War and Peace

War and Peace

I’ve suspected for a long time that there is a simple solution for winning wars -- you must out-brutalize your opponent(s). By “out-brutalize” I mean you pursue your enemy with absolute and unstopping ruthlessness. This does not mean that you exact sinister or sadistic revenges but rather measured punishments that go beyond your enemy’s actions by a degree sufficient to discourage their further agression.

If they buzz bomb London for months on end, you, once you achieve air superiority, fire bomb their industrial and population centers every night for the remainder of the war … killing and destroying with moral justification. If they invade your country for the second time by sending an army of elephants and legions of mercenaries against your capital, you respond by burning down their capital, killing as many of their citizens as possible … and salting their fields (Carthega delenda est). If they send suicide pilots in planes stuffed with high explosives to crash against your navy closing in on their mainland, you unleash the terrible terror of atomic weaponry against them. If they cut the heads off your countrymen and allies who have been taken prisoner, you pass laws that say your interregators of these same enemy prisoners must treat them with respect and honor. If they fly airplanes into your skyscrapers killing 3,000 innocents, you seek to have them tried in criminal courts by a jury of their peers. (Obviously, the last two examples are meant to illistrate the absurdity of our country’s actions.)

Combatants must be careful in crafting such responses to terrorists so they are not understated or overstated. For instance, when Germany lined up everyone in a Polish village and shot them in retaliation to the killing of a German soldier by a sniper, that was an overstatement. When Israel responded to Hamas’s suicide bombers by razing their familys’ homes, this was an understatment. (I think it just served to piss off terrorists, not scare the piss out of them.) But, when Israel changed tactics to that of sending missles into the cars of Hamas leaders, these suicide bombings dropped off significantly. I happen to believe that another appropriate response to suicide bombers who kill many innocents would be to execute their immediate families (assuming that they were the support group that caused such atrocities to happen.) I think that this would be appropriately measured brutality.

My point is -- I think we really need to rethink how we are responding to the Iraqi and other Islamo-facist terrorist acts … and be more brutal, not less.

POSTED BY CLOONEY