Two long posts today, both lost to posterity because of some glitch in the publishing software. And honestly? I have no desire to try to reproduce them in full.
So here are some quick notes:
The first lost post had to do with a debate between Bill Ardolino and Rusty of the Jawa Report over the nature of Islam (religion vs. ideology); you can see Bill’s lengthy call for strategic engagement of Muslims here. Rusty’s original post is here, with the subsequent context fleshed out in Bill’s essay.
For my part, I see the problem with defining our enemies as twofold: 1) the theocratic insularity of fundamentalist Islam as practiced by certain individual nation states is incompatible with western liberalism insofar as it rejects pluralism; and so consequently, before we can make strategic cultural inroads with a vast swatch of the Muslim population, we must first push for regime change in those countries that inculcate hatred of the west. Energy independence is a crucial step, but this means, necessarily, nuclear energy; and 2) the failure of many western cultures to insist on assimilation (vs. mere “multicultural inclusion”)—a philosophical position promoted by a Palestinian separatist reared on leftist dogma and then embraced by his ideological fellow travelers in the academy and the world of progressive public policy— has produced balkanized cultures filled with warring identity groups, proving to be, in retrospect, one of the biggest sociological miscalculations made by western liberalism. Forceful correction is needed. But if the western media’s refusal to print the Mohammed cartoons out of “tolerance” for Islam is any indication (and we can join to that former President Clinton’s call, if indeed he made it, for the prosecution of the Danish publishers of those cartoons), we are taking the wrong tack, led by a leadership elite raised on conciliation and symbolic diplomacy.
My opinions aside, there is much to recommend in both Bill and Rusty’s posts—which, in addition to striking an adversarial rhetorical pose, give lie to the idea that Bush supporters are lock-step cultists.
For what it’s worth—and as a way to engage the debate—I believe Bill is wrong to say that
The Allies’ plan for defeating Germany and Japan had almost nothing to do with enlisting their native populations to fight against their fascist rulers. In fact, the strategy was quite the opposite, with a component specifically focused on breaking the civilian will to fight by carpet bombing cities to dreadful effect. No similar strategy of subjugation—in terms of aims nor methodology—is currently in effect or even possible in the war against Islamic extremism.
[My emphasis]
Certainly in the current domestic climate, Bill is correct; but should we start seeing a string of attacks on malls or other non-military targets here at home, the American people will, in my estimation, find it remarkably easy to rationalize a use of the military that is less discriminatory in its targeting (under the pretext that in order to break the enemy’s will, we must first turn those who refuse to take sides against them by sheer force of terror).
The rejoinder to this, of course, is that such a violent reaction plays into Al Qaeda’s hands and promotes the very war of civilizations we’ve taken such care to avoid—that Muslims will rise en masse against the US. in response. And this is certainly a possibility.
But then, nightly news reports of charred American school children being pried loose from the twisted metal of school buses might convince us that neither our pre-911 strategy of treating terror attacks as law enforcement issues, nor our post-911 strategy of treating war as a game of Operation, has worked, leaving us with two options: isolationism and disengagement (which the jihadists would use as an opportunity to launch wide scale attacks in Europe and Asia); or a willingness to fight fiercely, which could involve strategically mixing smart munitions with other means of proving our refusal to accept terror tactics on US soil.
He is also right to point out that technology is increasingly leveling the playing field, a situation that minimized the “defensive advantages of the United States” over time. (He might have also added that a free society is necessarily more vulnerable to attack against its defenses). But whereas Bill uses this argument to note the necessity of strategic cultural engagement, I see it as a warning—specifically, that while we should certainly engage culturally where the conditions dictate such engagement will prove useful, we nevertheless need to concentrate our military efforts on the offensive (as the Bush administration and it’s war architects have done), where our advantage is far superior, and likely to grow even moreso, until such time that new technologies are able once again to widen the defensive playing field.
****
The second long post I lost had to do with the Care Bears TV show. But I’ve already completely forgotten the gist of that one, save for a visceral distrust I have for this one blue bastard who I simply do not trust, and who I think is plotting a coup to take over Care Bear village and turn it into an eco-Utopia.
And these things almost always end poorly.
Not too much disagreement. We might be able to attempt and win a grand and bloody battle of cultures successfully in the near term, but ONLY AFTER (as you cite) a catastrophic event on a scale much larger than 9-11, or a series of equivalent attacks. Because otherwise such an action would be politically impossible (as you also cite).
But
A. such a conflict of out-and-out cultural subjugation would need to be on a global scale so terrible as to defy rational application and outcome. Merely the economic implications would be horrible (nevermind ethical, etc)
B. Any such course of action – even under extreme motivations – will become untenable with 2 generations because of effective mutually assured destruction due to flattening tech hierarchies.
Also this:
No disagreement. But our offensive operations are doomed to failure or have severely diminished success (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc) without actually representing a lever to enable relatively successful, stable political solutions.
In this context, the thrust of my argument remains: we cannot frame this war as a war against Islam, because we need Islamic allies to really win it.
Bill,
The US has not framed the struggle as such. It is being framed by the other side in that light. And frankly, I’m out of intellectual latitude on how to deal with the the framing question when six-month-old cartoons in a Danish newspaper are used by jihadist loonies as a tool.
Down the road of “understanding” the other side in an ideological struggle where we are clearly in the right, lies appeasement. Our western heritage is at stake–no more–no less. Complacency about what is at stake and the accompanying guilt that some in the West feel for damn near everything will lead us to defeat.
Bill,
You are disastrously wrong.
It’s hard for me to imagine how this war could be worse than WWI or WWII if we fought it on the same scale. That it would result in lop-sided casulaties for our enemies is without a doubt. That’s not a bad thing to anyone except those who think that winning a war by slaughtering massive numbers of the enemy while sustaining relatively light casualties ourselves would somehow make us immoral.
What is wrong with saying we are at war against Islamo- fascism?
I found Bill’s post sort of amusing in that he basically is trying to convince people that water is wet. I don’t understand why people want to demonize Islam; it’s obvious we aren’t going to eliminate it, so that just leaves reform. We need to punish the extremists and reward the moderates and reformers; lumping them all together only serves the extremists’ interests. Take a look at Kurdish Iraq and the Ayatollah Sistani if you have doubts about whether a moderate version of Islam could peacefully co-exist with the West.
On the subject of reprisals, no matter what happens we’re not going to go back to firebombing major cities with napalm the way we did in WW II (killing tens of millions). In fact, I’d wager we are never again going to do anything designed to punish a civilian population, or “break their will.” Even if we’re nuked, the response will be intended to eliminate the military threat and deter a future attack; the massacre of civilians will be incidental. And that’s assuming we know which country it came from, or that it came from a country at all.
Moral is as moral does. We all believe this intrinsically. We only differ on the causal aspects. The problems begin when we apply this universal ethic to war; it turns everything we normally know as true on it’s head.
I read long ago that during the chaos of Lebannon in the early ‘80s, one militia leader made the mistake of kidnapping and killing some Soviet Embassy personnel. A short time later the leader of that militia received a package via courier that contained his brothers genitals. Afterwards, the Soviets never had another problem in the region.
Carpet bombing Saudi Arabia in response to 9/11 would have been ineffective. The Saudi population may have been initially sympathetic to Bin Laden, but they still weren’t responsible; Al Queda wasn’t their government. Japanese and German support for the Reich and the Empire were far more direct, so the WWII analogy doesn’t really hold.
But still, I often wonder just how long the Iraqi insurgency would have lasted and just how many Iraqi and American lives would have been saved if we had attacked their tribalist sensibilities more directly. They do have values, you know, they just aren’t like ours. For example, would Zarqawi’s appetite for Jihad have been dampened if his mother had been disappeared, everyone in his extended family been fired from their jobs, his tribe’s lands been confiscated, their structures demolished, businesses closed, crops burned and their fields salted? The question becomes sharper still when we realize that like the Soviets in Lebannon, we probably wouldn’t have really had to do much of this at all; merely demonstrating that we would be willing to may have been all it took to convice the jihaddist to pack it in. When we consider all of the lives and money that could have been saved, all of the strife and turmoil that may have been avoided, will our descendents look back on ourcurrent handling of this war as having been immoral? On the one hand, I find such a strategy as repulsive as anyone could, but on the other hand, moral is as moral does…
yours/
peter.
I don’t understand why, either, since Muslims do such a wonderful job on their own.
Robert,
Right, but I addressed that in the next sentence:
The western tradition of war, as I remember and paraphrase Victor Hanson, is that democracies are slow to resort to it but once we do, we don’t stop until we have won totally.
But we do less successful when we don’t adopt that approach (Vietnam, Korea, Somalia). So do we expect it to work this time?
Hmmph. Call me crazy, but that crescent is pointed right towards Mecca.
Moral is as moral does. We all believe this intrinsically. We only differ on the causal aspects. The problems begin when we apply this universal ethic to war; it turns everything we normally know as true on it’s head.
And on which side of that rationalization will we be? With the coulter’s of the world? Or the sane people?
albo,
Victor was referring to states at war; our enemy is transnational. If there was a country labelled “Islamofascism” containing all the extremists and no one else, which we could simply bomb to smithereens, that would make perfect sense.
But we did remove and replace the governments of Japan and Germany to excellent effect, so I think your point is well-taken regarding states like Iran and Syria, and of course Iraq. Look at the successes we’ve already had in Iraq: a terrorist regime has been removed, free elections have been held and as a result terrorism has been largely discredited among not just Iraqis but Jordanians as well, and the Iraqi Islamic moderates are ascendant. I think people are fooling themselves if they think Iran’s government will fall internally or learn to play nice anytime in the near future.
wishbone –
Certain right-wing entities enthusiastically agreeing with the clash of civilizations concept are also tools of jihadist loonies. The US has NOT framed the struggle as such, the govt has framed it well. Certain elements of the administrations base want it framed differently.
Ardsgane:
You are “disastrously [naive/ill-informed]:”
Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have such pesky moral inhibitions to not worry about indiscriminate slaughter of a billion people, given that no political outcomes are easily tenable without nation states as enemies. It’s also probably for the best that you lack the imagination to see the economic pitfalls in a globalized economy of mass slaughter especially with regards to energy supply, as you know, it might SKEER YOU LOTS, and yor cock might seem a lot smaller in the cruel light of geo-political reality.
Carin:
Nothing.
TallDave:
Yet frustratingly necessary lately, however.
albo:
I’d agree in many ways. But in this case, define the enemy, define the targets, the methodology and the ends for all-out war.
I’m not so sure about the second part of this: “without actually…” It sounds a lot like recent demands from people of all political stripes that Afghanistan and Iraq be liberal democracies almost overnight. That is just not a reasonable expectation and the Bush Doctrine (which in part espouses the long-term democratization of tyrannies) has never implied that it would be a short battle.
Anyone who is frustrated by the failure of Afghanistan and Iraq to liberalize in such a short period of time has not paid attention to history. Germany and Japan took much longer. Turkey, which liberalized voluntarily and not pursuant to an invasion did it in 75 years.
TallDave,
Try rewriting it like this:
Now ask yourself why you think that Islam can’t be eliminated. I think if you’re completely honest with yourself about it, the answer will be illuminating.
Here’s a question to help you towards an answer: If we completely demolished Mecca and Medina, what would that imply to Muslims?
Umm… Iran? Syria? Neither of those qualify?
Woah, woah, woah. We’re talking about incidental slaughter of innocents. Of course incidental slaughter of a billion is moral if it is done out of military necessity. Sad, but moral.
We have done it before, and we can certainly be counted on to do it again should the right set of circumstances present themselves. If we are called to kill them in great numbers, which I pray is avoidable, and suspect that it is, we almost certainly dehumanize them first. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate our capability and willigness to do whatever is necessary to protect our way of life.
Bill,
Is this what passes for an argument where you come from?
TW: larger
This is a partial straw-man. We AREN’T going to eliminate fascism. We haven’t even tried, though we’ve had numerous chances to do so. The only difference here is that fascism, by its nature, cannot be reformed; Islam can be.
Will it happen? I’m cynical. But it is possible.
TV (Harry)
TW: forward. I’m looking forward, but I see more of the same.
This war is too complicated for some folks.
We don’t want a war on the scale of WW1 or WW2. Too many civilian casualties, economic catastrophes, and nuclear possibilities. Ground troops would be too clumsy and blunt. We require surgical precision. I believe that we do need to wage a world war, but it should be done with propaganda, foreign aide, and thousands of black ops teams.
We need to gather intelligence, study, and ultimately eliminate every hostile Islamic fascist. Stop the poison at its source before it infects any more minds. Occasionally we will accidentally grease a friendly, but I’d rather have one friendly on my conscience compared to a million.
People disappear every day. For all I know, it could be aliens.
”…while we should certainly engage culturally where the conditions dictate such engagement will prove useful, we nevertheless need to concentrate our military efforts on the offensive”
Cultural engagement is on the offensive. “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” And the important thing is our aim, our goal. What result do we want? A lot of special operators describe the War On Terror as World War IV. (World War III being the Cold War.) A pretty accurate description.
Or maybe we could just kill everybody. Jesus!
Yes, of course it is. And I have been fighting that war by trying to first defeat the memetic poison inside our own cultural discourse.
But here, I’m talking specifically about pro-active pre-emptive military action (as opposed to concentrating on defensive military postures).
When Bill says that we cannot win this war without the help of Islamic allies, what he means is that we cannot win it on terms that he would find non-objectionable. The specter he presents of world-wide economic failure is just that, a specter. He offers no reasons for us to assume such a disaster, and no reasons to prove that it would be fatal to us (more fatal than say, losing NYC). His purpose is to simply scare us into accepting that the only alternative he finds moral is also the practical alternative.
He objects to the “indiscriminate” slaughter of a billion people–not that anyone ever said it would be necessary to slaughter a billion people, but he wants to make it sound as bad as possible. He refuses to accept that Islamism is not a small tumor within Islamic society that can be surgically removed without discomfort to anyone but a few radicals. This is so totally wrong that it’s almost impossible to believe that any non-leftist could ascribe to it. Islamism enjoys near-universal support within Islamic countries, far more support than was enjoyed by the Nazis, and probably more than was enjoyed by Tojo’s military junta.
Here is a question for Bill, and it is the measure of where he stands on this: If it turns out that the only way to win the war is to kill hundreds of millions of people–men, women and children–are you prepared to do it? If it’s a question of us or them, do you adhere to the moral limitation you’ve placed on yourself, or do you say that our lives and freedom are more important. I realize that you don’t think we face that choice, but accept the hypothetical, and tell us where you would stand on it.
Hmmmmm.
Utter rubbish.
1. Prove to me that the larger mass of muslims are in fact “moderate”. Though it would help if someone were to actually define what a “moderate” muslim actually is.
2. Someone needs to prove that Islam *can* be reformed. Looking at the history of Islam it’s clear that militants tend to crop up on a regular basis. So if we were to “reform” Islam today, doesn’t this mean that our grandchildren might be required to deal with this situation all over again?
3. If it’s possible to reform Islam, why has it been nearly impossible to reform it in Western countries? Wouldn’t it be easier here in the West to begin with?
4. No it’s not unimaginable to slaughter 1.2 billion muslims. It’s certainly not unimaginable to muslim militants to consider and plan for the slaughter of 5 billion non-muslim infidels.
5. If the difficulty is the mismatch between a transnational entity, which is under no obligations to follow international law, and nation-states which may be so constrained, then the solution is to create anti-terrorism agencies that act transnationally.
I.e. ressurect the old OSS.
6. Technology does not necessarily level the playing field. It may do so but only if it is allowed to. A cell phone can be used to detonate an IED. But cell-phone blockers will eliminate that technological device. Since terrorists are dependent on COTS, Commerical Off The Shelf, devices these can be countered or eliminated with much greater ease than miltiary-grade equipment.
The only requirement is a willingness to inconvenience the civilian population that’s dependent on these devices. If you don’t care about that, then you can disable most civilian technology.
7. IMHO I’m willing to treat people, regardless of their religion or skin color, as adults. If they’re looking at me as a target, then I have no compunctions at looking at them as a target.
Regardless of age, gender, religion or marital status.
8. What kind of economic issues could result from framing this as a war on Islam? What exactly do the Islamic countries produce that would be so catastrophic on the world market other than oil?
And just how much of an impact would it be if we were, in the course of a war, carpet bomb Islamic population centers with incendiary and cluster-bomblet munitions? If we, as an example, slaughtered every last muslim in Saudi Arabia, would that have any effect at all on international commerce? Isn’t the oil industry in nearly every muslim country actually operated by expatriates from Western countries? Aren’t the experts that people turn to all from the West and Russia?
So what if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were utterly consumed in a firestorm? What impact would this have other than a moral one?
What global economic impact would result in Syria being exterminated? What if the entire population of Iran were killed but the oil facilities were left standing?
What impact would there be other than a moral one? We’re talking about countries with minimal internal and external economies apart from oil. And that oil is largely operated by expatriates.
How about it Bill? But bring logic and facts, not this nonsense ok?
“How about it Bill? But bring logic and facts, not this nonsense ok?”
Don’t worry about bringing morals, they’re apparently unnecessary.
Was it immoral to nuke Hiroshima? Nagasaki?
Ed,
Great post.
—
Dorkafork,
Which morals? The ones that tell you that it’s better for you to die than to kill the people trying to kill you? I do not recognize that as moral. Any moral code that disarms innocent people in the face of lethal violence is evil.
Would it have been moral to nuke Pyongyang? Hanoi? Did JFK make the wrong choice in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or would you have preferred a radioactive Havana?
Why didn’t Reagan invade Russia? Anything less would be “disarm(ing) innocent people in the face of lethal violence”. Why was he so weak on communism?
if the soviets had launched I’m pretty sure the gipper would have pushed the button.
I have no doubt that we are doing that very thing as I type Natesnake. Excerpt from Richard Miniter’s Shadow War (2004):
“What exactly do the Islamic countries produce that would be so catastrophic on the world market other than oil?”
That’s got to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard in weeks. Bill Gates isn’t some rich businessman. Besides Microsoft, what big company does he own? NYC isn’t that big a city. Besides all the people and the buildings, there’s practically nothing there!
“if the soviets had launched I’m pretty sure the gipper would have pushed the button.”
And doing so would not have been immoral. And though I don’t want to answer for Bill (who seems to have quite wisely left this thread), but the answer to the question: “If it turns out that the only way to win the war is to kill hundreds of millions of people–men, women and children–are you prepared to do it?” is yes. It is the “if” part that is important. Jeff apparently agrees with Bill (and myself) that “ONLY AFTER (as you cite) a catastrophic event on a scale much larger than 9-11, or a series of equivalent attacks” could such a response occur.
As opposed to Ardsgaine, who comes across as believing that what made Hiroshimi moral was the 90,000 to zero body count.
No, dorka–what made Hiroshima and Nagasaki moral was that the body count would have been akin to 3 million (mimimum) on the Japanese side and 300-400 thousand (minimum) on the American side if the invasion had proceeded in the fall of 1945.
And I haven’t read one serious post that comtemplates laying waste to the muslim world. What I argue is that we are being less than serious if we believe our enemies can be overcome with “moderation” and block grants of twinkies and other sugary snacks.
There is one way to deal with bin Laden and his ilk–extermination. If that takes black ops on a ruthless global scale, so be it. If it takes the occasional carpet bombing of Waziristan–so be it.
Yes, and yes. How many people have died as a result of not destroying those two regimes? And now North Korea has acquired nukes which threaten Seoul and Tokyo. Was it moral to stand back and allow that to happen?
Would I have preferred it to what? A radioactive Miami? Yes. Absolutely.
What I would really prefer is for situations like that to be dealt with before they get to that point. So I would have preferred that some sort of strong action had been taken in 1979 when the Islamists took our embassy people hostage. I would have preferred that strong action had been taken in 1983 when Hezbollah blew the hell out of our marine barracks in Beirut. The longer we wait when things like that happen, the more people will die in the end.
Precisely. It would have been immoral for us to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers in an assault on Japan when we had a method of defeating them that did not cost us one single casualty. In a war, our moral responsibility isn’t to enemy civilians, it is to the men who are fighting for our freedom. If we have effective methods of warfare that will preserve their lives, then those are the methods we ought to use, regardless of how many civilian deaths it causes. The deaths of civilians in a war are the moral responsibility of the aggressors, not those defending themselves.
That question implies that we were fighting those nations to win, and we weren’t. We were merely fighting them to get them to do our bidding, following the whole “politics by other means” philosophy. So in the context of the wars we were actually fighting against them, no, it wouldn’t have been moral.
Now, had we been fighting them with victory being our goal, nuking those cities could be considered moral but only in a very abstract sense. Because if we had actually fought them to win, i.e., had our goal in fighting them been the destruction of their regimes as we have done in Iraq using a nuclear weapon would have been totally unnecessary since, we would have handily whooped their asses conventionally.
Sorry if that doesn’t answer the question.
I understand perfectly well why we nuked Japan and why it was a moral action. Thank you for missing the point.
“And I haven’t read one serious post that comtemplates laying waste to the muslim world. What I argue is that we are being less than serious if we believe our enemies can be overcome with “moderation†and block grants of twinkies and other sugary snacks.” Scroll up. Granted, they’re comments and not posts, but… I don’t disagree with you on any major points, wishbone, I see where you’re coming from. I think our enemies can be overcome with “moderation” and cultural engagement, just not solely through cultural engagement. It is a valuable tool that is being thrown away by those who would say that Islam cannot coexist with the West. And it’s just as foolish, if not more so, as thinking we can’t win with the military, and we can only win by begging the terrorists’ forgiveness. I’m certainly no bleeding heart when it comes to fighting this war, I like the phrase World War IV that I mentioned earlier.
Ardsgaine: “Would I have preferred it to what? A radioactive Miami? Yes. Absolutely.” That’s part of the point. Miami did not become radioactive. We know how that turned out. Kennedy handled the situation smartly. And in part that was by not attacking Havana before the missile sites became operational. I doubt many historians would believe dropping nukes would have been a better alternative. I guess you disagree.
Just maybe there are some situations that can be handled well, and even better, than cavalierly dropping nukes. Or declaring war on Islam.
I’m a casual student of the history of the second world war, and it always amuses me that there is probably an example for any point that one wanted to make with regard to the lessons of history. We forget that even with regards to the total war with the Axis powers that total war didn’t quite mean ‘wantonly kill the fascists’. Even Nazi Germany produced a couple of people willing to do the right things, many of whom died at the hands of the Nazi regime. As I recall, the Germans field-tested some of their prototype weapons on the Italian navy after Italy tried switching sides.
I don’t question the morality of leveling Hiroshima, Nagisaki, and Tokyo, and I don’t believe dorkafork was either. (I think one can make a serious case either way with regards to Dresden.) I do question the wisdom of saying that anything we do that leads to a higher loss of enemy life and a lower loss of friendly life is moral.
There is a massive gray area where one can argue either way about the morality of these things, and it is impossible to come up with a fixed dividing line. There is something to be said for Machiavelli’s advice, but we forget at our own suffering the words of another ancient political master “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” I assure you the Chinese have not forgotten.
I’m not trying to start a fight here, but frankly dorkafork, you and Bill both have been strong on invective and short on reasoning in this matter.
I don’t think you’re “soft.” I don’t think either of you are soft. But you are wrong.
The cultural war will never go our way so long as we insist upon appeasing the worst elements of Islamic society. There is no reason on earth that a “moderate” muslim should take his life into his own hands and confront jihadis when we refuse to defend the Danes, refuse to defend the mulsim editors who have been jailed over the cartoons and refuse to defend the muslim singer who has been threatened with death because she took off her burkha.
Our weakness, cutural and otherwise, proves to the jihadis that they are right and proves to muslims who are not wed to the idea of jihad that we will only listen to violent lunatics.
For what it’s worth I’m not particularly interested in fighting a war against Islam either. I’m fighting against backwardness, repression and murder. The fact that the backward, repressive murders happen to be a sect of Islam is unfortunate, but I’m not willing to pretend that they’re rotarians either just to make you feel better. I’m also not willing to qualify my support for free speech, women’s rights and artistic freedom in hopes of acquiring “allies” who don’t believe in free speech, artistic freedom and women’s rights. Those are the folks I’m fighting.
Finally, your fascination with nuclear war and the slaughter of a billion muslims is a straw man. No serious person has called for a nuclear exhange in this war. As a matter of fact the blood spilled so far has been in the hopes of preventing the possiblity of a nuclear exchange in the future. To argue otherwise, to argue that we who disagree with your postions on the cartoons, free speech, and art as they apply to our dealings with Muslims is simply a way to make yourself feel morally superior. It’s a pretty cheap trick, and frankly it should be beneath you.
In all fairness, I didn’t bring up nukes until after nikkolai’s comment. But it looks like trying to use that in analogies wasn’t wise.
I really don’t see my arguments as “qualifying” free speech. I am just trying to narrowly argue against blanket condemnations of Islam, that Islam is incompatible with democracy (Bill has been arguing that as well). I think that hurts the war effort and support of free speech is essential to the war effort. In fact, I’m planning a post supportive of the Muslim editors you mentioned. And looking everywhere for Carlsberg beer. Beyond that I don’t think I have anything else to add.
On the whole cultural war gig, I don’t think it will be sufficient, in and of itself, to win. However, I would argue that it is “divide and conquer” by a very different name. I don’t we can write off all of Islam as hopeless, because in so doing, we abandon the prospect of relatively responsible democratic states in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So the question then becomes one of how to affect a phase change from embassy burning Syrians, to suburbanite Kurds. In some cases, Iraq and Afghanistan, force worked. In others, such as Libya, diplomacy worked. In yet in others, like Lebanon, “cultural engagement” was the key.
Getting back to the original principle of “divide and conquer” is that the process of dividing your enemy allows one to then tailor tactics and methods to individual weaknesses, rather than applying a blanket engagement or no engagement approach to all comers. To that end, engagement may not be a way to win the war, in and of itself, but it might be a quite servicible way of shattering the monolithic nature of the threat.
Thus forgetting that from their point of view, “cultural engagement” is an attack. F’cats’ sake, that’s specifically what they give as a reason for responding with violence!
I swear to God, one of the reasons the mad mullahs are so nasty is continually being called liars and fools by the allies they need. They stand up before the whole world and explain their rationale, their grievances, their strategy, and their tactics in words of few syllables and sentences of few words—and no sooner have they sat down and twitched their robes back in place than some daft Westerner is on his feet apologizing: “It isn’t his fault that my colleague is too ignorant to pound sand. He is unfortunately too disadvantaged by cultural imperialism and capitalist repression to know how to phrase his ideas properly. His real problem is [fill in left-Rousseauvian bigotry here, heavy on the cultural relativism]. Let us seek understanding.”
I don’t think Ardolino would go in for “understanding”, meaning appeasement, but the tragedy of Bill’s attitude is that he has clearly internalized the cultural relativist, deconstructivist, the-West-is-evil memes so thoroughly and basically that he is reasoning from those bases even while trying to argue against the application of the principles.
In any conflict, when one side takes up arms the whole moral basis shifts. The other side must either accept defeat or take up arms in its own cause, and regardless of whether the excuse is “morality” or the Command of Darth if it will not do the second the first is inevitable. The dead have no morality; they’re dead. Slaves have no morality; they are tools, effectively as inanimate as the shovels they wield. Losing qua losing is never moral, and Jesuitry used to justify the contrary position is a weapon used by the enemy.
Much antiwar commentary is badly-concealed bigoted jingoism—somewhere down there is the notion that we are so strong as to be invulnerable, and little brown people can bash themselves against us forever without affecting tenure, the availability of vegetarian meals, or anything else of importance. This is a challenge, and militants love challenges.
What makes actus a hateful lying fuck in this instance is leaping immediately from “this is likely to happen” to “I desire this to happen.” I do NOT want to kill Muslims, individually, serially, or in job lots, and any implication that I do is a lie, hate speech against me and mine. But if it comes down to “them” and “me”, I choose “them” dying and “me” not. I want most passionately to avoid Option Zero. The thing I hate worst about the current Left is their dogged determination to avoid doing anything at all to prevent it from becoming necessary.
Regards,
Ric
Let me clarify my opinion.
I am not calling for gratuitous death and destruction. This is what I am saying:
1) There is no weapon in our arsenal that should be automatically off the table when considering our options.
2) Our response to any attack should be overwhelmingly disproportional. If we are hit, we must pound them into submission. Simply hitting them back only perpetuates the violence indefinitely.
3) Our only consideration in deciding how to fight should be to bring about a swift end to the war in a way that preserves the lives of our soldiers and forces the complete capitulation of the enemy.
3) We should not trade our soldiers’ lives for the lives of their civilians.
4) No population is defeated until it has agreed to an unconditional surrender.
5) Surrender means turning over any hostiles and weapons caches hiden within the population. Until that is done, the population has not surrendered.
6) Occupation is not a dirty word. No government should be allowed in a formerly hostile country that we do not create ourselves along lines satisfactory to our own sensibilities. Until such a government is set up, the area will be ruled by the US military.
7) No amount of civilian deaths should be allowed to overrule a necessary military operation. Civilian deaths are the responsibility of the aggressors. Civilians who do not support the hostile forces, must do their best to separate themselves from their vicinity.
…those who think that winning a war by slaughtering massive numbers of the enemy while sustaining relatively light casualties ourselves would somehow make us immoral.
The purpose of war is not to slaughter the enemy indiscriminately, but to force him to your will.
I think I over-reacted with my initial post in this thread. It’s a known side-effect of sickness and lack of sleep. I think part of the problem is that we are arguing past each other here; with a dozen different commenters each with slightly different definitions and opinions its hard to have a coherent debate. Further aggrivating the problem is that I (at least) am not just aiming my arguments at the commenters here but at commenters on several other blogs engaging in the same debate, some of whom have far more forceful opinions.
I suspect we need some common definiton of what a “moderate muslim” is, or at least some idea of what the other commenters agree is or isn’t moderate. We all probably agree that the extremists need to be eliminated (killed, imprisoned, converted to moderates), and that it would be best if we killed as few moderates as possible. And I suspect we all want to do so with as few American casualties as possible, and we all believe that sacrificing fundamental American values is unacceptable. We now need to merely define those terms…
I suspect the problem is is that many of us (myself included) have internalized the meme that it is better to delay making a decision until as many facts are in as possible when it comes to judging the “other” than to make a quick decision and solve the problem, knowing that there is a chance you made a mistake. We’d rather not have on our conscience that we killed an innocent, but fail to take in to account that in our inaction we may instead have doomed several innocents.
What set me off was Ardsgaine’s unqualified assertion that it is better to kill any number of them than to risk one more of ours. Although I understand and agree with the ideal behind that statement, I can’t accept it in practice as I believe the long term consequences of such a decision are unknowable, and one cannot assert that such a decision may not cause much more harm to us somewhere in the future. Alternatively, showing a consistant degree of mercy even at risk to onself provides a long-term advantage which may very well minimize future harm.
The point is indeed not to kill them; the point is to defeat them.
But killing them in “job lots” may be required to defeat them, though that is not the actual goal. Whether we go down that road or not depends on them, more than on us.
Which cannot be accomplished if you are too busy worrying about how many civilians you kill.
Look… the countries of the Middle East know they are weak compared to the West. They have outsourced their fight against us to international terrorist organizations in order to provide themselves with plausible deniability. They should not be allowed to get away with it. That was the whole point of Bush’s post 9/11 doctrine.
Iran is the number one sponsor of terrorism, according to the State Department, yet it is sitting there untouched after four years of fighting. Why? Because we have taken long-range, heavy bombardment off the table, and committed ourselves to slogging it out on the ground in one country after another for the sole reason of reducing civilian deaths. That constrains us to concluding the war in Iraq before we can push on to Iran, and so long as Iran and Syria remain untouched we might be in Iraq for a long time.
In the meantime, Iran is creeping towards the acquisition of nukes. We are in a race with time, and imo, we are losing. I have a serious problem with putting our boys over there to fight in conditions that even up the odds for the enemy. I have an even more serious problem with allowing that enemy time to acquire a weapon that will put everything our men have fought and died for at jeopardy.
I’ve been a supporter of this administration throughout the Iraq War, even when it was doing stuff I knew was idiotic (e.g., First Fallujah). If Bush fails us on Iran, it will wipe out everything he has done. Our troops will not be safe in the Middle East so long as Iran can threaten them with nuclear destruction. It must be stopped. We can not worry about angering or embarrassing “moderate” anti-regime elements within Iran. We have to fight this war alone, because there is no one else prepared to do what it will take to stop Iran.
Mojo my friend, that is a recipe for at best, foreverwar, and at worst, defeat.
WWI: Germany is “defeated” without the first foreign boot touching her soil. Result: WWII twenty-two years later.
WWII: Italy, Japan and Germany are totally defeated, surrendering unconditionally, their aggressive fascist regimes completely dismantled. Result: Italy, Germany, and Japan of today: democratic, peaceful, productive allies of no danger to anyone.
Korea: our first “UN war.” Goal: drive North Korean communists from the South. Result: Tens of thousands of American soldiers dead and a present day nuclear armed Kim Jong Il presiding over an unspeakably cruel and murderous ultra-militarized Famine State.
Vietnam: our second “UN War.” Goal: drive North Vietnamese communists from the South. Result: tens of thousands of American Soldiers dead and a million wounded with the US eventually leaving and South Vietnam falling shortly thereafter to an unspeakably cruel, ultra-militarized totalitarian regime which brings an utter human catastrophe to the entire region.
Gulf War: “this shall not stand.” Goal: drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Result: another, more divisive war in Iraq 12 years later.
Okay, does anyone notice a pattern? Mojo? Anyone?
The lesson here is that peace proceeds from victory, period. When we fight with less than victory as our goal that is exactly what we get, along with still more war. War is not “politics by other means.” War is the total failure of politics in the face of an aggressor who will not be appeased.
From a .sig I once saw: peace is knowing your enemy is dead.
Ards,
Now ask yourself why you think that Islam can’t be eliminated. I think if you’re completely honest with yourself about it, the answer will be illuminating.
Well, I have this little ethical problem with genocide or mass forced conversion. Is that the illumination you were looking for?
If you read through the end of the comment, you’ll find I agree re Iran and Syria. I would toss in Cuba for good measure. These are all governments that are essentially thugocracies; they have no legitimate claim to sovereignty over the people they oppress.
I believe in war for freedom, because it works.
Mansoor Ijaz
Tall Dave, way back up there you said:
”Victor was referring to states at war; our enemy is transnational. If there was a country labelled “Islamofascism†containing all the extremists and no one else, which we could simply bomb to smithereens, that would make perfect sense.”
Victor Hansen wasn’t referring to nations – he was referring to cultures. It’s the pivot the body of his work concerning historical conflict turns on.
I contend that the number of persons who are active consumers of information, who regularly seek opinion and debate on matters important to them above and beyond what directly affects their daily lives, constitute a very small fraction of the franchised population of this country.
When the actions of the enemy warrant, the polity will demand effective response. And given (I paraphrase from someone else above) the “leveling of the technological field” that has enabled what is at its core a tribal barbarian threat the power to not just be noticed, but to relentlessly, randomly, and pointlessly commit murder by retail or wholesale against our population.
The progressive element of western civ can abase themselves all they want. They can apologize, they can care, they can profess to feel the others’ pain… but the progressives aren’t the ones who will pull the trigger. Neither will it be hard right fundies. It will be the conglomerate, weighted toward a largely ill-educated and by nature apathetic polity.
Before the advent of industrial war, underage boys and single men literally ran away from home to participate in “the big show”. After the last century, the Madison Avenue line has been “goodbye to all that” and that ALL war is evil and that only BAD or STUPID people fight wars.
It’s never stupid or evil to kill someone who needs killing. And those of us who have been there know that.
The last half of the last century the goal was to win and be around to enjoy victory. That, in a nutshell, is why Uncle Ronnie didn’t invade Russia.
Islamists impossible to confront because they are transnational? Lack of a nation to target? Who says? I imagine waking up on some fine Tuesday morning in September only to find three million Americans dead in three, four, or a dozen cities, and then watching the coverage switching back and forth between the aftermath of the attacks, and the dancing in the streets in Ramallah or Damascus or Islamabad.
Only in a time of unimaginable wealth and unprecedented decadence such as today could such a worthless, pointless bunch of barbarians ever rise to the level of a valid international threat. The enemy are at base brigands: they seek a return to a utopia that never was utopic, and most cerainly will never be realized as a result of their tactics of senseless murder and strategy of depending on our forebearance to bring them victory.
If this were 1906, Teddy Roosevelt would have paved the mideast by now – to popular acclaim – if he’d faced an enemy capable of killing millions of Americans and hell bent on doing it.
It’s about tipping points. I used to comment on the war a lot more frequently but have come to accept that the approaching cusp of history is beyond my power to influence one way or the other. Now I just wait. And hope that al Q or whatever stripe of Islamist who does commit the unimaginable will do it somewhere where my family won’t be a statistic.
Then we’ll find out exactly what technology means when it’s civilization v. pirates.
Re the “economic interrelation” argument against war in our Modern Times: there was an internationalist movement in the early 1900’s that turned on “an end to war” based on exactly that premise. Yes, they thought they were at the end of history then, too.
Economy isn’t an issue to people who understand that life and death are the stakes of the day.
Sorry for the length. But that day is coming.
TW: “level”. “They’ll have to open a lower level of Hell to accomadate the traffic.”
But de-Nazification and de-Ba’athification, those were not forced conversions?
Illumination: You are giving religious beliefs a special status over other beliefs. This is a weakness among some religious conservatives, including our president. Islam is not a religion of peace. It never has been. Could it become one? I think the burden of proof is on them.
Btw, you know as well as I do that Islam is not the religion of one particular race. What I’m saying has nothing to do with racism or genocide.
TMJ,
Well, I think it’s more accurate to say Victor was referring to how states in Western culture go to war. It would be difficult to wage all-out war against a culture, and in fact I’m not even sure what that would mean. Are we going to burn down all the mosques and demand they convert to Christianity or secular humanism?
Islamists impossible to confront because they are transnational? Lack of a nation to target? Who says?
Not me, I think action against states like Iran and Syria makes perfect sense, and will ultimately be necessary. What I object to is the idea we’re at war with Islam as a culture. I think it’s more accurate to say we are liberating Muslims from their state opressors.
But de-Nazification and de-Ba’athification, those were not forced conversions? Illumination: You are giving religious beliefs a special status over other beliefs.
We still have Nazis and Baathists; they haven’t been forced to convert.
Also, there’s a difference between a tyrannical fascist mass-murdering war-for-conquest government and a religion with 1.2 billion people. It’s not a special status for religion, it’s a special status for fascist political parties.
Oh, and genocide can be religious as well as racial.
Genocide is defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) article 2 as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
I keep seeing this as well, and it infuriates me that so many people are going to insist on seeing the body count before they are convinced that more needs to be done.
The hole under the WTC from the first bombing was seventy feet deep. Seventy feet! Think about that for a few minutes. It was a wake up call, but we all rolled over and went back to sleep. We were rudely wakened again on 9/11, but a lot of people are wanting to just hit the snooze button now and go back to sleep. Three thousand people was enough for me. I’m not going back to sleep until we’re done.
Dave,
Islam is a religion, Islamism is a religion-inspired political movement. I’m fine with allowing wiggle room for any Muslim who wants to distance himself from the Islamists. I just don’t think it’s incumbent on us to go out looking for those people, sacrificing our soldiers to spare them, or bending over backwards to accomodate their religious sensitivities. Let them distinguish themselves by their words and actions. They will have to conform to our system of separation of church and state. That gives Islam-the-religion the same status as any other religion in the west, and that is all it is due.
Perhaps its irrational, but my worry is that we are more likely to see another 9/11 if we don’t go out looking for those moderate muslims in Islamist societies. I’m not saying we should sacrifice values or soldiers to appease the enemy.
I think we can all agree that Iran with nukes is worse than Iran without nukes. The question is, is ‘letting Iran develop nukes’ worse than ‘attacking Iran, failing to stop the Iranian nuclear program, and watching borderline-Islamist nations like Pakistan forge alliances of convenience with Iran to defend Islam’? I can’t answer that by myself. Do I think that scenario unlikely? Yes. Is it a straw man? In a sense. We don’t know what is going to happen in the future.
They are specifically playing to our weakness by hiding the borderline between enemy and neutral. That’s something that drives me up the wall about the anti-war left. Ardsgaine is saying a lot of things that I want to tell my anti-war friends and drive it in to their thick skulls. But taking it to the unconditional level of his seven stipulations may be a recipie for disaster if in doing so you end up creating more enemies or alienating allies.
I get constantly ridiculed for believing these statements. I think most if not all of us here believe them both. The question remains… how do you determine who your enemy is; how do you determine who needs killing?
Nuke the blue Care Bears.
The only answer to that is don’t do anything halfway. Don’t stop short of complete victory. I think Peter made the case very well. We keep trying to finesse situations, instead of resolving them for good. We’re bunting when we should be swinging for the fence.
The only way for us to lose allies is by giving the impression that we will stop short of defeating the enemy. As long as our allies think they will still have to deal with the enemy in the future, they are going to hedge their bets. If they know that at the end of the war we will be the ones victorious, they will align with us. If you want to win over the moderate Muslims, then let them know that it’s safe to be a moderate Muslim. Let them know that when we’re done, they’ll be the ones running their country with no need to placate the fanatics.
Pakistan is an excellent example. About half the country is made up of frothing fanatics who want Musharaf’s head on a stick. He knows where the agitation is coming from, but he’s powerless to do anything about it. If he can be certain that we’ll demolish the agitation at its source, then he can be wholeheartedly on our side. If he is worried that we’re going to stop halfway, then he has to pander to the islamists in his country, hence the cartoon demonstrations in Pakistan that were originally organized by the government.
You can’t send soldiers through the country to go through the population one person at a time and shoot just the fanatics. That’s an impossible way to fight a war. In Iran, we know without a doubt that there are some people who want the regime dead. We also know that if those people were a majority, it would already be dead. Hitler was elected by just 33% of the voting population. When we firebombed Dresden we were killing people who voted for the other guys. We were killing children who had nothing at all to do with the situation. That is the horror of war. You don’t get to finesse your targets. We can do so to a far greater extent now, but it’s questionable whether that should be our goal. We should not assume that we’re only at war with the government of a country. That was the mistake we made in Iraq. No government survives without a good amount of support from the people. Destroying the government does not destroy the people’s will to continue the fight, as we have seen. By the time we rolled into Germany, the German people had no fight left in them. They had become our allies, because they were sick of a regime that had only brought them death and destruction. The death and destruction came from us, but they knew who to blame for it.
Hey. I’m a conservative who believes that the ideals of American representative democracy are worth pursuing. I get ridiculed for that all the time, too.
Who needs killing? I freely admit that my target set for the current threat is excessively broad when measured by the current social climate. Understand that I’ve put twentythree years of my adult life into following the rise of Islamist fascism, on top of being an avid student of history since I was old enough to pick up a book.
Take away the nations and the races. Put the practices of Salaafist/Wahabbist Islam in a ring with those of western secular civilization and see what happens. Add a million random people and let them choose their creed. Ask the question: What works?
Western civ has evolved over four thousand years. Among other styles of government that have been tried, representative democracy shines as the clear winner if your criteria is individual liberty, economic performance, and ability to adapt or incorporate to change within societies.
As a contractural mechanism that defines state power, at the minimum, as ultimately residing in a public consensus consent of the majority governed you provide the widest possible potential for individual achievement to translate into benefit to the whole. The system embraces the explicit and inherent right of individuals to choose their path to happiness, so long as their actions do not criminally conflict with others’ pursuit of the same. The freedom to practice life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of an individual is protected by the state, and respected between law abiding individuals of that society.
Islamic fundamentalism is diametrically opposed to all these concepts. The adherents to Islam, by dogma, reject the existence of other belief systems. It presumes to hold the power of life or death, by holy writ, over any “other” it may encounter. By the same writ, women are chattels and dhimmis are subject to taxation and unequal legal recourse in any dispute with believers.
Islam harnessed xenophobia, bigotry, ignorance, and a healthy dose of seizing the main chance where chances were few and far between to incite rootless nomads into prominence as an expansionist movement. This was all fueled by the economy of conquest, since the immutable words of the prophet pretty much made individual profit or preservation of capital a legal impossibility. After several centuries of expansion they ran into societies they could not conquer. The descendants of those brigands continued to live under a totalitarian system, and thus have effectively became incapable of exploiting the potential of their people. They cannot coexist with unbelievers and they cannot near provide living standards or individual opportunity we take for granted. They are still a tribe; a tribe of hundreds of millions, but still at the mercy of chiefs right down to the smallest detail of their lives. And as we see today, they are more and more convinced they are instruments set down on earth by God in order to do God’s work… as directed by their chiefs and the immutable (or we’ll kill your ass) words of the prophet.
Are all Muslims marked for death by TmjUtah? Nope. Not at all. Just the ones that want to kill me and mine. They can believe what they want; they are free to do that, as am I. The individuals that act – then they must be held accountable for their actions.
The resurgence of fundamentalist Islam couldn’t have happened without the geographical accident that allowed the Saudis to become rich. Finding all that oil beneath their wasteland was what prevented Arabs from becoming ecotour oddities along the lines of those Amazon tribes we read about now and again. Oil wealth returned the capital to the chiefs coffers, without them having to do the work of fighting others to fuel a failed system of government. But there’s never been enough money in the universe to keep an inherently unworkable system like Islamism in business – not as long as free men still exist outside the confines of the mosque and burka.
We live and let live, mostly. The same cannot be said for our enemy. Again – the enemy isn’t all Muslims – just the ones that have acted or published their intent to act. The sooner we accept that resolution won’t come without victory, the fewer will die all the way around.
TW = “lines”. The lines are drawn.
There is no question the U.S. will defend herself. Let’s focus now on the front line action taking place in Europe. Will they defend themslves? The Islamist invasion involves three steps: 1) Quiet 2) Noisy 3) Genocide.
The U. S. is going from 1 to 2 right now. The Euros are slipping from 2 to 3. Is there to be a leader on the scope of Charles Martel? Will there be another Polish army in Vienna circa 1683?
nikolai –
The Euro citizens have insulated themselves from the responsibilities of government to the extent that they are more subjects than citizens any more.
There are some ugly neighborhoods in America. There are none that our cops won’t go to to answer a call, even if they come in force and behind armored vehicles. The same cannot be said of Europe. A problem that cannot be handled with police and courts is de facto a military threat.
The situation of the androissements (sp?) in france and depressingly common ethnic ghettoes elsewhere on the continent has developed over generations.
It comes down to taking freedom seriously, or not. Freedom is not a natural human condition, it is not an accident, and it carries a burden of individual responsibility before that of any level of community or state.
If we still lived behind walls of distance or time, we would lose little by failure of other societies or dogmas. Americans are markedly content to do business and let life take care of itself. I also believe that the Islamists’ intellectual straightjacket has caused them to generate a dangerously, horrificly skewed perception of free societies.
They see today. Everything that came before is ignored, or rationalized away through a lens of mystic chauvinism leavened with a huge dollop of megalomania.
I agree with the bulk of the conclusions of the author of this post (which I found via Instapundit last week.
The Euroes have abdicated their civic responsibility to the point that they have restricted the ability to respond to the threat to what is become essentially a socialist oligarchy. The denizens of Brussels prioritize political power and perks much, much higher than the lives or fortunes of any individual citizen in their thrall. And those oligarchs are invested in welfare statism, multiculturalism, militant secularism as state policy, and all the other bullshit that kills individual freedoms.
I think U.S. potential for over-reaction to the threat pales beside that of Europe’s predicament. They have centuries of history of sectarian genocide. They have the front lines of the war right down the street from their salons. Beyond their self-made domestic disaster, they face foreign threats they cannot counter with conventional means because they’ve long since abandoned the costs of their own defense to America.
They Euores have nukes, too, you see. And the enemy is insane. The enemy continues to exist because we’ve been too jaded to take him seriously. The weapons available for sale to anybody with a fat enough check puts the means to murder millions in the hands of people who celebrate self immolation while blowing up school kids as a step to heaven. A thousand such pointless slaughters won’t bring the Islamist movement any closer to physical success; their impetus to scale up will be tempered ONLY by the assets available to whichever of God’s instruments decides it’s time to kill a million on his way to paradise.
If they want to die on their way to their presumed reward, we should take concerted and serious steps to allow that to happen. Without joining them for the ride.
TmjUtah-
Toss this thought in: The Euros(natives)soon to have self-aborted themselves into a POLITICAL MINORITY. So, in twenty years or less, mullahs could be elected, in, say France. Their fingers on the H-bomb. Not pretty.
Hmmm.
@ dorkafork
1.
Just maybe there are some situations that can b
And yet you are still unable to list any global products or services, aside from oil, that is produced in such quantities in muslim nations that couldn’t be just as easily acquired elsewhere.
2.
My point is that the enemy we face doesn’t consider *anything* beyond the pale. You either accept that or you don’t. But don’t think for a moment that the terrorists out there would hesitate to slaughter you and your family.
3. @ Civilis
Moral is irrelevant, survival is relevant.
Do you think it’s morally correct to be the victim of highly destructive attacks? If not, then what limit is there on prevention of such attacks? What limits are there that you will not pass beyond.
What is beyond the pale for you? Where is the line that you will not pass? That you will accept death, not just for yourself but for your family and those you cherish? Where is the line where suicide or passive submission to death and oppression is worth more than survival?
That is the essential question that needs to be answered and, quite frankly, casting this question as a moral condition is avoiding the essence of the issue.
4. @ Russ
Precisely. But we must look at every option now while there is time for contemplation and discuss what can be borne, and what cannot. If we leave it to the last, then we risk an over-reaction, which would be bad, or an under-reaction, which would be worse.
And again. The objective in this GWOT must be victory, not a struggle delayed for yet another generation. If Islam is incapable of being reformed and every generation will produce it’s quota of terrorists, then what victory is possible? Is it possible to overturn 1,300 years of religious history and finally achieve, for all time, an Islam that cannot and will not produce a new generation of terrorists for our grandchildren to suffer?
Hmmm.
Possibly I’m wrong on this but I think much of the problems that the Islamic world have in dealing with the West has been that they weren’t really involved in WWII. Consider that most of the places in the world that are causing us trouble today were spared the horrors of WWII. They weren’t subjected to day and night bombing raids. Massive incendiary raids that would reduce entire sections of cities, and entire cities themselves, to charred cinders where stone flowed like water.
Because the Islamic world was spared much of the devastation in WWII they don’t really understand the true capabilities of the West to destroy.
Instead the Islamic world has convinced itself that the West will not treat them in a manner that they would willingly treat the West. The danger is that this point of view is hopelessly wrong, and such a viewpoint would convince militants that they can strike unopposed at the West. This explains why Iran is so hot for a nuclear weapon. They’ve convinced themselves that they can use the nuclear weapons as both a shield against retribution *and* as a weapon to inflict harm. The principle being that the West will jostle each other to be the last one eaten by the crocodile.
But this viewpoint is flawed because there is a line where the remembered past horrors will be exceeded by either the new horrors or the potential for that horror to be inflicted. And we’re drawing close to that line. Which is why France recently stated what their official policy would be to any WMD attack on French soil.
Hmmm.
Consider the state of Christians and other infidels in Islamic countries.
Do you think that they’re happy their ancestors made a lasting peace with Islam?
1. Prove to me that the larger mass of muslims are in fact “moderateâ€Â. Though it would help if someone were to actually define what a “moderate†muslim actually is.
I think you will know a moderate Muslim by his rallying cry of “God is pretty-darned-good”.
(yes I shamelessly ripped off my own Rantburg post, but if I can’t rip myself off…)
I think I’m not being coherent; I won’t take any action off the table. The key to succeeding at war is to use whatever means are necessary to achieve victory. But mercy itself is a tool that can be used.
To use a concrete example… taking prisoners (in regular warfare). Taking prisoners is a risk; you need to devote troops to guard the prisoners, and devote food and space to housing them. If the enemy is dishonorable, the surrender may be a trick, and it may be best not to risk taking prisoners at all (as is the case with the Iraqi insurgency). But the formulation I was referring to would rule out the risk of taking prisoners entirely, in any circumstances. And in so doing you lose the benefits of taking prisoners, that somewhere down the line a beaten but not defeated enemy may spare you the effort and lives of eliminating him entirely by surrendering.