Commentary: Might Does Sometimes Make Right

Might does sometimes make right.  When I was a boy a woman who worked at my school and attended my mother’s church used to tell me, “Might doesn’t make right!”  Her husband had been a pilot shot down during war over North Korea.  I understood she was instructing me to avoid the usual cafeteria and playground brawls, however.  Her husband’s experience (he and my father were distant cousins) shows there was an attempt to make right by force.

Some years ago the columnist Michael Medved answered a statement from a leftist who insisted, “Violence never solved anything!”  “Violence solved Adolf Hitler,” was Medved’s reply.

Over the weekend I watched this video.  It’s about the controversial life of abolitionist John Brown.  A great many effete northerners wrote in periodicals about the evils of slavery.  Brown actually took action.  At the end of the documentary Abraham Lincoln, prospective candidate for President, is quoted Brown’s bloody approach was destined to fail.  Less than two years later Lincoln entered a war that cost the lives of 600-thousand people.  Slavery also ended.  Brown’s actions set the tone for the Election of 1860.  He well could wear the crown of Great Emancipator but somehow his death is considered lesser in comparison with Lincoln’s martyrdom for the cause.  Lincoln wasn’t quite as rough-hewn and perhaps was more welcome by elites opposed to bondage.  If I can find a metaphor, another John was the Baptist to Lincoln’s Savior.

Today we’re faced with challenges internally and externally and I agree with sentiment about being judicious about where we respond.  A civil war in Congo really doesn’t require intervention by the USA.  Bosnia was in this category.  Afghanistan begs for a response.  Where does Iraq fit?  Somewhere in between.  As a writer once said in the pages of the Washington Times what would the world look like today had we not entered a second war and entered Baghdad?  I have an answer.  Saddam would be looking to match Iran in an arms race and both would be looking to recruit allies by promising to immolate Israel.  Death to America would be the war cry across the Muslim World even more so than we hear today.

Many of my countrymen are in denial but we’re headed for war with Islam and at the moment still mightier than the future enemy.  From a cultural perspective we’re also right.  If in order to save the planet some corners of the globe must burn then the time draws near.  Speaking of responses, I’d welcome your comments.