At the beginning of Robert Heinlein’s brilliant book Starship Troopers, there is a scene where a naïve young schoolgirl tells her teacher, a veteran, that violence never solves anything. He asks her what the city fathers of Carthage would think of that. They, she says, wouldn’t have anything to think of that because Carthage was destroyed. Violence, he tells her, has solved most of the problems in the history of the world. This might not be pleasant, but it has the great advantage of being true, something generally lacking in liberal shibboleths.

The modern left has never grown out of their foolish schoolgirl phase. They flitter about in flowery pink dresses (quite literally in the case of liberals of a certain inclination) and spit out banal and widely discredited platitudes as though they were Gospel. A refusal to admit the efficacy of and need for violence is naïve at best and wilfully and dangerously stupid at worst. As the saying goes, war has never done anything… except end slavery, Nazism, and Communism- with all of that, I might add, coming in just the last one hundred and fifty years.

We will win the War on Terrorism when we come to grasp the mathematics of the situation. Our enemies lack the strength to mobilize great armies or to build great weapons. They seek to defeat us by breaking our resolve with their fanaticism. They mean to force us to buckle and retreat when we are faced with a wave of suicidal murders that will kill without regard for any distinctions between the civilian and military or without any regard for the civilized rules of warfare.

In any population there is only a limited body of people willing to serve as suicide attackers. It is noteworthy that in the Japan of the Second World War, a totalitarian state where the primary religion was the worship of the Emperor, the Japanese military was unable to find more than a few thousand people willing to volunteer for suicide attacks. By the end of the Battle of Okinawa the pool of willing participants had already been effectively sapped, with future suicide attackers being coerced into action by threats.

Among a Palestinian population of several million, and a wider Islamic population of about a billion people, only a few hundred have volunteered for suicide attacks against Israel, even despite living an atmosphere of constant anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Semitic hate and with the assurance of their religions leaders that martyrdom for Islam will bring them eternal pleasure in paradise (as well as material rewards for their family here on Earth).

Whack a Whacko:
What this means, in essence, is that there is only a very limited number of people who will willingly conduct suicide attacks. It is therefore of the first priority that as many of these people as possible be killed and that they be killed as quickly as possible. Because it is impossible to tell which al-Qaeda or Hamas associate is a planner and which is the next suicide bomber it therefore follows that mere membership in any Islamic terrorist group must now be sufficient cause for a sentence of death, preferably administer via bullets, bombs, or missiles.

The United States should adopt Israel’s policy of the targeted assassination of terrorists- expand it and widen its geographical reach. All members of al-Qaeda and similar groups, from Osama Bin Laden on down to the janitor and messenger-boy should become a target for assassination. This reach should extend to people in foreign nations, including ostensible allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who provide moral, material, or financial support for terrorists. Nor does this need to be a strictly military affair, the US Government could offer to pay a bounty of a million dollars for the every confirmed death of an al-Qaeda member and offer Presidential Pardons and sanctuary to those who commit crimes in a good-faith effort to kill terrorists. A special web site could be established to publicize the names, pictures, and home addresses of those identified as supporters of terrorism. In all likelihood this would not lead to many kills, but it would probably force more second-tier members of terrorist organizations to move underground, where access to money would become much more difficult. Also, a few car bombings or brutal murders in broad daylight might deter others from becoming involved with terrorists.

Earlier, when I wrote of the “mathematics of the situation� I was referring to the fact that, once the pool of suicide terrorists had be cleansed, the war on terrorism will be effectively over for the time being. Without dedicated suicide terrorists, all of the infrastructure in the world will be of little use to their masters.

According to some reports the United States presently has about three thousand terrorists in custody at various points around the world. None of these should ever be allowed to leave alive. Many will be found guilty of crimes and can be swiftly executed, others can probably be driven to suicide by constant torment, others still attired by poor living conditions. Taking more prisoners, specifically those who lack intelligence value, should be a decidedly secondary priority. It is far better to have a terrorist dead than alive. After all, who knows what could happen if Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton was to become the President? Those terrorists could be let out of Gitmo the next day and be applying for a California Driver’s License the day after that.

It must be noted that simply killing all of the present-day terrorists will not end this war forever, but rather that it will simply end it for now. As you read this there are children being born in the Islamic world who, left unchecked, will grow up to be future suicide bombers. The real ‘root cause’ of this war is the inability of the Islamic world to deal with its own failures and the efforts of Moslem leaders to channel the ensuing anger into external aggression, with the end result of such efforts being that roughly 90% of the ongoing armed conflicts in the world involve Moslems attacking non-Moslems.

The Collective Responsibility of the Islamic World for Terror:
Before I go on, I think it’s important to discuss for a moment the popular myth that people bear no responsibility for the actions of their government and ought not to be made to suffer the consequences of the actions of the same. This is an absurdity.

It is only natural that populations which support and allow terror should be made to suffer the consequences of that terrorism. In the Palestinian Authority, where people danced upon the streets to celebrate the September 11th attacks, and all across the Islamic world there are tens of millions of people who have been complicit in the rise of Islamism. By failing to remove their terror-supporting governments and continuing to offer their personal support to terrorists, the populations of many terror-supporting states have made themselves valid targets for reprisal.

Now naturally this does not mean that I am suggesting that we build death camps for these people. Such tactics are not only immoral, but they are self-defeating as well. The point of making the Islamic world suffer some of the consequences of the actions of their leaders is to break the hubris and confidence of the people in order to allow an effective reconstruction to take place.

Iraq, I believe, is ideally suited to be the prototype for the reconstruction of the entire Moslem world. Its people were already broken by a decade of war and sanctions and, at any rate, they never fully bought in to the lies which as so popular in much of the Islamic world.

In the long term, in order for there to be peace, it is not enough to exterminate the terrorists: we must rebuild the entire Islamic world along Western lines via a process of neo-colonialism. We not only change the culture of the Islamic world, but we must threaten and bribe the right people in an effort to create a harmless and defanged religion. The pap spouted by the Islamic clerics at special ‘interfaith services’ in the United States- the stories about how ‘Islam means peace’ and ‘Jihad refers to an internal, personal, struggle’ would serve well as the basis of a perfectly benign religion.

Reconstruction will take decades, hundred of billions of dollars, and probably thousands of American lives. However, it is worth it because stopping the rise of the Islamist menace today will save the lives of millions of Americans which would otherwise be lost as soon as the terrorists acquire the weapons with which to match their hate.

Uncle Billy’s March:
It’s all well and good to talk, as the left does, about peaceful reform. But the kind of radical reconstruction required of the Islamic world rarely comes quickly and is rarely initiated internally. Repressive societies are destroyed more often by the likes of William Tecumseh Sherman’s men in blue and George Patton’s crusading Third Army than they are by cautiously-worded resolutions of the United Nations’ General Assembly.

Before we can build a new Moslem world we must burn down the edifice of the old. Sherman said that the purpose of his march through Georgia and the Carolinas was to fill the South with such a loathing of war that it would be a hundred years before they’d even think of rising again. We must do the same in the Moslem world. We must send our troops marching through Araby.

There will be no end to this war so long as the Islamic world is filled with notions of their own superiority and invulnerability. We must use the means of war to educate those people to the fact that their God will not save them. We do not need to kill great numbers of them to do this. Sherman certainly did not. Rather, we need to teach them the futility of resistance and the falseness of their own creed. It is a popular and self-evidently stupid myth that defeat will strengthen a culture or religion- more often it will destroy it. The Islamic world is a little slice of the Middle Ages, transported through time to the modern day.

The end to this war must be positively Carthaginian. This does not mean that we must do exactly as the Roman did and destroy the land and the people for these resources, both people and land, are far too valuable to waste. What we must destroy instead is ideas- the outmoded culture of the Middle East, the myth of Muslim superiority- and the prevalent versions of the Islamic religion which provide the intellectual, moral, and legal justifications for terrorism.

We must conquer their countries and we must salt the fields of the mind from which repellent Islamist ideas have grown.