Curtis LeMay: “I’ll tell you what war is about, you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting”
New York Times, regarding the untimely death of Ali Larijani, the guy who’d been running Iran: “Israel’s Killing of Ali Larijani Could Allow Military to Tighten Grip on Iran … had a reputation for acting as a bridge between hard-line figures in the armed forces and more moderate political factions”.
If that wasn’t clear enough for communicating how foolhardy the idea of killing the enemy is as a warfighting technique, the NYT ran a second article explaining that killing the enemy “can backfire” (i.e., will backfire).
(The Iranians retaliated per usual by launching missiles at civilians in Tel Aviv. One odd feature of this war is that the Iranians complain that it is against the laws of war when the U.S. kills some civilians by mistake while at the same time the Iranians mostly attack civilian targets, e.g., in Israel or the Gulf Arab states. Similarly, folks in the West don’t complain that Iran attacks civilians, but point out that if we were to shut down Iran’s weapons factories by disabling oil production and electric power generation that would be a war crime because civilians also benefit from oil sales and electric power.)
The New York Times doesn’t explain its rationale for why killing the enemy is a sure way to lose a war, but maybe it follows logically from Islam being the Religion of Peace. If Muslims are by definition peaceful then killing a Muslim such as Ali Larijani reduces the amount of peace in the world.
A good companion piece, from state-sponsored PBS: don’t be concerned about the four Islamic jihads waged domestically in the first two weeks of March (Ayman Mohamad Ghazali trying to kill 140 preschoolers in Michigan, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh killing Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shah, an Army helicopter pilot, in Virginia, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi throwing bombs in Manhattan, and Ndiaga Diagne killing Texans). Islamophobia is the real problem here in the U.S.
