I'm trying to make the
point that we are at war, and must act as if we are. I continually see this
kind of crap on the left go unchallenged:
If you want to make peace, the only people with whom you can do that, are your enemies. You cannot make peace with your frinds, they are already on your side.
To make peace with your enemies, you have to stop fighting with them and killing them and destroying their lands, their lives and their beliefs
To make peace you must first stop treating them, talking about them and encouraging others to see them as less than human.
When believers in gods want to make peace with their gods they have first to examine themselves, to figure out what they have done to damage the relationship. When people want to make peace with each other, they learn to examine themselves and the things they have done, even the things they did not mean to do, that have harmed the other.
Then they apologise for those things. Then they can start to make peace.
When people want to make peace they do not begin from the premise that everything they do is right and that all the fault lies with the other.
This isn't just flawed, it's deeply autocratic. Military solutions have their place, and they are not everything. But to turn this around, and make the debate about whether using force is moral just places liberalism in an untenable position of having to defend a lack of responsiveness to terror and oppression. We cannot make peace with Al Qaeda or terrorists, we must kill them. Liberal strength comes from a recognition that liberalism has enemies. You can remove the incentives to fight liberalism - and we should - but you cannot eliminate the forces of oppression solely through understanding and dialogue. That is nonsense, and an autocratic repudiation of a legitimate, indeed a necessary, role of the state.
Using force is not to be taken lightly, but it is necessary in some situations. The trick is to define those situations carefully, not to cry out in sheepish tones that peace will come from hopeful earnestness. It won't, and thinking it will causes just as much if not more mayhem and destruction, just as appeasement led to WWII and the holocaust.