Monday, November 16, 2015

Audacity and Ruthlessness

Stephen Green blogs as Vodkapundit at PJMedia. Hat tip to Ed Driscoll blogging at Instapundit for the link. Green muses about the world since the Paris attacks:
If the 21st century has a big question, it was asked on September 11, 2001. That question is: Can the West coexist with radical Islam, or in the worst case even with Islam at all?

Unlike a global hot or cold war, jihad can be done on the cheap. A few well-trained bombmakers can keep an entire generation of half-educated suicide bombers primed for mass murder. A few “migrants” with rifles and smartphones can hold hostage a great city, a City of Light, killing or wounding hundreds.

The West’s response has so far been an impossible combination of recklessness, fecklessness, and denial.

We fight like it’s 1999, like it’s a war about nothing. The jihadis fight as though they mean to conquer the world, although their reach exceeds their grasp.

We fight as though there’s no point or even any need to win, although we could. In our War About Nothing, we cripple our own intelligence, open our borders, and comfort ourselves with false hopes about the efficacy of a phony air war against a canny enemy.

We may lack the will, but we do not lack the means. God help us if we ever allow the situation to deteriorate to the point where our choices are either suicide or genocide.

After Friday’s attacks in Paris, the only two qualities we should look for in our next president are audacity and ruthlessness. All the rest is fluff and must be cast aside before our Age of Seinfeld becomes our children’s Age of Slaughter.
With his call for audacity and ruthlessness, Green concludes we have already reached the point where something very near genocide may be required. COTTonLINE believes those who seek martyrdom should normally be accommodated, for as General George S. Patton, Jr. famously said:
No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.