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| Murphy |
Hartford Courant Political writer Kevin Rennie delivered a glancing blow to U.S. Senator Chris Murphy in a recent column, “Gov. Ned Lamont, and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal stepped into different spotlights last week.”
Rennie noted, “In his 2020 book, The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy,
Murphy wrote, ‘it is likely that no American ever exported more violence from
our shores onto foreign soil than Dwight D. Eisenhower.’ Murphy uses the Second
World War Allied invasion of France as a premier example of the ‘violence we
export.’
“In the 80 years since the D-Day invasion, the people of
free nations have considered the liberation of France an achievement that
deserved unqualified celebration, and always will. Murphy notes that D-Day ‘resulted
in a stunning 425,000 troops on both sides being killed or seriously injured.’
That other side, the murderous Nazis, goes unmentioned.”
Indeed, life, most especially life in war, Shakespeare tells
us, is but “but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour
upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.”
Dwight Eisenhower was a General during World War II, not yet
a president.
When President Franklin Roosevelt at long last formally
entered World War II following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, one of his
persistent critics, U.S. Senator from Connecticut’s 4th District
Clare Booth Luce, the first woman to represent
Connecticut in the U.S. House of Representatives, said of Roosevelt that he had
“lied us into war because he was afraid to lead us into war.” Towards the end
of the war, Luce issued warnings about the threat of aggression from the Soviet
Union. She was also an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and the racial
integration of the armed forces.
Murphy is now supporting two U.S. wars, both undeclared by
the U.S. Congress.
The war of aggression against Ukraine prosecuted by
President Vladimir Putin of Russia began 2014 and dramatically escalated in
2022 when Russian invaded Ukraine. The Russian invasion was, it is generally
agreed, the most significant attack on a European country since World War II.
According to one Biden biographical account, “By
June 2022, Russian troops occupied about 20% of Ukrainian territory. About 8
million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had
fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since
World War II. Extensive environmental damage caused by the war, widely
described as an ecocide, contributed to food crises worldwide.”
Biden continues to pummel Ukraine as this is written. A
couple of years ago, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal strongly advised
that Biden send U.S. fighter jets to Ukraine, a suggestion smothered in frigid
silence.
The second war of aggression is that of Iran and its
sponsored terrorists units against the State of Israel. Neither Putin nor the
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's current spiritual leader and its highest
authority, have suffered diminishment as a result of their repeated deadly
aggressions.
Throughout history, purely defensive wars that do not punish
aggressors hiding behind proxies are doomed to fail. Wars are won by aggressive
means, which is why Murphy bothered to mention in his anti-war philippic, The Violence Inside Us, that “a stunning
425,000 troops on both sides” were killed or seriously injured during World War
II.
Murphy has little noted, nor has he long remembered the
dead, north and south, at Shiloh and Gettysburg. One soldier’s diary recalls
that the battlefield at Shiloh was so littered with dead bodies that he had to
step on them to reach the enemy. Of the forces engaged at Gettysburg, nearly
one third were casualties, 7,058 were fatalities: 3,155 Union and 3,903
Confederate.
“Hard going for Murphy last week,” Rennie noted, “but he’ll
always have his victory for Houthi terrorists now wreaking havoc on world
shipping and firing missiles at American ships. Murphy asked the Biden
administration in 2021 to remove the designation of terrorists from the
Houthis. It’s good to have friends.”
It is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than
presidents, senators and military advisors comfortably situated far from the
war in Israel who most resembles President Abraham Lincoln.
One can only imagine what the present state of the union might look like had
Lincoln’s well-meaning advisors prevailed on him, following Gettysburg, to
submit to a “two state” solution rather than prosecuting the Civil War to its
appointed end. Our bloody Civil War was followed by the restoration of the
Union, the end of slavery, the pacification of an insurrectionist South and –
not at all incidentally – 159 years of peace and prosperity.
In war, it matters a great deal who wins and therefore is
able to dictate the terms of peace. Murphy, like Biden, supports a “two
state” solution in Israel.
“The only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between
Israelis and Palestinians is a two-state solution. The United States must be
crystal clear in our commitment to preserving that path,” said Senator Murphy.
It may strike students of war other than Murphy that Hamas –
both the government of Gaza and a terrorist organization supported by Iran
pledged to the destruction of Israel – cannot be one of the two states
participating in a future peace between Israel and Gaza.
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