The longest war

“The underpinnings of Western culture—freedom, civic militarism, capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash—have always brought carnage to adversaries when applied on the battlefield. Setbacks from Cannae to the Little Bighorn have led not to capitulation but rather to study, debate, analysis—and, finally, devastating reprisals.”

“In our peace and affluence, we Americans of a complacent era have forgotten the lethal superiority of the Western way of war: the Greeks losing only 192 at Marathon, Alexander the Great destroying an empire of 70 million with an army of 40,000, Cortés wrecking an imperial people of 2 million in less than two years, or a small band of British redcoats ending the power of Cetshwayo and his Zulus for good in less than a year. We have forgotten that the arsenal of tiny sixteenth-century Venice—a republic based on principles of market capitalism and audit surrounded by a West torn by Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism—launched far better and more numerous galleys than those of the entire Ottoman navy.”

The lesson of history is that Western power doesn’t defeat barbaric enemies, it annihilates them.

And we will completely and utterly destroy the very foundations of radical Islamic fundamentalism.