Marco Rubio implements US policy in Syria.
Once in a generation, someone invents a story so powerful it rewrites the world. For our generation, that story was the Iraq war, and we will probably watch sequels the rest of our lives: ISIS, proxy war in Syria, ethnic nationalism returns to Europe, Ahmed Goes to Camp(s), et cetera. As made-up stories go, “we invade Iraq and they love us” is Huckleberry Finn, and the rest of us are writing Hardy Boys. Further fictions pale. Yet Kurt Schlichter’s What Defeating ISIS Would Look Like proves that in the field of literature, there is still a lot of work to be done. A taste:
The Americans published daily body counts. This horrified liberals, but delighted the American people, who for too long had had no good news nor any way to measure success.
Now hit that More button and eat the whole meal.
The year is 2016. The president is an unidentified Cuban-American male, a son of immigrants who “understood tyranny and knew how to deal with it.” The CENTCOM commander is a pussy, so the president replaces him with a man named The Wildman. Like all wild men, he knows how to get things done. That’s good, because the President wants him to do everyone in the Islamic State:
“Our goal is simple. We are going to destroy ISIS and kill its members. There will be no negotiations, no hesitation, no hands tied behind our backs. They wanted war. They will have it,” said the President. The new GOP Senate majority leader dispensed with the filibuster, and the declaration of war passed easily. The President also announced that all Americans must pay their fair share to support the war effort, and imposed a temporary 7% payroll tax on working Americans. Those not working must also pay their fair share too, he said; he signed a bill cutting all social programs 7% and shifting the savings to the military. The Democrats went ballistic; the President’s approval rating hit 60%.
You don’t want my 6,000-word close reading of that paragraph. Let me just say that’s how you deal with tyranny: the legislative branch dispenses with procedure to let the chief executive make war abroad and restructure society at home. But that’s not important right now. The important thing is that we finally untie The Wildman’s hands:
The Wildman’s Commander’s Intent statement said nothing about winning hearts and minds: “You will attack aggressively in order to destroy all ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria. You will kill all ISIS fighters who do not surrender. Your priority is the destruction of ISIS forces. The safety of civilians is secondary.”
You know what ruins a war? Confining yourself to killing only those people who fight against you. Sometimes, if you want to kill 27,000 members of ISIS, you have to “flatten” the city of Raqqa, Syria, population 220,000. The important thing is not how many people you kill total, but how many people you kill on purpose. Also, don’t worry about prisoners or whatever, since “the President had accepted the finding of the Department of Justice that all ISIS fighters were unlawful combatants not subject to Geneva Convention protections.”
I think two questions will guide the reader’s understanding of this seminal masterwork:
- Whose fantasy is this? It’s a world where we can “ruthlessly dismember the Islamic state and kill its members” without having to worry about civilian deaths, not because we figured out how to do it but because we stopped caring. Also, it is obviously our world. What, exactly, the fuck?
- Okay, so what would defeating ISIS look like if we were not insane?
If you answered “trial lawyer and retired infantry colonel Kurt Schlichter” for question (1), give yourself a point. If you answered “a distant possibility, a quagmire within a quagmire, a half-remembered dream” for question (2), give yourself two points. You didn’t just Google it, did you?
