UPDATE: The Captain was kind enough to link back to this post and though he has stopped updating his post I felt this issue was important enough to respond to his response to me.

Captain responds thusly: One blogger takes me to task for being overly concerned for war's unpleasantness. I have no problem with unleashing the awesome power of the American military, but I don't want to be stupid about it. Destroying Mecca automatically gets us one billion overt enemies, where now we face around 20,000 active and a couple of million covert at best. Even threatening to do that puts us at a disadvantage when arguing that we are not attempting an existential war against Islam. How can any intelligent Muslim believe that while we threaten Mecca, which has no military value whatsoever and sits in the middle of a country with which we are not at war?

One of the big problems in our fight against the Islamofacists has been that mainstream Islam has basically stood on the sidelines and not entered the fight foursquare against the sort of wanton terror our enemies are so capable of. We honestly cannot say that mainstream Islam isn't already in the enemies camp since they have been so far unwilling to completely condemn the awful actions already taken in the name of Islam. Where were the condemnations of the beheading of hapless Nickolaus Berg? For that matter how many American Imams came out after 9/11 to state without any equivocation that the terrorist actions on that day were the worst sort of perversions?

Islam so far has not exhibited the sort of rational behavior that leads one to believe that we can expect a return for charity given. Perhaps the stark possibility that we may wipe out the center of everything they believe in will be the sort of shock needed to really motivate the sort of moderation we must have if we are to win without murdering millions.

Do we want to do this? No. Should it be possible? I think it should remain in the realm of possibility and no, comparing the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland is beyond a stretch. We are facing a world wide uprising of Radical Muslims seeking to destroy not only one religion but all religions and even sects of muslims not their own. We need to get all the people on board and so far being nice and rational has only caused them to view us as weak. Osama had it right when he stated that people will always choose the strong horse. Perhaps it is time to appear just a bit scary...

Sorry Captain but you are showing your weakness not your humanity. War is not about showing humanity but about displaying the fact that you are unbeatable and that you are willing to use any means to win. You believe that this war can be won by limited actions and it simply cannot be won that way. We must be willing to use any means to win since the result of the other side winning is our death. The belief that we must show humanity to win is misguided since our enemy is only willing to accept our deaths not our surrender. We won't win by changing peoples minds but by showing that they have absolutely no hope of winning. We must kill their will to fight.

What Tancredo has done is put uncertainty into the jihadist minds and thats not a bad thing. War is brutal and horrible and by naming some of the results possible Tancredo has done nothing wrong.
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