Squeemishness and outsourcing

We're homeless again, our apartment that we've bought is still
undergoing a makeover, and the owner of the apartment that
we were renting finally noticed we were renting a nice apartment
with no rental agreement, and at half the price they should be
asking just because they are nice. Niceness apparently ended
this week, they dumped a 20 page rental agreement with price
hike and lease on on us, and we decided to take a hike and stay
with friends for a week or two until the floor is done in the new
place.

One result of that is that I can't watch CNN or fox or bbc, because
they only seem to be talking about Saddam, and a video of saddam's
tongue sticking out as he's hanged isn't something our host's little
boys need to see at their age. They can read about him in 10 years
in their history books, as a great leader who sponsored national kite
flying contests, and the imperialist americans removed him from power
because he wouldn't sign our haliburton contracts. Or something equally
muddle-headed. (hopefully they'll still study history, and not just chant
from the koran)

It's ok to be squeemish and not let little boys see death in slow-mo, but
as adults and free people, squeamishness will be our undoing. This is
war, even if we decide we don't want to fight it, there will still be people
who will come here and fight us until we are either dead or converted, or
they are dead and/or dead.

Mark Steyn says this much better today in the Chicago Sun-times:
(go read the whole thing, this is the climax)

Well, we'll see about that. One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren't fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some "war crime" or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they're just getting on with it.

And, given the potential for Islamist destabilization of their own country, they were wise to do so. The "international community" has reacted in the usual ways: calls for immediate cease-fires so that an ineffectual U.N. force of peacekeepers can go in and enjoy their customary child sex with the locals while propping up the Islamists. The Ethiopians can't be blamed for not taking the U.N. seriously. To be sure, the alternative to the jihad boys is a bunch of thugs. But that's the reality of much of the map today: a choice between being an outpost of the global jihad, or a patchwork quilt of warlords, or a bit of both with some feeble, half-hearted multilateral force mediating between the two. I don't know whether the Ethiopian intervention will work in the long run, but, if it does, the best hope for squashing the jihad might be to outsource the fight to Third World regimes less squeamish about waging it.

I'm afraid we're looking at one of the worst possible outcomes, limping along
in Iraq, burning up the army while the media chants our demise. At every stage
of the war, we've tried to be nice, targeting palaces with smart bombs instead of
carpetbombing, negotiating with people like Sadr instead of connecting the words
bullet and head, and chatting with the Iranians while their factories turn out IED's
in three shifts.

Nice hasn't worked and we are basically waiting for the Iranians to build a bomb,
or the pakistanis to give a bomb(or bombs) to whichever nutjobs are finally going
to attack us. Being nice and squeamish will probably cost us a few cities, and in the
end cost the other guys a whole lot more. We need to stand up now, roll back
the sadrists and whichever other bad guys choose to stand up in Iraq, roll back
the Iranian nuclear program and the syrian infiltration program, and do it in a non-
squeamish way that doesn't try and deliver a message...but kills the bad guys.

Or outsource the whole thing to someone willing to do what needs to be done.