Abu Wabu

By monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all your standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct... That's God in the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical judgements. Ethics is wiped out... God is horrific.
- Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth

Ed Morrissey, now blogging full time at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, has a post up today that echoes the previous posts here and here. He begins with reference to Alan Dershowitz' Wall Street Journal article Worshippers Of Death, in which Dershowitz points out how the enemy's very nihilism, and that of his willing civilian enablers, makes it necessary to devise new rules for dealing with what he identifies as the terrorist "continuum".

The obvious problem is that the Islamofascists are in love with death, as they themselves declare on a daily basis, and we know they cannot be negotiated with; all they want is to destroy us and our way of life, and they thirst for glory as martyrs in service to that end, including those we wind up killing as so-called collateral damage. The question therefore forced on we the rational by the enemy is, how do we define "collateral damage"? I agree with Morrissey's answer:

[W]e need to understand this war as something other than Hitler rolling into Poland or Japan bombing a naval base in Pearl Harbor. We face a network of radical theological nihilists who want to destroy civilization by using our civilized impulses against us. We have to maintain those impulses but not shy away from doing the necessary work of ridding the globe of this new and dangerous cancer, militarily, politically, and financially. That will require the West to understand that the collateral deaths are the fault of the terrorists, whether that is in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, or anywhere else where terrorists launch attacks in the midst of civilians.

In short, it requires the West to dump the fantasy of the old set-piece paradigms and get serious about saving millions and perhaps billions of lives in the long run by doing what needs to be done now. The irrational do not seek a negotiated solution, and rationality cannot be rescued by surrendering to the irrational. (Emphasis mine)

The enemy specifically rejects all ethical judgements. It is therefore not we but the enemy who has placed Western civilization into this conflict between doing what is necessary to destroy this malignant evil, and sticking to our old paradigms of conventional warfare in which civilized people agreed on civilized laws, including the rules of war. When our enemies hide by weaving themselves into the very willing fabric of their society rather than standing up like warriors in the civilized tradition, then their civilians, innocent or not (mostly not in the cases Dershowitz cites), must necessarily be killed when we counter their attacks with our own. If that is how they choose to fight, we must accommodate them with a commitment and sense of purpose that suits the job at hand. "Rationality cannot be rescued by surrendering to the irrational."

As a society at war with an implacable enemy bent on our destruction, we must answer that aggression with the clear intent of destroying the enemy wherever it hides and in whatever form it takes, including Dershowitz' pregnant female homicide bomber. The deaths of the innocent will be on the enemy's heads, not ours; given the enemy's nature I can live with that, just as I can live with a Dresden or a Hiroshima if that's what will save the civilized world.

It has been so in the past and it will be so again if we are to prevail against this latest horrendous apparition.

We have always emerged from war with our humanity intact, and we always will. That is our nature.