The logic of war when the enemy has declared there are no civilians
Our enemy targets civilians and hides behind civilians, to frame things the Western way. He regularly uses children as killers, and their families love it. It is his way of war, in which the enemy uses Islamic theology to define away the concept of innocents and civilians. This is precisely what terrorism is about, after all, and why it is so common among our enemy wherever he fights. If you haven’t noticed, life is cheap to the enemy. We dealt with this last year, quoting, among others, Hani Al-Siba’i, head of the London Center for Islamic History:
The term “civilians” does not exist in Islamic religious law. Dr. Karmi is sitting here, and I am sitting here, and I’m familiar with religious law. There is no such term as “civilians” in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.
Under the fourth Geneva Convention, among other agreements, the US does not target civilians. However, there is a bit of selective memory at work in such assertions. For example, such sentiments did not stop the United States from reducing much oif Germany to rubble, fire-bombing Dresden and Tokyo, and using atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wars are meant to be fought and won, not managed. It is about time we remembered that.
The United States needs to get real about war or get out. By the way, we are not passing judgment on the Haditha matter, which is this year’s Natalee Holloway for the jackals of the MSM.
Call us stone-hearted, but the only hearts and minds we care about are those of the American soldiers and their families. By the way, we think this makes strategic sense as well. America need to be the strong horse, to use the term of a famous man. The US stands to gain nothing — but defeat — by trying to appear more sensitive and hair-splitting than an enemy that respects only brutality, ruthlessness and raw power.
(We have often thought of these ideas in trying to understand Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s apparent plan to withdraw to the 1967 borders. This idea only makes sense if its purpose is to generate the political will among Israelis to wipe out whole villages and towns from which will come the inevitable rocket and other attacks across Israel’s narrow middle.)
The objective of war must be total victory, not to change somebody’s mind-set. That means wiping out the enemy — whoever and wherever he is — and his capacity to make war. There is plenty of time to woo hearts and minds after the enemy has been blasted to smithereens. What the US sees as “shock and awe,” the enemy sees as shuck and jive. He does not respect such surgical warfare, nor should he, in our opinion. This enemy will not stop until he feels utterly defeated, and believes that the theological underpinnings of his mission are worthless. Needless to say, half-measures and self-flagellation won’t get that job done.
UPDATE
Daniel Henninger in WSJ:
One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy’s defeat.
War is unspeakably evil, and that is one of the reasons it must be avoided when possible. It is evil not only for what the enemy has done to foment it, but for what it requires good men to do and to sink to — in order to stop it and to save their lives and those of their comrades. Henninger appears quite correct in his statement above, and it seems likely that this is one reason WWII personal stories went untold for many decades after that war. If you look into the face of hell, would you want to talk about it? If you did whatever it took for you to survive and not some other man, would you want to relive it? What acts would you personally not commit if they would save your life against a crowd of enemies?
Perhaps we as a society are unwilling to face the implications of women and children being active combatants in a war, and perhaps we are morally the better for it. But our enemy teaches martyrdom from birth, raises child suicide-soldiers for pre-teen death, and has perverted some women away from the essence of female-ness into the same task. Unless men and women in the Islamic world revolt against these evil perversions of human nature, we will have to face the reality of this new barbarism sooner or later.
It would be nice to think that we can cut the head off the snake and make an end to things — whether Ahmadinejad or Zarqawi or some particularly radical imams — but the poisonous ideology we face is utterly decentralized, and distributed and constantly reinforced to men, women and kids. We shall likely have to do whatever it takes to destroy it on a far more extensive basis, and that will debase us in countless ways.
June 1st, 2006 at 10:24 am
You sound exactly like Saddam.
June 1st, 2006 at 11:40 am
Yes, this is a nice definition of lunacy.
Really isnt worth the finger-exertion to say much more.
June 1st, 2006 at 3:22 pm
What is “war on terror” anyway? It would certainly be advantageous if our elites would truly define our enemy and issue a real declaration of war. Maybe try securing our borders would also be helpful? Until we fully commit ourselves to the total eradication of our enemy, we will never defeat those who will indeed use any and all means with which to defeat us. This country’s citizens have not known sacrifice for the common good for many years but, most of us would surely forfeit a portion of our everyday pleasures to get a win on this one. What is going to happen when we must face the ever growing military might of an enemy like China? God help us!
June 1st, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I believe that you are confused about who the enemy (in a military sense) is.
” This enemy will not stop until he feels utterly defeated, and believes that the theological underpinnings of his mission are worthless. ”
Is our enemy an idea? I submit that it is not, any more than Bolshevism was our enemy. The idea exists today, and there are millions who do not think it worthless.
Is our enemy the man who believes the idea? There are plenty of Nazis around.
No, our enemy is anyone who will act to harm us. Saloon haters and parlor bombers are harmless. It’s not until the will is joined to the instrument- the killer- that we have an enemy.
So, how do we fight those enemies and prevent their formation? What turns a zealot into a murderer?
An organisation does it. People in positions of power and authority use their power and ideas to make enemies. Without a power structure, all the hate in the world won’t make a war. The Jews of Europe never fought the Nazis. If the United States Government had decided to let Pearl Harbor pass, who would have built the carriers?
I offer the U. S. experience. The German sea outrages against the U. S. were no worse in 1917 than in 1915. If Wilson had never gone to Congress, there would have been no war.
Our enemies are the tyrants, the dictators, the popular and freely chosen demagogues who use the hate. The truth is that most people hate war, that few would choose murder if it were not encouraged and rewarded.
Also, men like power. The Lenins and the Bin Ladens reject personal risks if at all possible.
My point, and I do have one, is that we need to revive an old (Lord forgive me) paradigm for war. We have at our disposal an instrument of incredibly precise destruction. It’s time we did away with the ban on targeting our real enemies, the disturbers of the world. Tyrants will always find people happy to die, killing the willing is just not productive. The king is victory on the chess board for a reason. Kings, not conscripts, make war.
If, in 1935, we had the ability to destroy Hitler and Tojo, would we have had a second world war? Who would have started it, Goering?
To pick a closer example, suppose in 2001 we had announced, “Saddam Hussein is an outlaw. We will seek to hunt down and kill him because he continues to threaten the peace of his neighbours and the world. If you are standing beside him, buy some insurance. We do not care who runs Iraq or how- but if the next government continues to pose a threat, we will kill them too.”
Best case, his Generals kill Saddam or deliver him to us, and get the message. Worst case, the next government but one shuts off the terror talk.
If we killed Assad and the Saudi royals, how much financing would Hamas and the madrassas get the next month from their successors?
Our Presidents, congress, and Generals reject this out of hand. They are trained for WAR, and that means using thousands of young men to kill and mutilate thousands of other young men. We have, right now, an instrument that might coerce the powerful into creating a warless world. But we choose instead to kill and die in meaningless slum alleys. Again we will fight another war in the shadows, and lose it because we do not fight our enemies- just their ignorant lackeys.
Forgive my running on, but I’m starting to hear the sound of defeat in Iraq like I heard it from Vietnam and in Ireland. The sound of defeat in an insurgency is when the powerful army’s professional soldiers say “Kill them all and leave it to the buzzards.”
July 31st, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Yesha Rabbinical Council: During time of war, enemy has no innocents
The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that “according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as ‘innocents’ of the enemy.”
All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians,” the statement said. (Efrat Weiss)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-3283720,00.html
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=494