Gitmo, Schmitmo

Gee whiz. You mean the guys in Gitmo that the lefties wanted released really were bad guys?

Damn that George Bush! Sure glad we have Barack now! He won't be so soft on the bastards...

Some day we'll wake up realize that we are at war with radical Islam. Maybe we'll even realize that war sucks. A lot of people get killed, some of whom will be innocent, no matter how "surgical you try to be.

But I doubt it. If you want to win a war, you have to reconcile yourself with this fact: the wars of the past were fought with soldiers. The wars of today (well, pretty much every war since Vietnam) are fought by soldiers who battle against those who wear no uniforms and act in complete and utter disregard for the law of war. They are vermin.

You cannot fight them on conventional terms.

If you have rats or roaches in your house you can try a surgical, one rat or roach at a time, approach. It might work sometimes, especially if there are few rats or roaches. Or you can go Armageddon on them and try to obliterate them all. If the latter you are likely to kill things you'd rather not, but you are also more likely to be successful.

So when Abdul and Mohammad - known bad guys - hide out in a village, you can try a house to house search. It'll work sometimes; you might find them.

Or you can destroy the whole village. It works every time.

It's a terrible approach, of course, except for the fact that it works. And if the bad guys don't play by the rules we don't have many meaningful options, do we?

Think I am being too harsh? Many people do; I get that. But let me throw a little history at you: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo. We weren't even fighting soldiers in these instances - we just wanted to break the back of the enemy.

And we did.

That's why they call it war.

That's why Sherman observed that "War is Hell." After he burned Atlanta to the ground.

It's the only way to fight a war too - brutal, bloody, violent. Enough with the candy ass approach. It doesn't work - it never has and it never will.