The Lessons of Iwo Jima

Sixty years ago the assault on the tiny island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific began. Few of us alive today can imagine the hell the troops went through.

Bravo to The Wall Street Journal for this excellent editorial on the subject by historian Arthur Herman. Read the whole thing.

This passage, though, is key:

Yet even this valor and sacrifice is not the full story of what Iwo Jima means, or what Rosenthal's immortal photograph truly symbolizes. The lesson of Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to Machiavelli: that sometimes free societies must be as tough and unrelenting as their enemies. Totalitarians test their opponents by generating extreme conditions of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak democratic nerves will crack. This in turn demonstrates their moral superiority: that by giving up their own decency and humanity they have become stronger than those who have not.

Free societies can afford only one response. There were no complicated legal issues or questions of "moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima: It was kill or be killed. That remains the nature of war even for democratic societies. The real question is, who outlasts whom. In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery, based on Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests. In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.

Would that we understood this lesson of history today. Indeed, the women during WWII were tougher and more resilient than the men of today. Today, while our enemy hangs the bodies of murdered civilians from bridges and hacks off the heads of kidnapped innocents, our "intellectuals" wail and gnash their teeth over the "torture" at Abu Ghraib and the horrendous fiction that our military men targeting journalists.

We will have to learn the lessons of Iwo Jima. Or we, like the many invincible powers that came before us -- the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Romans -- will see all we've built fall to ruin.