We Are Not Who We Were

Sixty years ago this past Thursday, the First Battalion of the 28th Marines raised the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of that event is among the most memorable ever taken and has been immortalized in bronze as the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, DC. The moment will stand forever as a symbol of American indomitability, and as an emblem of America’s greatest generation.
In a cruel way, the event was also a hoax, as a long and bloody fight for control of the island still confronted those Marines. It required the remainder of February and most of March before the United States was in full control of Iwo Jima. By the end of the 38-day battle, fully one third of all of the Americans who landed on the beaches fell as casualties, including 6825 dead. The 22,000 man Japanese garrison perished almost to the last man.
In its own way, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue two years ago was a similar moment. As jubilant Iraqis cheered, an American tank retriever pulled the abomination down. Liberated Iraqis spat on Saddam’s likeness and battered it with the soles of their shoes. Like the flag raising at Iwo Jima, the image will always be remembered as a symbol of victory. And just as was the case at Iwo Jima, there was still a lot of fighting and dying yet to be done.
In both Iwo Jima and Iraq, the enemy offered little initial resistance. In both cases, he chose not to meet us head to head, where our superior force would certainly prevail. Instead the enemy all but invited us onto his turf, where he believed he could win a protracted war of wills.
The Marines at Iwo Jima were a part of our greatest generation. The fighting men in Iraq are the finest of their generation and are every bit the equal of the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guadalcanal, or the servicemen who fought in any other theater of World War II.
But we cannot call this generation the equal of that one. What makes America different this day is not that her finest are less than the finest of earlier generations. Rather it is the quality or lack thereof, of the people whom our finest are defending.
Aside from his own father, there really was nobody like Ted Kennedy in World War II. Like father, like son, Ted Kennedy actually seems energized by every enemy success. Sixty years ago, no one like Michael Moore would have been invited to sit alongside a former president in the VIP booth at the national convention of a prominent political party. He would have suffered unanimous ostracism.
The terrorists came within about 50,000 Ohio votes of winning their victory last November, and it’s still not clear if the small majority of Americans will continue to stand resolute against the terrorists and their defeatist allies here. Traditional patriotism has become unfashionable among the social elite. Too many of those who support our mission feel they must do so quietly, so as to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of their friends.
We have become so muddled and squishy as a nation that, when some New York firemen raised a flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center, what should have been an occasion for Americans to rally around turned into a tribal squabble. The image of three firefighters raising that flag recalled Mount Suribachi so vividly that a statue was ordered. But efforts to create that memorial statue were halted because all three firemen in the photo were white. Political correctness came into conflict with historical correctness. It seemed that nobody could bear the thought of a statue with three people of pallor. The historically improved statue was to have one white, one black and one Hispanic. Why no Asian or Pacific Islanders, indigenous Americans or Arab-Americans were included escapes me. Why not add a few women? Why not hundreds, if not thousands of flag raisers so that every race, creed, sex and sexual orientation can be represented?
The Japanese strategy at Iwo Jima and later at Okinawa, was to break the will of the American public by making victory indigestibly costly. As it turned out, the Japanese were visionaries. They saw America, as it would be in the 21st century.