Magruder's Law

"Combat inevitably sinks to the lowest common denominator of the combatants. If you like to wrestle in the mud and your opponent likes to gouge out eyes, then sooner or later you will both be eye-gouging in the mud."

I missed this editorial from last month but it captures the essence of what I have come to believe. There will be a tipping point. It may be a massive terrorist attack, a political assassination or perhaps just some small but horrifying event that captures the attention of the world. When it happens the West will finally come to the sobering conclusion that the battle we find ourselves in is existential in nature. That day will be a bad day for the West. It will be a disastrous day for our enemies.

In the piece Jacques Dhervillez uses two vivid examples from WWII:

At the start of WWII, England fought in a gentlemanly fashion, not hitting until they were first hit and scrupulously confining themselves to military targets. Then Hitler flagrantly violated that covenant by bombing civilian neighborhoods in London and other British cities, with the sole objective of terrorizing the British people. It took a few years but when the Allies had the power to retaliate they used it, bombing German cities with a rather half-hearted regard for whether targets were military or civilian and needlessly annihilating Dresden in what many think was a payback for Coventry. In the end, over ten percent of Germany's people died in the war.

Japan pulled off the ultimate terrorist attack at Pearl Harbor, killing over 2,400 people. Our immediate response was what would nowadays be called "proportionate"--Doolttle's daylight raid on Tokyo. But our anger festered over the years and was fed by news of later atrocities such as the Bataan death march. The end result was Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nearly a million dead Japanese.. I know that all sorts of pragmatic arguments were advanced, even cogent ones, but I contend that if Pearl Harbor had not occurred, we probably would not have used our atomic weapons.

Dhervillez lays out the path to disaster if the goal of obtaining nuclear weapons is ever achieved by Islamic terrorist willing to use them:

Bear in mind that you are planning such an attack against the biggest nuclear power in the world and the only one that has actually used nuclear weapons against an enemy. The only thing that restrained us during the Cold War, aside from fear of reprisal, was a mutually agreed upon taboo. If an Islamic power violates that taboo and uses nuclear weapons against the US, what form do you think our retaliation will take? And how "proportionate" do you think it will be?

"Massively Disproportionate" is Dhervillez's prediction. Read the whole thing.