Why liberals lose shooting wars

Caleb Howe:

President Obama today made yet another statement that is sure to follow him for some time. There can be little doubt the President wanted this line to go down as part of his legacy. Just as there is small doubt that the opposition will pin it to him as a negative. Whatever the case, that the statement is completely false is without question, beyond any semblance of doubt.

"Ideologies are not defeated with guns," the President said, "but better ideas and more attracting and more compelling vision."

This is a lovely thought of the "I didn't put too much effort into this" variety. A simple rewording of the trite and bland 'violence is not the answer" trope, it is a message for kindergarten teachers to spiel yawningly to unruly youngsters. It is not an insight worthy of a serious adult, much less a world leader, and one that would elicit little more than a ho-hum from any but the most glassy-eyed of college freshmen were it delivered by anyone else from any other pulpit. But from the President of the United States, it is worthy of not only repetition, but dissection.

It is all too easy to ask which better ideas caused Adolf Hitler to blow his own brains out, of course. That guns absolutely defeated the Nazis, that guns were absolutely integral to the soldier in war, should go without saying. But it is also true that Hitler was quite literally defeated by a gun. One in his own hand, placed to his own temple, his own finger on the trigger. That was not a triumph of ideas, though better ideas certainly came of it. It was a triumph of violence. Weapons. War. Enemies are defeated in this way. They always have been.

And while Nazis aren't the only example, they are definitely the best. Another one a person might think of is slavery. Remember that war? It's kind of been in the news lately.
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Obama is a poor student of history as this remark proves yet again.  He also does not understand warfare and how wars or won or lost.   Enemy's are defeated when they are persuaded that their cause is hopeless.  Obama's approach has been to give enemies hope by retreating from battle and talking about which side of history he is on.  Beside the Nazi example, the Japanese were not persuaded to quit fighting until they were hit in their homeland with atomic bombs.

The Munich accord made war more inevitable and made it worse.  That is another reason why his proposed Iran deal is so awful.