Not Enough Dead Arabs?

A truly frightening glimpse into the neo-conservative mind-set is Norman Podhoretz's piece in the New York Post, featured on Uruknet; Too Nice to Win?

Apparently, Israel's problem is that it is just too darned soft-hearted;

If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon - not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?

What's more, Norman has a little friendly suggestion for the US in Iraq;

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Thanks, Norman, we'll take that under advisement for our next invasion. He also indulges in a little bit of historical perspective;

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Bad examples, Norman, both of them. The war in Europe was pretty much won when Dresden was firebombed, a gratuitous act of carnage probably meant to scare the bejeezus out of the Russians more than anything else. And as for Hiroshima, John Denson makes the case better than I can, in this excellent essay on the Hiroshima Myth.

Why should we care about the murderous ravings of some crank? Who is this Norman Podhoretz anyway? According to his bio in Wikipedia, Podhoretz is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project for a New American Century, and a 2004 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He's one of the leading ideologues of the whole Clash of Civilizations/ World War IV mythology.