Sigh. Newsflash: people die in wars.
Eradicating an enemy who kills without conscience can be costly, but is absolutely necessary. Regarding an article out of AP today about deaths in Mosul during the raging battle with ISIS there in March, 2017 (Taipei Times Dec. 21, 2017 p. 1 “More than 9,000 dead in battle to oust ISIS from Mosul”), it is clear that the number of civilian casualties are directly proportional to the absence of morals or ethics or care or concern for human life by the adversary, because our systems provide for adherence to those norms, but theirs do not, and in fact they use brutality as a weapon against us. However, when the adversary is bereft of conscience, it all goes out the window and you are in the fight of your life. Period.
President Obama micromanaged conflicts and we made almost no progress against ISIS. The supposed “progress” made during his administration was miniscule, chaotic, disjointed, betrayal, and incompetent (e.g. stepping aside (Obama’s chief policy) and turning the fight over to Russia, who by the way, WAS FIGHTING FOR THE OTHER SIDE – DUH!). When facing an adversary like ISIS (and Assad, the flavor of the month of Arab strongman with no compunction about murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people), who uses people as human shields, you simply cannot allow them to control the battle in this way. It is sadly like removing a cancer, which often involves death of good cells as well. People who are placed thus are already dead, because hesitation will embolden them to kill ever more, take more, be more cruel and brutal (as ISIS proved), as opposed to obliterating them finally so they can kill no more.
This is war. During WWII tens of millions died at the hands of the Nazis and Japanese (often brutally and bereft of human conscience), and finally the US ended the Pacific war with awful weapons, saving millions of lives and costing hundreds of thousands. I offer no apology for this. Those attacks ended the war within a week.
ISIS needed to be crushed, and attacking them with pebbles from 1,000 yards on alternate Sundays when the moon was in decline was an idiotic approach, and prolonged the war to destroy ISIS for years while hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced. The refugee crisis today in the world is directly related to the absence of any conviction to win the battle on the ground because the Commander in Chief was a wimp and tied the hands and legs of his warriors.
We cannot control the depths of depravity that some adversaries sink to except to destroy them. If you are unwilling to do that to save families and children and the future, stand aside. Others will step into the fray and accomplish the task, in our case, with far more discretion than in previous conflicts in history. There are bean counters who will whine and weep. So be it. Stand aside.
Appeasement gets nowhere and accomplishes absolutely nothing. We need to stop appeasing evil. This means China especially, and Russia, Iran, terrorists, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, PLA, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and many others. Kumbaya diplomacy accomplished nothing the past ten years. It is time for a new paradigm which does not involve hand-wringing, whining, caving in and running away. Stand aside.
I wrote about this yesterday here regarding the world’s appeasement of the Palestinians who have only grown more intransigent and belligerent with every European appeaser’s vote of betrayal of the US and Israel.
Stand aside. Get out of the way.
Strait Talk by Lee Longhwa 