Responding to a question from an audience member on what he said was the futility of killing Muslims in Iraq to end extremism, [Christopher] Hitchens parodied:
“‘How does killing them lessen their numbers?’ You must have meant something more intelligent. … We worry too much in America about our ‘right’ to be in Iraq.
“Make them worry. Make them run scared. … I’m going to fight these people and every other theocrat all the way. All the way. You should be ashamed sneering at the people guarding you as you sleep.”
The question was silly. We killed lots of Nazis from 1942 to 1945. There were more Nazis fighting in 1945 than in 1941 prior to our entry into the war. This did not mean we "created" more enemies. The enemy mobilized more resources to fight us in a quite natural reaction to our application of our power to fighting them. They added more Nazis in uniform because if they didn't, they'd lose ground to us. Had we not fought Nazi Germany, the Nazis would have had no need to mobilize more resources to fight us. That would be a sign of our victory ... how?
As we killed Nazis and more Nazis were trained and equipped despite our strenuous efforts to kill Nazis, we advanced toward Berlin and the heart of Nazi Germany and eventually won that war. Killing was not enough. We had to exploit the killing to take their territory and eliminate their ability to wage war.
Today, killing jihadis is a necessary component of winning the Long War. But it is not sufficient. We have to kill the Islamo-fascist ideology that spawns new recruits. And killing the jihadis is just one tool to achieving that result.
This is where Leftists get confused. Hearing that killing is not the main component of defeating any enemy, they neglect that in a war, killing is indeed necessary nonetheless. We couldn't have marched on Berlin (and I speak in a general sense, of course, quite aware that the Soviets captured Beerlin) without killing lots of Nazis. And we won't defeat jihadi ideology without killing lots of the current crop of jihadis spawned by that ideology.
So while we work on the real means of defeating Islamist terrorism, killing jihadis is absolutely necessary. As General Sherman might have said if he lived today, "The only good jihadi is a dead jihadi. Because any jihadi we don't kill this year is just another we have to kill next year."
But Hitchens will do in a pinch, no doubt.
