An article highlighted on SteynOnTheWorld takes the question even further by asking, “War isn’t the answer so much as a question: What are you? And is what you are worth defending?”

This delves to the heart of the Global War on Terror, the Israeli response to acts of aggression against its sovereignty, and the general worldwide response to terrorist acts. If war must come, and come it will, how are we going to view it? Are we going to turn and run from it, depending on pacifist fantasies to make everything okay, or meet the threat head-on and take care of business?

An important excerpt from the article, giving us an oft-repeated history lesson about fascists from the past and how previous “realists” dealt with them:

Do you know the name Jim Callaghan? No reason why you should. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom before Mrs Thatcher. In fact, he’s the reason the Brits wound up electing Mrs Thatcher. Very nice chap. Affable, decent, modest. But he once confided to a friend of mine that he thought Britain’s decline was irreversible and that the government’s job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. He wasn’t alone in this: an entire generation of Britain’s political class, on both sides of the aisle, felt much the same way. So their instinct, when confronted with a crisis, was to “manage” it rather than solve it.

This method of thinking is precisely the problem with the so-called “strategies” and “diplomatic solutions” espoused by the Ned Lamonts and John Kerrys of today’s world. The question with them isn’t whether we are at war or not; rather, the question to them is how we can manage an unstoppable, unimaginable, violent threat to our civilization - and their answer is all too often to stay cautious, to appease those who want to hurt civilized peoples, and to use a “carrot and a stick” to attempt to reason with people such as the dictator of Iran who call for the elimination of Israel yet is considered a less threat than George W. Bush by leftists who insist that there is a “middle ground” between appeasement and absolute destruction of terrorist cells. The very people who insist that there is no “global war on terror,” in my belief, are those who in their hearts know that such a war is in fact the reality, yet insist upon denying it repeatedly to hedge their bets for either one of two reasons: 1) they have such an ingrained “blame America first” dogma that they subconsciously believe the terrorists have a just cause to fight for, or 2) are scared to death of the possibilities that such a war presents and would rather go the appeasement route in order to better serve mankind (a theory that is grossly miscalculated - see Chamberlain, Neville).

“Cowboy Diplomacy,” for all its nuanced guffaws and laughs around a beer the “peace at any price” crowd may have, is the only way to deal with this threat. These people (people is a loose term; a better term would be “barbarians” or “genocidal maniacs”) will not negotiate. Sorry to spill the beans, Kerry, Lamont, et al, but there is no other way than complete and utter destruction of those who want to establish a fascist Islamic Caliphate. You can make all the statements you want decrying “preemptive warfare”; the point remains that this war is here, whether you like it or not, and only a hawkish foreign policy view is going to handle it appropriately to protect our way of life.

There is no negotiating with a breed of animals who insist upon the total genocide of a civilization or a race. In the end, the only way is to meet them, as they wish, on the battlefield. Initally, the only way to deal with them is to either convert them to a sane way of thinking, or to do as they desire and fight them and defeat them. It has been shown time and time again that the al Qaida types, the Taliban types, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, refuse to be converted. They have strayed so far down their delusional path that there is no return. They must be defeated.

God Bless our troops, and God Bless the mission that they are set out to do.