Posted 8/22/2003 10:57:00 AM by Ocean Guy
War on Terror
Hat Tip to Spoons pointing me to the InstantMan's comment:

Treating them[Islamists] as reasonable people with possibly legitimate grievances has mostly been a matter of Western self-deception.

Prof. Reynolds was referring to this article by Victor Davis Hanson.

President Bush's announcement about a war on Terror was, in fact, only an acknowledgement that the war was on. It's not a new event. Islamists have been fighting us since at least 1979, but we've largley ignored it or looked at incidents in isolation. This littel bit fro Hanson could apply to any incident in the past 50 years involving Islamic attacks on Israel and the West.

From the detritus of Wednesday's terror will arise a new grim acceptance that despite all our brilliantly rapid military victories we are not yet finished in this war for civilization, and that there are a group of killers — whether Baathists, al Qaedists, West Bank murderers, or Iranian and Saudi terrorists-who shall give no quarter. We should never forget that. In the euphoria of the three-week victory many of us rightly still worried that under the new restrictive protocols of postmodern warfare the age-old laws of conflict were for a time being forgotten: The ease of postbellum occupation is in proportion to the level of punishment inflicted on the enemy.

This group of killers continues to grow and will not disappear. They will continue to grow and to fester hatred and violence until we defeat them or they overwhelm us. The longer we avoid confronting them with brutal and overwhelming force, the longer they will have to embrace

"the tactics of the bomb-laden truck and suicide belt to demoralize civil society and to win the only way they can — as was true in Beirut and Mogadishu — by eroding public support for the continuance of war."

Don't fool yourselves, the terrorists MUST be defeated. They will not be appeased, bribed or debated into respecting us or their neighbors. How much longer will we wait? Do we have to absorb another catastrophic attack to move us to action? How many more must die?

Theres' a job that has to be done. The terrorists are fighting us and waging war against us and will continue to regardless of what we do. We have only two choices: fight them now or fight them later. But the violence, as Hansons says, "will continue until either we or they are defeated."