I would have thought it was already clear well before World War II that this country can't afford to extend its lines of defense no farther than its borders. Thank God President Truman didn't take the attitude that what happened in Berlin or Greece or Korea was only the business of the people living in those places, and none of ours. Thank God President Kennedy didn't just shrug his shoulders and say it was Cuba's business do decide what kind of military equipment to have on its own soil.
It's clear these savages in Iraq, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week, are the enemies of civilized people everywhere. If these evil people are tolerated, more like them, in other parts of the world will take notice--and take heart. This country's policy should be to destroy Muslim jihadists as fast as possible, wherever they can be found, starting with this group.
There seem to be no more of them than a couple infantry divisions would contain, spread out over a vast area. A force that thin is vulnerable, because it can never be very strong at any given point. These people are not very well trained, and having a lot of new, advanced equipment doesn't mean they know how to use it effectively. Once they venture outside populated areas in substantial numbers, they are just largely defenseless targets for aircraft.
I think some of those aircraft, from this country and any allies who will join us, should already be operating out of bases in secure Kurdish areas in support of the Peshmerga and whatever Iraqi troops are willing and able to fight. And they should not be so fastidious about killing people in cities. If there is no way to dislodge them without doing that, then it has to be done. We should remember that despite the best efforts to spare the innocent, about 40,000 French civilians were killed by the Allies after Normandy in the process of liberating that country from the Germans.
Unless we are willing to accept some inevitable horrors now, we may well have to accept much worse ones later. And there is no way to separate the truly innocent from those who are helping the jihadists. As small a fraction of the population of a city like Mosul these people are, they could not possibly be in control there unless a great many locals were sympathetic to them.
The world needs to see the U.S. show, even at this late date, that it is resolved to crush jihadism for good. When eight Nazi saboteurs were captured here in 1942 after landing by U-boats, President Roosevelt took the opportunity to show Hitler we were not the weak, decadent people he imagined. The rules for a military tribunal were drawn up in less than a week; the men, although they were represented by some of the best criminal lawyers in the U.S., were shortly convicted and sentenced to death for war crimes; the Supreme Court (against FDR's wishes) very quickly heard their habeas petition; and it denied every claim, including the claim that one of the men, as a U.S. citizen, had wrongly been denied his constitutional right to a jury trial. One day less than two months after they had landed here, six of the saboteurs, one each hour, was electrocuted in New York.iI reali
If this country, under the greatest liberal U.S. President ever, could deal with enemy war in such a no-nonsense way in 1942, why
should we insist on being a nation of hand-wringers and navel-gazers today? It's almost as if being weak-willed and equivocal, even in the face of shocking wickedness, is polished up and mad into of how "evolved," "sensitive to other cultures," etc. a person is. But if a culture is about beheading people, burying them alive, clitoridectomy, honor killings, and exterminating Jews, I no more want to be sensitive to it than I do to a poisonous spider. No need to hem and haw and think the problem to death--just kill the damned thing.
One step we should take, which will have to wait for the zero now occupying the White House to be replaced with someone who loves this country, is to try, convict, and execute the unrepentant mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. More than a decade after his capture, this yellow cur is still alive and well at Guantanamo, getting his three squares a day. The rules for the military tribunal should be kept simple and drawn up quickly this time, instead of dragging the process out for two years and letting it finally be crippled by petty legal maneuvers. The President can make those happen very fast when the will is there, as FDR did.
The rules should abandon execution by lethal injection for war criminals--that is for U.S. servicemen convicted of capital crimes in courts-martial. Used against monstrous war criminals, who are outside even the protections of the Geneva Conventions, it is only a badge of effeteness. Instead, the rules should specify hanging, the time-honored means of executing war criminals, and the one used after WWII at both Nurmberg and the Far East Tribunals.
Far from doing them in private, the executions should purposely be broadcast live around the world, and the more of the world's Muslims watch, the better the object lesson. We are in a fight for Western Civilization, and any potential opponents could use a clear demonstration that we do not intend to lose. With the cameras rolling and hundreds of U.S. troops guarding the scene, march the jihadist mass murderers onto a gallows, give them the chance for a last word, hood them--and then let them take the drop.