Don't fight Muslim terrorists

Matthew Continetti offers his thoughts on defeating Muslim terrorism in the Washington Free Beacon. The gist of his wisdom: whack the jihadists on their turf, not ours (meaning Western countries, which some terrorists have the legal right to call "home").

He presents a reasonable history of the dopey responses that have been tried over the years. First there was the law enforcement method: treat them like Mafiosi or tax evaders. Various other strategies, from bombing to invasion to nation building, followed.

Our president in absentia introduced the latest phase:

With the election of President Obama, however, the conflict between Islamism and America entered a third phase. Our troops were removed from the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving Special Forces and drone pilots to do most of the fighting. The defense budget was cut. Harsh interrogation was curtailed, and Guantanamo Bay slowly emptied. Surveillance practices were disrupted. The words “Islamic terrorism” would not be uttered, for that somehow legitimized extremists. As for the terrorists themselves, they were once again treated like criminals.

This naughty-but-nice policy has been another dud.

What has resulted is a dramatic uptick in Islamic radicalism. In January 2014 the RAND Corporation found that “the number of Salafi-jihadist groups and fighters increased after 2010, as well as the number of attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates.” Attacks including the Ft. Hood massacre; the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi; the Boston Marathon bombing whose victims included an 8-year-old boy; and the public beheading of British Fusilier Lee Rigby.

Continetti pitches a new strategy, which sounds suspiciously like one of the old ones:

And there is really only one way America can respond to this challenge. We need to kill them first. We need to kill them on a field of battle whose contours are determined not by the terrorists but by us. We need to kill them over there—in the Middle East—before they reach the West. ... 

The number of U.S. ground forces in Iraq must be dramatically increased, and America seriously must work to remove the cause of the Syrian civil war: the mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, who continues to use chemical weapons, has entered into a de facto alliance with our terrorist adversary, and is reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

There "is really only one way America can respond" -- but it's not Iraq War 2.0. To eliminate, or at least marginalize, terror attacks we shouldn't fight IS, Al Qaeda, et al. 

We should keep them the hell out of our countries. No more Muslim immigration, period. If some of them feel a need to spray Americans and Europeans with automatic rifle rounds, they face an extra dimension of difficulty if they are busy swatting flies in Syria or Iraq.

Encourage all Muslims to return to the failed states from which they came to enjoy the privileges of big-hearted tolerance in the United States, Europe, and Australia. If they want to play with AK-47s and explosives, they can do so against each other in the territories the Prophet dealt them.

Of course such an idea violates our religion of multi-culturalism. But even religions change. I'd rather switch than fight.

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My wife and I are flying to Los Angeles tomorrow for a few days of -- we hope -- sunshine and warm temperatures. Even if the weather lets us down we will have plenty to do. 

Posting, if any, will be light for the next week. As always, thanks for stopping by.