I maintain that the Bush/Powell/Rice foreign policy doctrine post 911 has been to try to find a way to defeat the Jihadists without declaring war on Islam.
I believe that they have failed.
I believe that they have failed because John Kerry and Dan Rather and Chirac and Putin and the UN and a million others who hate America and western civilization as we understand it (meaning "not socialism") would rather ally with Bin Laden than with George Bush, under any circumstances.
And there are consequences to that sort of failure. And the logical outcome is all out war. They are already waging it against us. As this thread makes clear there are those among us who are not willing to do so against them, declaration or not.
In the age of nukes, once nukes are used, all out war is all out war. No quarter. No civilians cordoned off from harm. No prisoners or Supreme Court hearings over rights of combatants. They've got no rights if they're dead. If we don't kill them then we're dead. Simple, binary equation.
So, where would you bomb first?
Well put. That's really what my tagline implies.
The source of my tagline if from a conversation I was having with my 13 year old son. He was asking me about terrorism and trying to get a handle on the "War on Terrorism" since it doesn't have any true borders.
What I was explaining to him was that this war is not like Vietnam. You cant just walk away from it and that let that region take care of itself. Vietnam didn't attack us after we left. Islam would. And there will be consequences if we "give up" that will span beyond even his generation. And then I said what's in my tagline.
I agree. and I'll say more, Until we stop treating this like a police operation and start treating it as a war, we are not going to win it. There are no " innocent civilians " in a war. We won ww2 in part because we nuked 2 Japanese cities, taking out a lot of non military persons. Some of these mid-east "civilians " are hiding and harboring some of the terrorists. Our civilians were attacked on 911, I personally believe in retaliation in like kind.
Don't think we are there yet. Not to far in the future maybe but their actions to date are relatively feeble. We will continue to exercise restraint until the wolf is at the door.