Of course, we are scared of the Islamic State. They are nasty people with a nasty agenda. The Paris attack was beyond the pale, adhering to no recognizable logic or system of human thought.
Yet dropping conventional bombs does not defeat an enemy and never has. This has been obvious at least since World War II. (Ask any old Brit what happened as a result of the Blitz. Lots of singing and the grim determination to punish Gerry whatever the cost. [Sidebar: My grandmother from Lancashire swore up and down that when cigarettes ran out during the war, people rolled up cow dung instead.])
Remember Vietnam? Not only did we bomb the shit out of them, we gave the campaigns macho names. (Rolling Thunder in 1965 and Linebacker I and II in 1972). Didn’t work. Made it worse.
In that fight, while we were willing to (arguably) commit war crimes with conventional weapons, policy makers balked at going farther.
I promise you, IS is not scared of our conventional bombs. We can bankrupt our nation by dropping AGM-154As, Mk-20 Rockeye IIs or even the truly awesome GBU-54 with LJDAM GPS laser guided upgrade. It will do no good.
The leaders of IS will wait out the worst conventional attack we can muster. They will slip into ratholes, waiting patiently for the dust to settle when they can emerge to find thousands of new recruits ready to join the struggle.
IS welcomes our bombs, quite literally. (Read Jürgen Todenhöfer’s excellent piece, I know Isis fighters. Western bombs falling on Raqqa will fill them with joy in the Guardian if you don’t believe me.)
It may make some people uncomfortable, but we cannot win this war with conventional bombs or even boots on the ground.
IS is not scared of our bombs, or our boots, or even our freedom. What they are scared of is women, sex and anything that approximates a sense of humor.
Instead of carpet bombing, or surgical striking, or putting boots on the ground, I propose a modest solution that will satisfy our national need to chest thump without falling into the obvious trap IS has set for us.
Let’s fire up all the printing presses that were mothballed with the rise of the internet and pack our billion dollar toys with the hottest, nastiest, gayest, straightest, whateverest expressions of what it means to live in a free society. Then we drop them on Raqqa, Tikrit, Mosul, Hawija and Suleiman Beg.
We may not stop the Islamic State, but by forcing the leaders of the caliphate to wade waist deep through glossy american wank magazines to get to the mosque we will slow them down.
I nominate Larry Flynt to lead this campaign. He’s taken a bullet for freedom, forced a speaker of the house to resign and bested Jerry Falwell-al-Lynchburg at the Supreme Court. Pack him in into a B-2 with his gold wheelchair and a couple billion surplus copies of “Big Black Booty.” He’ll hold his own.
Let’s be clear, according to the Global Terrorism Database, less than 20 people in 2014 died from terrorist attack in the United States. That’s compared to at least 1000 people who died from autoerotic asphyxiation. (Source: Medicinenet.) According to the CDC, 600 people die from falling out of bed each year.
We wouldn’t be America if we didn’t react to fear with a completely out of scale overreaction. (Razor blades in Halloween candy? War on drugs?) It’s not always productive, but it is definitely who we are.
Yet if we have to react, and I know we do, let’s not create more terrorists and feed into the narrative of our adversary.