We Can Kill Our Way to Victory
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
“We can not win this war by killing them,” Marie
Harf said on MSNBC.
Reversing
thousands of years of battlefield experience in
which wars were won by “killing them”, the State
Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat
ISIS by killing its fighters.
"We can not kill our way out of this war,” she said.
“We need in the medium and longer term to go after
the root causes that lead people to join these
groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs."
War is one of the few things in life we can reliably
kill our way out of. The United States has had a
great track record of killing our way out of wars.
We killed our way out of WW1. We killed our way out
of WW2. The problem began when we stopped trying to
kill our way out of wars and started trying to hug
our way out of wars instead. Progressive academics
added war to economics, terrorism and the climate in
the list of subjects they did not understand and
wanted to make certain that no one else was allowed
to understand. Because the solution to war is so
obvious that no progressive could possibly think of
it.
Harf’s argument is a familiar one. There was a time
when progressive reformers had convinced politicians
that we couldn’t arrest, shoot, imprison or execute
our way out of crime.
We couldn’t stop crime by fighting crime. Instead
the root causes of crime had to be addressed. The
police became social workers and criminals overran
entire cities. The public demanded action and a new
wave of mayors got tough on crime. While the
sociologists, social workers, activists and bleeding
hearts wailed that it wouldn’t work, surprisingly
locking up criminals did stop them from committing
crimes.
It was a revelation almost as surprising as
realizing that it does take a good guy with a gun to
stop a bad guy with a gun. Addressing root causes
won’t stop a killing spree in progress. (That’s
another one of those things we can and do kill our
way out of.)
But bad ideas are harder to kill than bad people.
And stupid ideas are the hardest ideas of all to
kill.
The same plan that failed to stop street gangs and
drug dealers has been deployed to defeat ISIS.
Heading it up are progressives who don’t believe
that killing the enemy wins wars.
General Patton told the Third Army, “The harder we
push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we
kill, the fewer of our men will be killed.” That
kind of thinking is passé. General McChrystal,
Obama’s favorite commander (before he had to be
purged for insulting Obama) had a much better plan.
“We will not win based on the number of Taliban we
kill,” he said. “We must avoid the trap of winning
tactical victories—but suffering strategic
defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive
damage and thus alienating the people.”
Under Obama’s rotating shift of commanders, we
avoided the trap of winning tactical victories.
Instead of following Patton’s maxim, American
casualties doubled. The Taliban struck closer to
Kabul while US soldiers avoided engaging the enemy
because they wouldn’t be given permission to attack
unless the Taliban announced themselves openly while
avoiding mosques or civilian buildings.
“We will not win simply by killing insurgents,”
McChrystal had insisted. “We will help the Afghan
people win by securing them, by protecting them from
intimidation, violence and abuse.”
But we couldn’t protect the Afghan people without
killing the Taliban. Civilian casualties caused by
the United States fell 28 percent, but the Taliban
more than made up for it by increasing their killing
of civilians by 40 percent. Not only did we avoid
the trap of a tactical victory, but we also suffered
a strategic defeat. American soldiers couldn’t kill
insurgents, protect civilians or even protect
themselves. We’ve tried the McChrystal way and over
2,000 American soldiers came home in boxes from
Afghanistan trying to win the hearts and minds of
the Afghans. Many more returned missing arms and
legs. The Taliban poll badly among Afghans, but
instead of hiring a PR expert to improve their
image, a Pentagon report expects them to be
encircling key cities by 2017.
Unlike our leaders, the Taliban are not worried
about falling into the trap of winning tactical
victories. They are big believers in killing their
way to popularity. As ISIS and Boko Haram have
demonstrated, winning by killing works better than
trying to win by wars by winning polls.
Now the same whiz kids that looked for the root
cause of the problem in Afghanistan by dumping money
everywhere, including into companies linked to Al
Qaeda and the Taliban, think that the way to beat
ISIS is with unemployment centers and job training.
Many of the ISIS Jihadists come from the social
welfare paradises of Europe where there are more
people employed to find the root causes of terrorism
through welfare than there are people working to
fight them. So far they haven’t had much luck
either.
The Europeans were still searching for the root
causes of Muslim terrorism back when Obama was
smoking pot on a dirty couch. They’re still
searching for them even while newspapers, cafes and
synagogues are shot up. Meanwhile unarmed police
officers lie on the ground and beg for their lives.
Obama’s real ISIS strategy is even worse than his
Afghan strategy. He doesn’t have a plan for beating
ISIS. He has a plan for preventing it from expanding
while the sociologists try to figure out the root
causes for its popularity. American air power isn’t
there to crush ISIS. It’s there to stop it from
launching any major advances and embarrassing him
too much. Meanwhile hearts and minds will be won. At
least those minds that haven’t been beheaded and
those hearts that haven’t been burned to ash.
We won’t be falling into the trap of winning
victories. Instead we’ll be figuring out how to
create jobs so that all the ISIS fighters go home to
Copenhagen and Paris where they won’t be Obama’s
problem.
But while it’s tempting to believe that stupid ideas
like these are solely the realm of lefties like
Obama, it was Mitt Romney who announced during the
final debate that, “We can't kill our way out of
this mess.”
“We're going to have to put in place a very
comprehensive and robust strategy to help the world
of Islam and other parts of the world, reject this
radical violent extremism,” he insisted, calling for
education and economic development.
“Killing
our way out of this mess” has become an orphaned
strategy. Neither Democrats nor
Republicans want to take it home with them. But
killing our way out of wars used to be a bipartisan
strategy.
Truman believed in a plan to “kill as many as
possible.” Eisenhower could casually write, “We
should have killed more of them.” But why listen to
the leaders who oversaw America’s last great war
when we can instead listen to the architects of the
social strategy that turned our cities into war
zones?
What did Eisenhower and Truman know that Obama
doesn’t? They knew war.
Truman cheated his way into WW1, despite being an
only son and half-blind. He took the initiative and
took the war to the enemy. They don’t make Democrats
like that anymore. They do make Democrats like
Barack Obama, who use Marines as umbrella stands and
whose strategy is not to offend the enemy.
In Afghanistan, the top brass considered a medal for
“courageous restraint”. If we go on trying to not
kill our way out of Iraq, that medal will go well
with all the burned bodies and severed heads.