It’s History Day on Calpundit:

For some reason, every generation loses the ability to appreciate the emotional impact of events from the previous generation. They become merely words in history books, and the players seem somehow like misguided little children making silly mistakes that, really, are sort of obvious in hindsight, aren't they?

Hey, we're not even paying attention to the words of various revered Greatest Generation types who are still alive and fully appreciate the emotional impact of events of their generation. The videogame cowboys who think to prove their manhood by saying things like “glass ‘em” apparently believe these men don’t have a clue about war and geopolitics. After all, they only lived through a worldwide depression, a war of survival that took the lives of about 50 million people and then ran the world during the following 40 years of nuclear standoff known as the cold war. Surely, they could not possibly have anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il.

As Kevin Drum says, “these two are not the first thuggish dictators we have had to face.” Try Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler on for size.

How ironic it is that the Republican baby boomers, most of whom “supported” the Viet Nam war but were awfully busy and didn’t have time to actually participate, would find in their middle years that the elders and the Generals whose favor they so unctuously sought in their youth are now openly contemptuous of their adolescent bloodlust. Because the fact is that many of the elder statesmen who lived through the bloody 20th century are not very impressed with the bellicose prattle emanating from the President and many of his advisors.

I don’t consider him to be a liberal pushover, but Andy Rooney was on Donohue last night and pulled absolutely no punches in his criticism of the Bush administrations foreign policy. (No transcript available.) Studs Terkel is downright apoplectic about the prospects for a worldwide conflagration. And Walter Cronkite said in October that he thought going in to Iraq unilaterally might very well provoke WWIII.

From Scowcroft to Schwartkopf to Zinni to Clark to Shalikashvili --- all younger certainly (except Scowcroft) but nonetheless better informed of the reality of war and more connected to WWII on a visceral level than the amateur historians like Gingrich, Cheney and Perle who complain that the Generals are all "McClellans" --- all of them believe that the rush to war is a mistake.

And, I personally need look no further than my 80 year old father, a retired Navy man and veteran of WWII and Korea who thinks the rhetoric about Saddam and impending war with Iraq is a “joke.” We’re talking about a former John Birch society type wing-nut here, a man who treated the possibility of my older brother refusing to go to Viet Nam as a very personal insult. This man, who voted for George W. Bush with enthusiasm, is convinced that these Neocon hawks are leading this country into disaster.

When I read him the quote from Richard Perle, (another messianic hawk with no military experience) “The Army guys don't know anything. With 40,000 troops, the United States could easily take over Iraq. We don't need anyone else," he replied with one of his more pithy Navy phrases that roughly translates to something like, “why the heck would any President listen to an effeminate draft evader like Perle about anything but how to stuff a coq au vin?”

Needless to say, these older fellows are not necessarily right, merely on the basis of their experience. However, it should be noted everytime somebody trots out the "Pearl Harbor" analogies that there are still some people around who were actually there. And they know it wasn't a video game because they can still see the blood of their buddies and the Auschwitz victims and the millions of refugee children and the widows of their friends when they close their eyes at night.

They are worth listening to because they aren't going to be around forever and they are the last living connection we have with what a real, live world war is like.

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