The New Republic

I gather, then, that few if any Nazis had participated in sensitivity training.

See, this is why it's important to have a strong HR department. This kind of thing goes unchecked and, next thing you know, all kinds of bad things happen: harassment suits start materializing, recruitment and retention become problematic, all humanity throughout the remainder of recorded history regards you as cold-blooded monsters, pilfering of office supplies by employees increases, etc.

- williamyard

February 12, 2008 at 12:54pm

Hmm...we should find out if Don Rumsfeld has read this article.  Maybe this is what he thinks "winning hearts and minds" actually means, and the whole postwar period was a funny misunderstanding!

- rossjem

February 12, 2008 at 12:57pm

Seriously, could The Plank just hire good Mr. Yard?

- rhubarbs

February 12, 2008 at 1:10pm

And their PR campaigns in Poland and Czechoslovakia were, at best, half-hearted.  Certainly not as well received as in Vichy.

- adaglas

February 12, 2008 at 1:12pm

I like this quote: But this brilliant style of war (blitzkrieg in German, shock and awe in English), shaped by geographic and historical circumstance, masked an unhealthy strategic shortcoming: an inability to see national war as the last resort, sometimes even an unnecessary one.

Ok, cheap shot I know, but it did kind of fit.

- blackton

February 12, 2008 at 1:18pm

For all his faults as a political commentator, Victor Davis Hanson is a tremendously insightful military historian. Perhaps the great tragedy of the post-9/11 world is that America's leaders set out to reject what Hanson would call "the American way of war" in favor of something more like a 19th-century German ideal of hard strikes and maneuver. The American way of war Hanson has described would have committed the United States fully to Afghanistan and won that war. War with Iraq in 2003 would not have been possible, but when the slow collapse of the sanctions regime made war with Iraq unavoidable -- as it eventually would have -- the American way of war would also have had a much higher chance of winning that war, too. Instead, our leaders have fought -- and lost -- like Germans.

- rhubarbs

February 12, 2008 at 2:09pm

I think the German "hearts and minds" policy was hindered somewhat by the general belief that Slavs were subhuman creatures who didn't really have either.

- ironyroad

February 12, 2008 at 2:47pm

Rhubarbs:

The German way of war is no longer possible from democratic nations.  Nothing short of an existential war would make Americans commit FULLY (and I mean even those damned hippies in Berkeley) to a war.  That is the beauty (and weakness, some would say) of democracy.  And why expressly Bush and the neocons wanted to spread it to the Middle East.

Not even 9/11 was enough to allow Bush to commit all of our resources to Afghanistan.  Or have we not forgotten? The reason Afghanistan became the "good war" was because of relativity.  Before Iraq, the damned peaceniks f*cked Bush for the Afghan war too.

- jwl2672

February 12, 2008 at 5:05pm

I'd say the peacenik clout was at an all time low as we went to war in Afghanistan.  With hindsight it is pretty clear that Bush held back in Afghanistan, not because the American people would be opposed to fighting the people behind 9/11, but because there was a risk that after a real war in Afghanistan, there wouldn't be a popular hunger for the manufactured war in Iraq.

- aculimic

February 12, 2008 at 6:44pm

jwl: "Not even 9/11 was enough to allow Bush to commit all of our resources to Afghanistan." Are you deranged? Rumsfeld was intent on proving his new theory of warfare, how else to explain he put practically no troops in Tora Bora to cut off Osama's escape route? What stopped him? The Democratic congress?

- blackton

February 12, 2008 at 6:56pm