Chances are, the United States and her allies will never win another war outright. There are powers that be who do not want her to, apparently.
War is not, nor has it ever been a pretty thing. It involves espionage, killing, taking prisoners of war, and political intrigue. Every one of these components is necessary to winning. Most of these are thwarted by a greedy media and warped thinking politicians.
Throughout history, warriors have been heroes. There are persons and groups in America who do not see their military as heroic. They tie the hands of the leaders at every opportunity and cause the soldiers to come home feeling a burden of guilt.
Even in the Old Testament we read about graphic brutality. The Israelites were often instructed to destroy every living being among the enemy. This sounds heinous, but God knows human nature. He knows that we often adopt the worst of other cultures rather than the best. He did not want the Israelites inter-marrying with their foes, or bringing back "loot" which often consisted of household idols. He was striving to keep the culture of the Israelites pure and free of interlopers who wanted to introduce new ideas and new gods to them.
We are no different than the people of old. We, too, often absorb the worst of other cultures, but worse than that, in time of war, we sympathize and empathize with the enemy. We want every bit of espionage published. We do not want the prisoners of war punished or questioned. We do not want our soldiers to be the agressor - always the defender. This will never win a war.
The outcome of the recent trial of Bin Laden's driver as an accessory to terrorist acts could not possibly have encouraged our soldiers. The sentence was light enough to have been no sentence at all. The judge even smiled and told him how eager he is to have him rejoin his wife and children. How many American soldiers have been killed as a result of his actions and choices? They will never rejoin their families. The publicity of this so called trial must have been very demoralizing to our fighting men and women.
I personally think that the trial after World War II at Nuremburg handled it right. They tried all the war criminals in one place after the war was over. All were publicly hanged, with the exception of Herman Goerring, who managed to commit suicide. There is no way to have a war crimes trial without it generating a mountain of publicity. This is unhealthy for the war effort.
American soldiers are doing time for "humiliating" prisoners. Though I don't agree with some of the events at Guantanamo Bay, I do understand why they happened. Most of the guards had seen or known of brothers in arms being killed by the very people with whom these prisoners align themselves. They had seen news reports of Americans being kidnapped and/or beheaded by blindfolded people of the ilk of those held at Guantanamo Bay. They would not be human if they did not feel some bitterness.
We in this country bend over backward to be humane. At least once a week I get an e-mail of an American soldier(s) playing with local children, delivering blankets or other supplies to locals and helping in any way they can to make things better for people. In return, they get blown up by a roadside bomb that no one warned them about. In the "new war" our soldiers cannot even tell who the enemy actually is, and yet we ask them to treat those arrested for terrorism hospitibly. That is asking a lot. They go the second mile to find and arrest these known terrorists only to see on the news that a tribunal felt that their crimes were "not so bad". They must surely ask, "why bother?".
This attitude of ours will soon destroy us from the inside. There won't even need to be a war, which is alright, because there won't be a military to fight it.