More Slaughter, Less Mischief?

Treason in Defense of Slavery Yankee posts part of an e-mail purporting to be from someone stationed in Iraq, explaining what we need to do to win:

Massive firepower brought down on any transgressor is the answer. Sometimes you need to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut if you want people to pay attention and learn the correct lessons in life. If an IED blows up outside someones house and the homeowners tell you that they don't know anything about, bulldoze the house and salt the ground. After you do that two or three times, Iraqis will shoot the terrorists themselves to protect their homes. I realize that this may not be totally in keeping with some people's concept of "the American way of war", but if we are in it to win it, we need to take all the steps required to totally destroy the terrorists ability to make war on us and turn the population against them.

And so on. It's the 'more rubble, less trouble' approach that wingnuts are embracing as they wake up to the fact that we were not actually greeted with flowers. (Joseph Conrad put it a little differently: "exterminate all the brutes." English was his third language, though, so perhaps he was not entirely sensitive to the appeal of a rhyming slogan.)

TIDOS Yankee, expanding on this message, posts some recommendations of his own:

• "Let our soldiers use their massive advantages in firepower, training, and communications to take the fight to the enemy."


• "Quit trying to fight a "nice" war."


• "It should go without saying, but if the other side doesn't feel defeated, then it isn't be [sic]defeated."


• "Enable our soldiers to rely on their training and instincts and remove the overly cumbersome rules of engagement that restrict our soldiers to the point they are fighting a defensive war."

Right...let me know how that works out for you, Skippy.

The thing about the 'more carnage, less annoyance' strategy is that it could work in theory...if we were to kill every last human in Iraq. Not a lot of trouble if they're all dead, right? In practice, though, most Iraqis would leave before we butchered them (nearly two million have fled so far, and another hundred thousand leave the country every month). Where there are refugees en masse, there is political instability. In other words, even if we had the will (and the monstrous indifference to human life) to create of Iraq the vast depopulated smoking ruin that has become the new wingnut ideal, we would only have succeeded in exporting the problem to Jordan and Syria and a few other already unstable states. Which, of course, is what we're already doing.

So much for the genocidal daydreams of TIDOS Yankee. Ludicrous as they are, though, we should expect them to become a good deal more popular among the bitter-enders as they grow increasingly desperate for something they can call 'victory'.


[That's all, folks]