 20 stories above the waterline and more than 1,000ft long: Inside glimpse of the awesome naval power that is the USS Roosevelt."

Plus, at the U.S. Navy YouTube page, "Theodore Roosevelt Deploys for World Tour."

Remembering D-Day: The Most Brilliantly Conducted Invasion in Military History

From VDH, at National Review, "D-Day at 70":

Seventy years ago this June 6, the Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 b.c.

About 160,000 troops landed on five Normandy beaches and linked up with airborne troops in a masterly display of planning and courage. Within a month, almost a million Allied troops had landed in France and were heading eastward toward the German border. Within eleven months the war with Germany was over.

The western front required the diversion of hundreds of thousands of German troops. It weakened Nazi resistance to the Russians while robbing the Third Reich of its valuable occupied European territory.

The impatient and long-suffering Russians had demanded of their allies a second front commensurate with their own sacrifices. Their Herculean efforts by war’s end would account for two out of every three dead German soldiers — at a cost of 20 million Russian civilian and military casualties.

Yet for all the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for his war with Nazi Germany. In 1939, he signed a foolish non-aggression pact with Hitler that allowed the Nazis to gobble up Western democracies. Hitler’s Panzers were aided by Russians in Poland and overran Western Europe fueled by supplies from the Soviets.

The Western Allies had hardly been idle before D-Day. They had taken North Africa and Sicily from the Germans and Italians. They were bogged down in brutal fighting in Italy. The Western Allies and China fought the Japanese in the Pacific, Burma, and China.

The U.S. and the British Empire fought almost everywhere. They waged a multiform war on and under the seas. They eventually destroyed Japanese and German heavy industry with a costly and controversial strategic-bombing campaign.

The Allies sent friends such as the Russians and Chinese billions of dollars worth of food and war matériel.

In sum, while Russia bore the brunt of the German land war, the Western Allies fought all three Axis powers everywhere else and in every conceivable fashion.

Yet if D-Day was brilliantly planned and executed, the follow-up advance through France in June 1944 was not always so...

A whole 'nother era.

More at the link.

Parents Read Vet Son's Suicide Note On Air: CNN Anchor Breaks Down

It's Brooke Baldwin breaking down after parents Howard and Jean Somers read their son Daniel's note.

Background at WaPo, "Daniel Somers’s suicide, his family has a new mission: Improve VA services."

Via Conservative Hideout.



Also, ICYMI, "Why the Troops Diss Obama."

Why the Troops Diss Obama

Recall from yesterday, "Watch How Vastly Different West Point Cadets React Between Hearing Presidents Obama and Bush."

In a Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation poll out last month, just 32 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans approved of how well President Obama "is handling his job as president." Just 42 percent consider Obama "a good commander-in-chief of the military." In contrast, when asked if George W. Bush "was he a good commander-in-chief of the military," two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) agreed that he was.

See, "After the Wars - Post-Kaiser survey of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans."

And FWIW, see the discussion from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "After the Wars: A Legacy of Pain and Pride." It's a beefy discussion, but one thing that sticks out is the mediocre medical care veterans say they receive from the Veterans Administration, which rings with particular resonance considering the Obama administration's VA scandal.

As for the huge gap between troop respect for President Bush versus President Obama, see former Army Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, "Blame Bush: Why Obama gets so little respect from the troops":

What civilians fail to realize is that we join the military to serve, realizing that the rigors of combat and privation are a part of that service, sacrifice, and commitment. We're not looking for someone “posing” as a leader who uses us as political pawns and gives away the hard-earned gains we've achieved. What troops want are leaders who are principled and will stand and have heartfelt sorrow when one of our brothers or sisters gives that last full measure of devotion.

What we see happening to our military under the Obama administration is unconscionable. The cutting of benefits to those serving, have served, and their families is disturbing. To have a Secretary of Defense step forward and announce we are cutting our military capability and capacity at a time when the world is far more volatile is perplexing.

To hear President Obama come out and say that we are war weary? When in the heck has he put on combat gear and humped on a patrol or spent years deployed?

Real combat troops don’t look for a fight, but when a fight comes their way, they want to win. And they expect leadership that will stand with them seeking victory, not retreat, masked as some insidious political campaign promise...

More.

I think the troops also genuinely respect a president who articulates and embodies American exceptionalism, like President Bush. (And President Obama, not so much.)

Obama's Foreign Policy: A Somber Parade of Straw Men and Emptiness

From Charles Krauthammer, at WaPo, "Emptiness at West Point":

As with the West Point speech itself, as with the president’s entire foreign policy of retreat, one can only marvel at the smallness of it all.

Watch How Vastly Different West Point Cadets React Between Hearing Presidents Obama and Bush

Oh my goodness this is brutal, at the Independent Journal Review.

Previous "icy" Obama at West Point blogging is here.

#Democrat Bob Beckel Attacks Kimberly Guilfoyle, Slurring Her as "Treasonous'

At Expose Liberals, "Blob Beckel meltdowns yet again – calls Kimberly Guilfoyle treasonous."