More on extremism in warblogging Daily Pundit thinks that I'm overreacting to the "Most Bloodthirsty" warblog competition. He believes that this is basically a joke. And I agree that many - probably most - of the bloggers in the "contest" are joking. But at least three - Misha, Laurence Simon, and Cato the Youngest - are at least semi-serious. 1) Misha and Simon are not joking. A sample: The Gazans have worn their humanity away with their self-inflicted media assaults and lessons of hate and destruction, their self-deprivation and social suicide to garner attention like a teenager slicing their wrists as an empty cry for help, and they've engaged in population-expanding programs to intentionally inflate their numbers to sink the life raft they are piled on so as to force the nearby ships to pull them out of the water. No more of this madness. It's time to just fire up the D-9's and start up a systematic campaign to wipe out all buildings from Gaza, period. Rip out the evil machine underneath the skin and see if the corrupted flesh can endure on its own. Bury all evidence of the homicidal civilization called "Gazan." Let all million of them go back to the Stone Age with their Stone Age ways of behavior and utter lack of civilization and see how far they get before Mother Nature ends their little death cult experiment. 2) Cato has not repudiated his earlier comments and/or said that they were entirely in jest. In other words - he was not completely joking. Now, I happen to agree that ending state sponsorship is the key to ending major acts of terrorism, and that Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran must be dealt with. But I emphatically do not believe that it is wise or desirable to advocate the leveling of Riyadh (or Baghdad, or Teheran). There are really only two permanent solutions to state sponsorship of terrorism: a) Continual US military occupation of the worst Middle East offenders. This would be a state of perpetual war. b) Democratic or semi-democratic (e.g Turkey) Middle East governments that take care of radical Islam within their borders and keep the oil flowing. Obviously, solution b) is far more desirable than "solution" a). I do not want the US outpost in the Middle East to become another Israel, involved in a costly and endless guerilla war against fanatical Islamists. Some use of military force will be inevitable, and I support the invasion of Iraq - but pragmatically speaking, it will be far easier to democratize a relatively intact country than a shattered one. Destroying cities indiscriminately will polarize even moderate Muslims. Yes, power talks in the Middle East, but a scorched earth program of untrammeled destruction will cause the Arabs to fight to the death. And though we would still win, the pyrrhic victory will make it difficult or impossible to reeducate/reform the defeated populace. This does NOT mean that we should eliminate the option of force for fear that we will offend the natives. It does mean that we should be judicious in our application of force, as befits the fact that we have learned the lesson of Vietnam. Remember that one of the major problems with Vietnam was that we were attempting to fight a war against a guerrilla force with widespread popular support. In such an environs, events like My Lai are inevitable. There is one crucial difference, however, between an extended battle with partisans in the Middle East and in Vietnam: the Vietnamese never threatened American soil. Of course, the Vietcong wouldn't have gotten very far without Chinese backing...but can we really keep the Muslim countries and/or oil sheikhs of the world from covertly funding terrorism? I don't think that would be possible without outright occupation of every oil-producing Muslim state, which would likely provoke a backlash from the industrialized world. It's for these reasons that I think it is counterproductive to seriously advocate nuclear strikes/razing of cities/terror bombing of civilians. Our goal is an end to major terrorism, not the destruction of the Middle East or the extinction of its people.