The depths of depravity.

Is there no bottom?

In Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz recounts a tale to Willard about fighting the VC:


Kurtz: I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.


That judgment is our moral compass. It's very easy to win if you have no fear of losing your soul. We could easily win the war on terrorism by indiscriminate annihilation of the Muslim world or a good portion of it. We don't do it not just because of them, but for us. We, as a nation, have a strong conscious that dictates such decisions.

That moral compass is not unmoveable. The will to firebomb Dresden and drop nuclear weapons on Japan (twice) came only after 4 grueling years of hundreds of thousands of casualties. The publics will to see an end to the war by horrible means outweighed their will to continue sending their young men overseas to be killed.

Imagine the we lose our political will to fight the War on Terror (read: elect a Democrat). We pull our troops home and let Iraq collapse into anarchy. We withdraw from the fight entirely. We focus on diplomacy and root causes. We increase security (or at least the appearance thereof). Our borders remain porous. Closing them off is racist and doing so would mean "the terrorists win".

Attacks then increase in frequency and size. A school seizure in Florida. Hundreds of children killed during a rescue attempt. Suicide bombers in New York City, California and Detroit during Christmas shopping season. A gas attack on commuter trains and so on.

How far would the American people go to put an end to this? All the way. Any President who did not come up with a strong military plan for dealing with the threat would be ousted in the next election if not impeached. Even if the terrorists were homegrown we'd look to the "root causes" of the radical mosques in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and beyond.

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