The Same Sneak Attack

Days of infamy

Seventy-six years ago yesterday, the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The total number of American military personnel killed was 2,335, including 2,008 navy personnel, 109 marines, and 218 army soldiers. Added to this were 68 civilians, making the total fatalities at 2,403 dead. 1,177 were from the battleship USS Arizona alone. The number of wounded came to 1,143 with 710 navy, 69 marines, and 364 army personnel, as well as 103 civilians.  The very next day, Franklin D. Roosevelt committed the United States to a state of war with Japan.   Four years later, Japan surrendered to the US unconditionally, having been summarily beaten.

Just sixty years after Japan's infamous strike, radical Islamic Muslim Saudi fundamentalists attacked the United States, using hijacked US commercial air carriers as their platform.  The attacks were the most devastating foreign attack on American soil since the attack on Pearl Harbor.  During that attack on September 11, 2001, 2,996 people were killed (including 19 terrorists) and more than 6,000 others wounded. These immediate deaths included 265 on the four planes (including the terrorists), 2,606 in the World Trade Center and in the surrounding area, and 125 at the Pentagon. The very next day nothing happened, as our leaders wouldn't identify a nation state to blame.  Some time later the US invaded Iraq.  Yet over the next sixteen years, countless dollars, and thousands of lives, have been spent to make right those wrongs fostered upon us. And Islamic terror continues to this day unabated, our response castrated by political correctness.

What a profound difference in American resolve in the six decades between these two sneak attacks.  America responded in kind to the Japanese threat in 1941, yet today flounders about ineffectively, Vietnam-style, making the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about ever richer, and our enemies ever more emboldened.  Consider the arrogance and existential threat from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, for example.  Where now are those hard men, ready to do hard things?   Have we become a nation of pajama boys, with man-buns and cool tats, waiting for our wives and girlfriends to tell us what to think?

I hope not.  Maybe the return of the American male is at hand.  Maybe there will be an American adult - a leader - who will find a victorious end to the Crusades.  Maybe.