"Resolve"-to what end?

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"Resolve"-to what end?

Last July after the London bombings, Ben Macintyre writing in the Times
of London asked, what would Churchill have done about the terrorist
threat? This is a good question, considering all the people who issue
statements about "Churchillian resolve" but decline to tell us,
resolve for what? For example, after columnist James Pinkerton last
summer spoke about the need for "resolve," I asked him, twice,
"What is the object of this resolve, to what end is this
'resolve' to be directed?", and he decined to answer, though in
the past he had always replied promptly to my e-mails.

Macintyre's answer is that Churchill would have answered as he did in
his book on the Sudan campaign:

"For in the end, Churchill saw the Sudan campaign as a conflict
between barbarity and civilisation. Of the battle of Omdurman he wrote:
"Civilisation-elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to
discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect
compromise-here advanced with an expression of inexorable
sternness."

That, undoubtedly, would have been Churchill's response to the
suicide bombings in London: these are not disasters to be "tamely
survived" but an immoral assault on civilised values, to be fought
with "inexorable sternness." "

Now that does not sound to me like the Bush/Blair/Pinkerton language,
which boasts about "resolve" but which turns out more often than
not to be the resolve not to give up our belief in unlimited tolerance.
True, it is not unlimited tolerance for those who seek to kill us.
Rather it is unlimited tolerance for those who have the same beliefs as
those who seek to kill us, who have the same goals as those who seek to
kill us, and who in fact support those who seek to kill us. Macintyre
is talking about inexorable sternness, which can only mean sternness
towards our actual enemies, which means, not just those in the front
lines, but the entire enemy army.

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