Blogging over at VodkaPundit, Will Collier asks a tough question:
One of the more pressing questions in the ongoing war against Islamofascism is, how do we fight these people?
It's not just an academic question. The opponents of classical liberal civilization have become adept at using the West's principles against us. The Geneva Conventions, for instance, were originally designed to protect both civilian populations and members of lawful armies from mistreatment. Terrorists from Lebanon to Somalia to Afghanistan, with no small amount of help from jurists and journalists in the West, have learned to turn those principles on their heads, regularly using civilian populations as shields from attack, only to turn and claim "atrocity" when attacks are carried out against terrorists hiding amist civilians ...
Gunmen in Mogadishu learned early that Americans do not attack women and children; they quite literally hid behind civilian women while shooting at US troops as a result. What then can the response be from the civilized world?
Lori Byrd at WizBang replied,
I sometimes wonder if we had gone into Iraq with no regard for innocent human life, if our troops might be home by now. But we do honor innocent life, and that sometimes is to our disadvantage. Our enemies know this and they use it against those in our armed forces everyday.
And Ed Morrisey, writing at The Examiner, notes the obvious disadvantages of a war in which one side "plays by the rules," and the other side doesn't:
In order to defeat terrorists, Israel will have to engage them when they attack, wherever that happens to be. In their effort to zealously apply the rules of war to only one side, the global community doesn’t act to reduce the tragedies of civilian casualties, it increases them by encouraging Hezbollah’s tactics. The terrorists counted on precisely this response, which dictates their tactics and strategy to this moment.
The choice that most pro-war conservative factions believe is necessary is to accept the collateral deaths of citizens as an ugly but inevitible part of a war that is fought against an enemy that unscrupulously uses human shields against their foes. War cannot be ended simply because of the barbarity of the enemy; a victory for terrorists and the true forces of evil (such as Iran and North Korea) means the doom of Western civilization.
But is there a viable alternative to this kind of war? I surely hope so.
As a Christian, I would like to ask my readers who pray to sincerely pray for true peace in the Middle East, in which all sides put down their arms and choose to resolve their differences without bloodshed or humiliation.
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