In a fight to the death, the terms of the conflict will devolve to the tactics employed by the most ruthless, remorseless side. If one side insists on fighting by a higher, more moral standard, that side can win battles and manage a stalemate in the conflict for a time if it has overwhelming superiority. However, in a prolonged conflict, even the superior power will be defeated if it refuses to adopt its own version of the tactics employed by the other side.

At the beginning of World War II, the British refused to bomb German factories and other civilian sites because they considering doing so to violate the rights of the property owners. The Germans, on the other hand, had no reluctance in bombing British and French cities and noncombatants. As the fighting progressed and after France fell to the German invasion, the British understood the stakes involved in the conflict and the evil nature of the enemy. They recognized that victory at all cost and by all means by morally justifiable not only to preserve England as a free society, but to spare other peoples the horror of a Nazi victory. Hence, as their war papers reveal, the British were prepared to use poison gas against German troops as a last resort should the Germans successfully obtain beachheads in an invasion of Great Britain. We almost know that Great Britain and the United States pursued a bombing campaign against the German homeland that devastated whole cities and killed hundreds of thousands. None of this was a particularly moral way of making war and would have shocked and horrified people if the tactics had been suggested but a few years earlier. However, the war was won, an achievement for which the whole world can be thankful.

The United States has refused to employ the same tactics of its opponents in wars since Korea. As a result, we have not won a war since (the incursion in Panama and the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait were not wars but battles involving no long term commitment). Our military has been restricted in the means by which it is to obtain its objectives and now operates under so many rules that military lawyers are proliferating. Our opponents are not so impaired. Their objective is not to win "right" but simply to win, which they define succinctly as killing us. In the meantime we have almost reached the stage that our troops will have to read prisoners "Miranda rights" before they can be interrogated. Our society’s obsession with "rights’ and legalism has infected the armed services, to the detriment of the nation’s ability to defend itself. We discourage aggression and promote caution in war making, an oxymoron in concept and execution.

It is no accident that the United States won all its wars until we accepted a draw in Korea. In all conflicts up to then, it was understood and expected that the military would kill people and destroy property and in the course thereof ugly, ruthless things would have to be done to obtain victory. War, to paraphrase General Sherman, was "hell" and there was no time to brood over or complain about the tactics used to defeat the enemy. Whether it concerned the preservation of the nation or the union, all means which advanced the cause of ultimate victory were acceptable, because the thing to be accomplished by victory was far preferable to alternative.

The bottom line is that in order to defeat the jihadists we must jettison the effete ethos that war can be fought clinically and by legal code. Effective war against the jihadists will result in the unfortunate deaths of noncombatants. Our opponents have conclusively demonstrated they regard the murder of innocents or the wanton destruction of property as perfectly legitimate means of warfare. We must demonstrate that we are fully capable of the ruthless killing of them and their sanctuaries, wherever found, even if in the midst of cities or in mosques or if they gather at a funeral. These barbarians can be allowed no safe havens anywhere, anytime.

Currently the United States it not yet ready to fight. We have not reached the point that we believe ourselves sufficiently at risk to wage total war against the Jihadist threat. Our "kid gloves" conduct of the Iraqi campaign, the court rulings which circumscribe our handling of terrorists we have incarcerated, the uproar over modest surveillance programs of terrorist communications, bespeak a society still in a peacetime frame of mind. I fear it will take a death of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, before we awake from our delusion this threat can be managed as it has been.