OPINION:
Wednesday is Veterans Day, one of those holidays we tend to overlook. There are no sales. We do not visit the cemetery to decorate graves. There are no fireworks and few parades.
Veterans Day started as Armistice Day to mark the armistice that ended fighting in World War I. After World War II and the Korean War — which followed what was supposed to be “the war to end all wars” — Veterans Day was established to honor all those who served in peace or war.
It is fitting to honor the patriots who served their country, but in doing so, we need to consider why a republic goes to war. America does not fight for glory or territory, but to keep our nation free. Blood is the price we pay for liberty, as we have since the first volley was fired at Concord’s North Bridge.
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If not for that blood price, we would be speaking German, Japanese or Arabic today.
Someone once asked conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. whether there was anything worse than war. He replied, “Yes, slavery.” I would add genocide and unchecked aggression, which always lead to greater carnage in the long run, as Munich did.
Often, war is unavoidable. In 1861, President Lincoln could have let the Southern states secede. Instead, he led us into a war in which three-quarters of a million died to preserve the Union. Eventually, it became a fight against slavery too.
We did not choose to fight Germany and Japan in 1941 or to fight international Islam before Sept. 11, 2001. World War II started with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while we were negotiating a way to avoid war. The World Trade Center was another attack without a declaration of war.
It is horrible to hear the screams of men dying on a battlefield. It is more horrible still to hear the screams of women whose breasts are hacked off after they have been gang-raped, one of the atrocities committed during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.
After each war, some historians decide that it was unnecessary. World War I is a case in point. The Great War resulted in 9 million to 11 million military deaths and probably an equal number of dead civilians. Yet if America had not entered it in 1917, it would have been longer and bloodier. Britain and France might have lost, and Kaiser Wilhelm would have turned Europe into a German colony marked by mass graves.
We fought in Korea and Vietnam to stop the spread of communism. That could have ended better if politicians had not overruled the generals. Still, it kept South Korea and most of Southeast Asia free. If we had not intervened, killing fields would have dotted the landscape.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, but without them, the Japanese military would have met an invasion of the home islands with an “honorable death” for a nation of 77 million.
It would be well if we did not have to spill blood periodically to live free or to live, period — which is what we are doing now in the Persian Gulf.
When a regime has been telling you for half a century that it intends to kill you and its actions confirm that threat, believe it. Nuclear weapons are the last thing you want these savages to have, even if it means higher prices at the pump.
With Iran, we have been kicking the can down the road since 1979. Let us hope the road ends here, despite the unconditional surrender party’s victory in the midterm elections.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Muhammad said to fight hostile “idolaters.” Most Christians did not take Jesus literally. If they had, Christianity would have ended in the second century.
Pope Leo XIV, who speaks woke fluently, says God rejects the prayers of those who wage war.
On D-Day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt prayed: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”
God hears the prayers of those who seek to liberate the oppressed and stop genocide. I wonder whether Pope Leo has ever seen Auschwitz. Do the Swiss guards at the Vatican carry submachine guns and Glocks or bouquets of flowers?
As awful as it is, a war can be as necessary to preserving liberty as amputating a gangrenous limb is to saving the whole body.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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