Beating ISIS: Only Trump and Cruz Have a Clue

After watching the Republican debate on foreign and defense policy last night, it seems like we have three basic approaches to defeating Islamic terrorism.

One, do absolutely nothing. Praise Islam and shame/blame the United States for being mean and arrogant. Tell Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists and anyone else who’s not Muslim that they have to get over it.

This is the Obama/Hillary Clinton approach.

Two, go back to the Bush “regime change” and “boots on the ground,” conventional war strategy.

Such a policy means fighting a half-hearted war with rules of engagement preventing soldiers from killing civilians. Instead of fighting a war to win with all of our firepower, we fight a war to lose.

This appears to be the approach of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and all of the other Republican candidates, except for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Three, fight a war to win with all available massive force on the table. Speak in unequivocal moral terms and act on the premises of those terms.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz come closest to this approach.

Donald Trump summed the moral issue up best when he asked, “So, they can kill us, but we can’t kill them?”

That really nails it.

I am so sick of hearing people – not just Obama, but many Republicans, as well – prattle on about how “that’s not who we are.”

What’s not who we are?

Fighting back against the most vicious, savage and brutal bullies the world has ever known?

These “moral weenies” basically uphold the view that no matter what anyone does to us, we cannot fight back.

Trump made another good point.

America spent trillions on defeating militant Islam after 9/11, and we have nothing to show for it. Nothing.

Although I don’t agree with him that government should fund anything other than the military and courts, Trump’s absolutely right that we would have been better off spending that money on roads and airports.

Worse yet, consider the efforts of the soldiers who lost their limbs, their lives or their peace of mind.

For what?

An even more destabilized Middle East, more threatening and dangerous than ever before. And that region’s religiously based terrorism (yes, it’s all about religion) has once again reached our shores.

Ted Cruz has repeatedly advocated “carpet bombing” and “utterly destroying” ISIS.

Whether carpet bombing will be enough is an open question, but Cruz has the right moral premise. He’s less emotional, more explicit and more intellectual about it than Trump. ISIS is bad, and so is anyone who aligns with their point-of-view, including – most definitely – Iran.

Any innocents who die in such attacks are not our victims; they’re the victims of the ones who initiated the aggression in the first place. The victimizers are the Islamic terrorists. They are the ones who get the blame for anyone who dies.

America’s continuing loss in the war against Islamic terrorism stems from a wrong moral premise. The wrong moral premise is that we cannot kill anyone, ever, other than the terrorist gang members themselves. That was the premise behind George W. Bush’s futile efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s the very same premise behind Obama’s incomprehensible pacifism.

Imagine if we had adopted this moral premise against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Have you seen the Amazon television series, “The Man in the High Castle”? It dramatizes what America might have looked like in the 1950s and 1960s, had the Nazis and the Japanese won WW II. It’s kind of like “Mad Men” in a parallel universe, one in which Hitler had won and conquered America.

We’re at a similar point as we were in World War II. Like the 1940s, we’re at war with hateful savages who seek to enslave and murder those with whom they disagree.

Unlike the 1940s, we have yet to admit we’re at war, or even to name the enemy.

Instead, we have officials who seek to disarm peaceful citizens, outlaw fossil fuels and repeatedly lecture us on the virtues of the religion whose sternest advocates seek to wipe us out of existence.

This America would never have won World War II.

How interesting that Trump and Cruz are the two candidates most reviled and despised by the cultural and intellectual elites who have served us so badly.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the only two who seem to even sense the wrong moral premise involved.

When will the rest of us?

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