Without popular support, no democracy can win a war, even if its armed forces are stronger.

Vietnam taught this lesson. Though American arms suffered many casualties, and some battles were touch and go, in the end, our forces were unbeaten. But the American people turned against the war effort, tiring of its endlessness and increasingly convinced that the government of South Vietnam was not all that much worse than Ho Chi Minh. At the least, people were feeling that the difference was not worth the loss of treasure — and especially of blood. 

The dispiritedness about the war was enhanced manyfold by the hugely dispiriting Watergate crisis. The Paris treaty could have resulted in peace with honor, as advertised. But a piece of paper is only as good as its backing. It didn’t stand a chance once the author of that policy had become reviled and despised by the American public. Everything that was identified with Nixon now had the touch of death. America simply walked away everything that had been achieved, unsure of itself and despondent. Congress refused to send a penny to South Vietnam even just to defend itself, and the troops and tanks from the North just rolled down the highway. All that was left was the helicopter evacuating the last Americans from the roof of the embassy in Saigon and a crushing burden of shame — the malaise, so named by the famous peanut farmer who presided over it.

In the 19th century, Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz memorably stressed the importance of politics and psychology in war. He wrote:

We maintain … that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase “with the addition of other means” because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.

Vietnam and the successful Algerian terror campaign against France showed the truth of this teaching with a brilliant clarity. These struggles were won primarily by the larger and more powerful combatants in the struggle losing the political will for the fight. Despite America and France in their respective battles having the military and economic resources to triumph, they lost the will to spend the resources of blood and money that that triumph would require.

In World War II, the full advantage of the economic and military power was successfully brought to bear against the Axis Powers. Britain had become deeply resolved to fight after having been humiliated continuously by Hitler’s taking advantage of its naïve but well-meaning assumption that he was negotiating in good faith. America entered outraged at the treacherous and bloody surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and at Hitler’s declaration of war on us in Japan’s attack.

Moreover, FDR and Churchill were equal to the need in clarifying what the fight was for — a civilizational struggle. Here Churchill did just that in assuming the premiership, when all seemed to be crashing to ruin:

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.… For without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised … for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. 

Words such as these recognized Clausewitz’s teaching and were instrumental in bringing the overwhelming advantages of Britain and America fully to bear. Stalin relied primarily on other means to propel his war effort.

No such clarity was obtained for Vietnam. Certainly, no one made a successful case for the war. There was no Churchill or FDR, only a succession of uninspiring leaders. And the war was lost.

Hamas has excelled in using political methods to win its battles. It saw how its predecessors had begun to perfect the political aspect of warfare. Yasser Arafat had notably established the cause for the destruction of Israel in his dramatic coup de main in getting the UN to vote that Zionism was racism. Hamas built on this skillful political warfare and has kept the offensive of ideas going, trying to achieve follow-up success in branding Israel as an apartheid state and to establish a claim for its own state to exist, from the river to the sea, that is, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no place at all for Israel. 

The Nazis, at least, were forthright in their propaganda. They believed that race was supreme, and they fought their war on that basis. That is why they diverted precious resources away from fighting the advancing Allied armies and toward the ones they believed to be their chief enemy, their racial enemy — the Jews. Even as their troops suffered for lack of transport for food, ammunition, and manpower, the cattle cars bearing civilian men, women, and children rolled toward the smokestacks of Auschwitz.

The communists learned from the spectacular failure of Germany in the war of politics. They learned from Madison Ave as well to sell the sizzle and learned how to do it when what they were offering were cow pies. Stalin’s Soviet constitution looked like the framework for a shining democracy rather than the home of the Gulag archipelago. Their police states were all deemed People’s Republics even as they tried to build an empire by subversion and police them by creating a society of informants; they simultaneously projected onto the liberal democracies their very own guiding sin, first and foremost, the imperialism and colonialism in which they were pioneering and malevolent innovators.

By the sixties, the Soviets had figured out that Israel was more democratic than socialist, and when Israel was threatened with extinction by Nasser and his acolytes in 1967, Russia became the chief backer of the Middle East states that sought Israel’s destruction, as well as similarly inclined non-state entities, like Arafat’s PLO.

Under Soviet tutelage, the propaganda became breathtakingly Orwellian in its inversions. Israel alone in the Middle East effectively guards full political and civil rights for its minorities. Its Muslim and Christian populations have thrived; they vote in elections, they are elected to positions of power, their worship is protected, and their religions have state support. 

On the other hand, no Jews at all live today in Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, or Iraq. Only where the benign Abraham Accords rule are Jews welcomed and protected. In several of these places, selling land to a Jew is punishable by death. Whenever Israel has lost a battle to its belligerent opponents, death and expulsion follow. In the 1948 War of Independence, Israel lost the battle for Jewish Quarter in the Old City. Every single Jewish survivor of the fight was expelled, and the synagogues, some dating back to the Middle Ages, were razed. When in the same war the Gush Etzion community just south of Jerusalem was lost, the survivors of the battle who were not executed were all expelled. And we all saw what the war aims were on Oct. 7 — nothing less than the torture, kidnap, humiliation, or extermination of every Jew they could reach.

Yet even now the propaganda war is at high pitch. Hamas can only survive to further its exterminationist dream if it can persuade the world politically that is lies are true, that what you saw on Oct. 7 was not really what you thought you saw, that there is some great redeeming context for acts of unspeakable bestiality — although my furry acquaintances bristle at the comparison.

You who read this are the target of this war campaign. Your life is not directly threatened — just yet — unless you are a Jew or identify with Jews. You are thought to be unsophisticated, unserious, and childish, a complete sucker, ready to accept extermination and torture and the substitution of an atavistic barbarism for an advanced constitutional democracy as long as it is dressed up in catchy slogans and moral pretension.

When you dare to view their claims with the revulsion and contempt that is the best they deserve, you are helping to defeat their despicable cause. You recognize that the cultural and political rot that that causes champions will not stop with the destruction of Israel and of the Jews. It seeks the destruction of anything that holds their pretensions and appetites for power and unearned esteem in check. That means our won freedoms and constitutional way of life.

They already think they have won our college campuses. They already think that they have a strong and growing foothold in our halls of government power, in the bastions of blueness in Washington and around the country. They already believe that they their message will triumph in our children’s classrooms and in our legacy media. 

They are only partially right. Whether they will be proved right in the end is largely up to us. The challenge that faces us is starkly existential. Do not kid yourself that the evil will be content when it has its way with Jews, any more than it did in the thirties.

The crucial battle in the war is being fought here, among us, and within us. Our resolve and grit in this battle for the mind and the heart may very well be the crucial battle of the war. Fight it with courage, an uplifted spirit, and a fierce resolve.