JACK KELLY:
The Ethiopian example -TAB argued that half-assery ALWAYS sucks in war HERE - on 07/19/06.
How to win a war: Unapologetically use force against the bad guys
It's hard to win a war if you quit fighting in the middle. That's the lesson we should learn from Ethiopia's New Year's message to us. ... Ethiopia won in short order because it unapologetically used force against vicious killers who understand only force. They killed the people they needed to kill without worrying overmuch about collateral damage, and not at all about world opinion. And though the Ethiopian soldiers are Christians, they were hailed as liberators in this overwhelmingly Muslim country.
When, during the march on Baghdad, we unapologetically used force in Iraq, we also had rapid success with minimal casualties. But since the statue of Saddam fell in Firdous Square in April 2003, we've acted as if the war were over. Our focus shifted to peacekeeping and nation-building, though it's hard to be a peacekeeper when there is no peace to keep, and it's hard to rebuild a nation when the bad guys are still out there blowing things up.
We've become a Gulliver bound by our own politically correct strictures. ... Half-measures in war typically produce half-baked results. If the military measures we take in Iraq must first be approved by Iraqi politicians and the editorial board of The New York Times, we will not succeed even if we double the number of troops. But if we remember -- as Ethiopia did -- that the surest way to win in war is to kill the enemy, we may yet match Ethiopia's success.
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