“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.
I'm personally ok with being able to defend myself and family from criminals until someone can figure out a way to redirect their energies into something not involving crime.
ReplyDelete"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."
"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."
ReplyDeleteBut if you kill enough of them, it certainly affects their combat power. I just thought of a good example of a fighter who never admitted defeat, yet ended up not being very effective,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4
"All right, we'll call it a draw then."
DeleteI've never believed that citizens being empowered to shoot criminals would end crime, but I do know that with a gun, I have a decent chance of shooting my way out of crimes against me, and I'll never give up my right to do so.
ReplyDeleteI am not addressing the subject of crime. To mention the two problems in one sentence is the height of ignorance.
ReplyDeleteApparently it didn't really help matters very much randomly killing and imprisoning suspected terrorists as well as terrorizing their villages, cities and families these past thirteen years. I more or less predicted all of this at least ten years ago. Of course, the true horror of it all was much more than anyone could possibly have imagined.
And I can prove my prediction, if anyone cares, going back to about 2006. It was a rather obvious conclusion.
ISIS is, without any shadow of a doubt, the bastard son of U.S. aggression and intervention. Or grandson, if you will, with Al Qaeda in Iraq as the daddy.
I'd say this ingenious new direction in foreign policy is about twenty years too late and five trillion dollars short. But good luck, anyway, with that "hearts and minds" thing.
Caliber for winning hearts and minds?
ReplyDeletehttp://tacticalol.com/winning-hearts-and-minds-via-ammunition/