Advocacy of Total War

IF the US did these things:

1. Only became militant against entities (or their support network) that had committed an atrocity within the territory of the US.
2. Became equally militant, no preferential treatment, e.g. the US's perverse distinction between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and others.
3. Only nullified all life in a zone, and then leave. No conquest, religious or ethical proselytizing, taking of resources, signing of lucrative exclusionary trade deals, orphanage building, or state building.

THEN

the world, especially the Muslim world, would have a very sincere respect of the US.

I would support a war on jihad extremism much like the US's war on the Japanese -the US obliterated every city above 50,000 in population. That nullifies the production of almost anything: hardware, memes, religion. In the war on jihadism, the US should have, at the very least, obliterated Islamabad, and then moved to an opposite of Japanese urban-bombing and used some form of nuclear war or other complete area death methodology to wipe the mountain terrain of both Afghanistan and Pakistan clear of all human and animal life.

Below is a copy from an email from a friend on the subject of Total War, his synopsis compliments my statements.

Saying that total war is all good or all bad is like saying that government is all good or all bad, or that bacteria is all good or all bad. Total war is a horrifying idea, and a powerful strategy that may do more good than harm in some cases. At the core of the idea is the concept of the "system" - the coordinated nation-state, the body politic, the public and private, military and civilian appendages working together under a political head.


To make any distinction between Sherman's march to the sea and Hitler's rape of Europe, we need to think objectively about systems. We need to understand that the good of the system is not necessarily the greatest good, and that the system does not self-regulate, it is not inherently justifying, it is not necessarily rational, and it has no destiny written in the stars. But we also need to understand that the system can do enough good to justify itself, that the system can be efficiently regulated, that it can be mostly fair and moral, and it can be improved over time.


Any system that can prevent Total War is a subtle form of Total War in itself, since preventing Total War means preventing the whole system of one nation from organizing itself against the whole system of another nation, and preventing a nation from organizing itself in that way is a military intervention against that nation.

-Seth Galbraith