I'm going to use a technical term to describe this notion:
The Islamic State terrorist group wants nothing more than for the U.S. Armed Forces to destroy it, politicians and pundits say.
Dozens of thought leaders familiar with the terrorist group say that its members yearn for the day that close air support from an A-10 Warthog cuts them in half while coalition soldiers storm Raqqa.
This idea that destroying our enemy plays into our enemies' hands is what is called in the business "stupid."
But it does touch on a reality that I've droned on about over the years. This is merely a restatement of the idea that fighting back just creates more jihadis.
Let's ignore the fact that under this logic we should just sit and take the killings until the enemy tires of killing us.
Although if we conduct a vigorous self-criticism session exploring "why they hate us" as the left ponders all the time, I suppose we might hasten the day when the jihadis stop wanting to kill us.
Anyway, this is related to my repeated explanation that fighting back doesn't create more jihadis. Fighting back ineffectively creates more jihadis.
Fighting back ineffectively simply kills jihadis at a rate the enemy can endure while failing to deliver a decisive blow against them. Ineffectively fighting back just confirms to Islamists that we are both an enemy and incapable of destroying them despite our great power--thus confirming Allah's will in the fight that will lead to jihadi victory.
The Taliban regime certainly wanted us to ineffectively fight them after 9/11. Enduring a few cruise missile salvos would have been great. Instead, we destroyed their regime.
Osama bin Laden could have taken air raids to punish him with little loss of sleep. Instead, he sleeps with the fishies.
Saddam Hussein deployed his military not for defense against a real invasion but for the purpose of enduring a non-serious attack that would allow him to quickly reassert control of the Shia south when we tired of flailing away. Saddam was captured, tried, and executed, and now his lads are reduced to hoping they can ride the ISIL train back to power in Iraq (and yes, I'm amazed to see the media even mention this).
No rational enemy wants to be destroyed. They want to win.
Which begs the questions of why the left doesn't want to win this war against jihadis and just who do they see as the enemy?
So when the left's so-called thought leaders pop off about how the enemy wants us to destroy them, and so we'd just play into their hands by trying to do that, just ignore them.
And get on with the job of killing them and defeating them--the traditional and proven method of winning wars.
