Imagine if the Secretary of State sent the following message to our military (this teaser inspired by a comment at LGF):
Islam, insofar as it is a religion of individual Muslims, is not to be interfered with. Islam, however, insofar as it is directed by the Iranian or Saudi government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Islam and there will be no place for Islam in the schools. Islam as a state religion — National Islam, that is — will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Islam . . . The dissemination of Islamic militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Iranian and Saudi Governments will be required to cease financial and other support of Islamic establishments.Radical?
Impossible?
Unconstitutional?
Just substitute Shintoism for Islam and Japanese for Muslim / Iranian / Saudi and that's the exact telegram sent by the State Department in October, 1945 directing a confident nation how to win a war and defeat its mortal enemies.
It's a historical prescription for victory.
In the five years since 9/11, the motivations behind the Islamic attacks have not been suppressed—and this is the real failure of these policies. The number of particular attacks is not the measure of success or failure. The Islamic Totalitarians remain physically intact, spiritually committed, and politically empowered. The Islamic Totalitarian movement remains—distributed, without the strong central command Al Qaeda once had, but still energized—and it appears like hidden gushers, the jihad bursting forth in seemingly random places by internal pressure from an underground stream. Our acceptance of pragmatism, the policy of short-range trial and error that rejects principles on principle—and altruism, the morality of self-sacrifice—left no other result possible.Limited war, as described here, must stop, and total war begin. Iran is a good place to start.
The reason for this failure is that every one of the ideas we used to evaluate our options is wrong. In every case, the opposite of today’s “conventional wisdom” is true.
-- A strong offense does not create new enemies; it defeats existing foes. Were this not so, we would be fighting German and Japanese suicide bombers today, while North Korea—undefeated by America—would be peaceful, prosperous, and free.
-- Poverty is not the “root cause” of wars. If it were, poor Mexicans would be attacking America, not begging for jobs at Wal-Mart.
-- Democracy is not a route to freedom—not for the Greeks who voted to kill Socrates, nor for the Romans who acclaimed Caesar, nor for the Germans who elected Hitler.
-- A culture of slavery and suicide is not equal to a culture of freedom and prosperity—not for those who value life.
-- The world is not a flux of contradictions, in which principles do not work. If it were, gravity would not hold, vaccinations would not work, and one would not have a right to one’s life.
-- Being moral does not mean sacrificing for others. It means accepting the American principle of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—and living for one’s own sake.
History is clear: All-out force against fanatical killers is both practical and moral.
The Korean War began the change in the American concept of war away from total war, or what was called at the time "general war," to a form of war that was more "civilized" and "less dangerous" in the minds of social scientists.Jihad is going on in over 100 countries and it's not going to stop even if we leave Iraq. If we never went into Iraq, we'd still be facing mass casualty attacks -- but with a list of potential A-bomb donors that was one name longer than it is now.
The problem of limited war from an American national interest standpoint was that it assumed U.S. enemies would likewise be restrained in objectives and means. This fanciful social science assumption rested on the unproven belief that no foreign national leader in his right mind would dare oppose America, following its World War II victory, once U.S. willingness to fight was made clear. However, the advocates of limited war never came to grips with what would happen if a Soviet Cold War client state refused to "play" by limited war "rules." In other words, how and when would limited war be concluded when the communists were pursuing total war objectives and the U.S. was waging a war for limited objectives? This was the first appearance of an asymmetry in war strategies long before the now infamous contemporary asymmetry on the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) battlefield. The GWOT is more appropriately termed the war against Islam (and the Shari'a touting faithful), but we use GWOT due to its common usage.
Islam as a state religion must be officially crushed like Shinto. Freedom of Religion didn't enter the equation in 1945. A real occupation, like that of Japan, would look like this:
We censor the media, impose reforms on schools, dismantle economic cartels, efface militaristic language from discourse at all levels, and write a political constitution which they are forced to accept. We tell them, pointedly and publicly, that they are defeated, and that we have no obligations to them. When they face starvation, we remind them that their miseries are their own fault. We charge them for many of the costs of the occupation. Not one dime of aid arrives until they demonstrate their complete surrender, in word and in action, including their repudiation of the militaristic ideology that motivated their attacks.Bush has been a huge disappointment all along in fighting this war (things were already going wrong when Operation Infinit Justice to remove the Taliban was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom because muslims said the term offended their religious sensibilities), but I reasoned fighting even just halfheartedly may lead to unforseen positive events more readily than not fighting at all would -- such as in Kerry's apparent law-enforcement approach.
Because the jihad will never ever stop, acquiring greater and greater weapons, until we either die, convert, or islam is eradicated, total war is eventually coming.
The only question is how many of our innocents must first die before we take that step?
The moral imperative is to act sooner rather than later. I see no moral reason to wait until the world has sufficient sympathy for our catastrophic losses to deign to give their approval for our self-defense.
Our lack of civilizational moral self-confidence disgusts me, especially given the clear obvious total evil of the barbarians at the gates. The short time over which it vanished is amazing.
Everyone has gone blind and knows nothing beyond five minutes in the past.
The central purpose of our lives must be to regain this moral self-confidence as a culture. And it's not going to come from the approval of Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, or Amnesty International.
There is much to be relearned from the Victorians and the Puritans.
Iran delenda est!
