America Must Fight Harder

Says Steven M. Warshawsky in The American Thinker, responding to the National Review's Stanley Kurtz:

The truth is, to date, we have not made any effort to destroy the forces of militant Islam. We have only engaged in limited conventional actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and (supposedly) covert ops worldwide. That’s it. We haven’t mobilized the American people for war. We haven’t destroyed Iran and Syria. We haven’t closed radical mosques or shut down the jihadist propaganda networks. We haven’t conducted targeted assassinations of jihadi leaders across the globe. We haven’t made it clear to the terrorists and their supporters that they cannot win and that they will die.

How can Kurtz be so sure the enemy cannot be defeated? We haven’t even tried.

Yes, Kurtz is right in that a much broader war will be required to defeat militant Islam. And, yes, Kurtz would have been right to question whether the United States and Europe have the political will to engage in this fight. I have my own doubts on this score. But to believe that militant Islam “cannot be defeated” is ridiculous—and only weakens whatever resolve we still have to kill them before they kill us.

The ugly truth about existential warfare—and that is what we are engaged in with militant Islam—is that the only way to win an existential conflict is to kill as many of the enemy population as possible and to destroy as much of its society as possible.

This is precisely what we (and our allies) did to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War Two. The reason these two enemies were defeated and pacified is because literally millions of their young men were killed, and their societies were brutally battered into physical and psychological submission. Just because we no longer have the stomach for this type of warfare, for bloodletting on this massive scale, doesn’t mean it is not an effective strategy for winning wars. Indeed, it is the only strategy. It certainly is the jihadists’ strategy, only limited by their lack of military capability.

How quickly we have forgotten 9/11. How blithely we assume that an even more devastating attack could never happen. A nuclear bomb in New York City or one of our other great metropolitan areas could inflict more casualties than we suffered in World War Two. This is what we should be fighting to prevent. We should not be fighting for elections in Iraq.

Today, our excessive compunction about killing the enemy, and about having our own soldiers die in combat, is the real reason the gloomy scenario described by Kurtz may come to pass. For “peace” is not an option. Even if we do not fight the jihadists, they will keep attacking us, and keep trying to kill as many Americans, Jews, and westerners as possible. Kurtz surely is right on that point. But the answer is to fight harder, not resign ourselves to an even deadlier future.