Back to the old joke:

You can get further with a kind word and a sword than with just a kind word.

Reason and persuasion not backed by the willingness to use force is posturing, and nothing more. If Kerry won't recognize that, he's a worse fool than Carter.

Was it possible to really say that? Wow.

Well, it is one thing to hope for no need to have to retaliate with WMD on Muslims using WMD, but another to establish deterrance. That to me is the weak point in Bill's essay. To effectively deter, you have to communicate your retaliatory intent to your enemies.

The Soviets could have incinerated us with unstoppable nuke missiles, but they didn't. Because they knew that we would with certainty irradiate their children and blast their warm little puppies away in mushroom clouds. Innocence would be no defense if only 6 Politburo people out of 240 million Soviets had any part in the decision.

All the talk in fighting Islamics is of avoiding collatoral damage, harming a single brick on any Mosque, ever violating a terrorists civil liberties, and above all avoid killing the families of Islamics that want to kill us - because that will make them only want to double extra special kill us.

If infidel cities are nuked or millions lost to a biological agent - all that "compassionate" thinking goes out the window. Because the attack on us definitively ignites the clash of civilizations, NOT our response.

So we do need to communicate strategic deterrance. If New York, Beijing, or Frankfurt goes......

We fry the appropriate country most responsible and kill millions of innocent Islami little girls and cute goats.

If whole Islamic world rises in gibbering frothing at the mouth rage, and use WMD on us again....

Mecca and Medina are nuked. What is left of Islamic nations are isolated as lepers. All Muslims are purged from "infidel nations". If that then sends the Islamics into bug-eyed paroxisms of seething murderous rage and a universal call for total global Jihad to kill all infidels on the planet - Fine - We can destroy the infrastructure and economy of every Muslim nation in half an hour if we (US, China, or Russia) chose to.

Screw 'em, if need be. If they don't listen to warnings of our strategic deterrance. Muslims
have destroyed several civilizations in their quest to push their religion throughout the globe by the sword for 1400 years. They almost killed off Western Civilization along the way.

Carthage awaits - if they are not going to back off from their insanity.

The great and unavoidable failing of all our achievements in the science of "conflict studies" is that, being economically based, it's unable to cope with the phenomenon of the villain who's willing to pay an infinite price -- his own death and the destruction of all that he loves -- to do you harm. There is no way to bargain with or deter such a creature. Which is why we have to locate, close with, and destroy him before he can get a shot off.

Unfortunately, that might involve incinerating the entire Muslim world. That's something any Muslims whose love of life exceeds their hatred of "infidels" should think about really, really hard.

Having re-read the essay, I have a quote to add, from Terry Pratchett:

Hi! I'm the inner baby-sitter!

Good post and comments. It's depressing to think that it will take another attack on us, and maybe more than one, before anyone in a leadership position in the U.S. will even broach the subject of either the possibility of a problem within the religion itself, or that "moderates" in those parts of the world have a life or death OBLIGATION to root out and help destroy the "extremists." Until then, we'll hear about "terror" and "hate" as the enemy, and the need to spread democracy. Let's hope we can all stay safe long enough for the latter strategy to work.

It's a shame that Muslim leaders can't get their S**t together and actively combat these muslim extreemists and terrorists.
If they don't, it won't be long before they will be forcing civilised society to take the position that the only good muslim is a dead muslim.

I've played a game with people I know who are not really paying attention. I ask them to imagine a good-sized A-bomb goes off in New York City, and then Al Jazera broadcasts a tape of a Muslim militant demanding a total US surrender. A week later, Chicago goes, and the tape is repeated. The US Government capitulates to a Shiite cleric a week later, and we watch helplessly as Islamists flood the country.

They always guffaw, and say I'm nuts. I suggest they go to a library and read newspapers from August 2 and August 9, 1945. If it could happen then, it could happen now. Especially now, since we wouldn't have a clue of where to retaliate even if we could. It is NOT a farfetched scenario.

Deona - long before that, the Trident and Typhoon missile tubes will start emptying on Camel Land.

The Japs thought we had plenty of Bombs, they had none. The Muslims outside Pakistan have none. If the terrorists get one or two, Islam faces 9,000 American warheads & 10,000 American ones. 250-300 in the hands of the Zionists, India, UK and France, each. Maybe 800 Chicom bombs.

It is an entirely different situation than with Japan.

Of course some people currently believe we can't ever use nukes on Islamoids after our major cities are nuked because women Islamoids and baby Islamoids will die in droves.. trust me, no problem hitting the launch button...

And that bit about them loving death more than life...??? Islamoids have generally shown cowardice on the battlefield unless they have overwhelming numbers, or their fighting is limited to sneaky assymetric stuff.

How do we deter them? Two words: pig blood.

With Bush, it's playing Russian Roulette with a revolver; with Kerry, it's playing with a .45 Auto.

As said elsewhere, if they wish to commmit suicide, we can oblige them. And taking cover behind innocents puts the onus on them, not us.

Ok, so what we have here is an effective solution to Russia's terrorist problem. They sneak a coupla nukes in here set 'em off, we shoot all of ours all over Islam, and the world is none the wiser, and poof! no more islamists. Yeah, right!

I'd like to stand up, beat my chest, and plan to nuke the asymmetric bastards if they nuke us. But to make sure we get all of them, we would simply make the Earth uninhabitable. Whoopee.
It may feel good to strut around and say it, but it ain't that simple. Neither the problem, nor the solution.

Maybe we ought to make a bunch of suitcase bombs (the best in the world), and make this war symmetrical again. We use their techniques, but with bigger boomers. Even that makes more sense than sitting back, not paying attention, and saying "Oh, hell, if they come after us, we'll just wipe them off the face of the earth." Whoever says that is not part of the solution, but is part of the problem.

There is another solution: before Iran can get a nuclear weapon - we use EMP bombs to turn off all of the lights in Iran.

This doesn't sound like much but it is really devastating. Basically we take electricity away from them and put the country into the 18th century.

Soon, no cars - how do you pump gas without electricity, do you use steam engines on the pipelines? No internet, no Al Jazeera, no TV no radio, no computers, no building nukes without electricity, no waste treatment plants, no running water - the populace has to disperse - 18th century cities can only be so large since there is no practical way to feed them. No electrical printing presses. We also pulse their military - no missile threat - the circuitry is all fried.

They try to rebuild - but we just pop their rebuilt generators as soon as they come on line.

Iran disappears as a threat Use this as an abject lesson to the rest of the Islamic world - repeat until they all understand.

*That's* why I'm so annoyed by this whole "no WMD stockpiles" meme. We got the son-of-a-bitch *before* he got WMDs: *good*, that's the *right* way to do it.

We should not wait until he's got them and *then* strike. If there *had been* WMD stockpiles, *that* would have been a sign of Bush misfeasance for waiting so long. As it was, it was a triumph.

... begging to be repeated in Iran, I may add, and too late to be repeated in North Korea, thanks to trusting Mr. Clinton.

I see a minor problem with that "strategy"--it "elevates" them immensely...from their 7th century mindset...by about 1100 years...

There are those who recognise the above observations as a "need" for a NEW Spanish Inquisiton with a different target audience--the problem IS the MUSLIM "religion".

Not meaning to trivialize the problem, bring us home..before turning this part of the world into a nuclear scab on the world's ass crack...
or, as one of my 20 yoa xbot playin' mtv watchin' mp3 lissenin'"kids" (who happens to be a pretty damned good shot) observes...there's plenty of sand here already...cover this place with black glass so we can see OUR oil when we're pumping it out....
actually (and surprisingly,I must admit) he's more astute "politically" than that..
"humor"is a wunnerful thing...aint it?

"...and your little dog, too, missy!"
Choose...domesticate or eradicate
Faramir

Ace--

Excellent post.

I elaborate more on what you and Eject said on my site http://garfieldridge.blogspot.com/2004/10/deterring-radical-islam.html

The gist:
-- We can deter nations, not terrorists
-- Our current nuclear posture is ambiguous, without explicitly stating when we'd resort to nuclear weapons
-- We need to implement a "nuclear corollary" to the Bush Doctrine: any nuclear attack on the United States by an Islamic terrorist group receiving support-- EVER-- from a nation-state will result in a nuclear response onto that nation-state.

We need to make this explicit, and we need to do it *before* the bomb goes off. As part of the larger strategy in the war on terror and radical Islam, this is the "last gamble of Kings." Al Qaeda may want the world to burn, but not every Arab citizen wants their nations to go along with them. We must make that clear now.

V/R,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

Hey Cedarford--

Sorry pal, I didn't see your comment before I posted mine (or made my post on my site). But I think we agree.

Cheers,
Dave

Bill Whittle's essay was quite good. We will always have terrorists willing to die for their jihad. We need to fight to the death on all corners of the globe to ensure that they never get their hands on WMD or the technology to create same. I doubt that is possible, but it is certainly a worthy goal. Waving the carrot will only give them the time to calculate our demise.

Dave at Garfield Ridge:

"-- We need to implement a 'nuclear corollary' to the Bush Doctrine: any nuclear attack on the United States by an Islamic terrorist group receiving support-- EVER-- from a nation-state will result in a nuclear response onto that nation-state."

That's still not realistic. These guys aren't directly related to any nation-state. When New York blows, how in hell do we know for sure which "nation-state" to associate the vaporized terrorist with? We can't be firing off nuclear shotguns.

Yesterday's report on WMD shows how reliable our spooks are -- the chances are at least even we'll launch an attack on the wrong guys.

For years, it's seemed to me that when members of a certain ethnic or religious group start causing trouble, then political correctness be damned -- appropriate pressures ought to be brought on the group to clean up its own compadres, or continue to face the consequences, as a group. If innocent muslims felt the pain when Islamic maniacs strike the West, maybe they'd solve the problem by internal means.

There's a concept there, somewhere, but I've never been able to frame it quite right.

Dave at Garfield Ridge has it right. We have to have a stated deterrence policy. If you are a Muslim nation that funds the terrorists that end up nuking Moscow, if you are the nation that let them "borrow" a tad of your plutonium, even if you weren't in on the actual attack - Russia nukes you. Conversly, America nukes you if the terrorists you help hit Washington DC.

Deona That's still not realistic. These guys aren't directly related to any nation-state. When New York blows, how in hell do we know for sure which "nation-state" to associate the vaporized terrorist with? We can't be firing off nuclear shotguns.

We were ready to blow up the Soviet Union if they hit us. Even though we knew an attack would be the decision of 6 men in the Politburo and none of the other 240 million in the Soviet Union would have any effective say or responsibility in it.

I would imagine that we would not be willing to listen to Sweden saying the proper response to having 1 million Americans nuked is to "find the specific criminal parties" and "bring them to justice" in the Almighty UN's International Criminal Court - where after 2-3 years - a stiff jail sentence was meted out(jailtime done with appropriate halal culinary sensitivities and a full-time Mullah hired to spritually salve them with 5X prayers for infidel deaths, a day)

Deona--

I sympathize with your point, but there are two elements at work here:

-- Intelligence may not matter. I mean, if you're Al Qaeda, and you nuke NYC, you're liable to brag about it, eh? The intelligence mission is made easier when you have suspects.

-- Intel may be irrelevant. This is a preemptive policy. . . I'm a little less worried about the day after than the day before. By making it clear that, "Hey, we may be a little bit crazy if we get nuked," it may do a bit to put the fear of Allah into these regimes.

Is it perfect? No. Is it helpful? Well, I'm sure there'd be plenty of protests from the "give peace a chance" crowd, but we're not talking about *preemptively* nuking people here. It's a savage policy to be sure, but it's insurance on the cheap (I mean, we already have the nukes lying around; even if they sit in silos and bunkers, we might as well get some use out of them in the preseason).

Cheers,
Dave

Good stuff, Ace. I ran with one of your points, at http://sfsays.blogspot.com/

While the idea of declaring a nuclear retaliatory policy is probably good, I agree with the commenters who wonder how you can ever be absolutely *sure* which terrorist group was responsible.

A second valid objection (to actually retaliating, not to announcing the policy) is killing lots of folks who had nothing to do with an American city being nuked.

Imagine if some extremists here managed to get hold of, say, anthrax, turned it loose in France, and the French government decided they'd retaliate against some U.S. city. I suspect most Americans would argue--correctly--that they shouldn't kill a few hundred thousand innocent Americans for the actions of a few nuts.

Since retaliation obviously doesn't bring back our dead, is it possible that a better course is to calmly, methodically, over a couple of years, find out exactly who *was* responsible and take out only them?

Which is, of course, pretty much what we're doing now.

Actually there is a military option which would solve the Islamist problem short of total destruction: Electromagnetic Pulse.

Simply take electricity away from Iran, and they never develop nuclear weapons, or any other weapons of mass destruction.. No missiles, no tanks, nothing but steam power. No computers, no Internet, no radio - nothing that uses electricity.

Most importantly no news reports coming out of the country. Reduced to late 18th century status they are no threat to anyone else.

If the Islamists want to live in the 13th century the proper thing to do is put them there. This won't directly kill anyone, but it will remove the country as a threat.