The same is true for terrorism. They don’t know when to stop. And therefore, even if the President hopes he can deal with them, he probably can’t. The enemy gets to vote on the continuation of history. Once an unknown is known, it is altogether too complicated to make it an “unknown unknown” again.
Both the gunfighter and the terrorist have something in common: they have reduced themselves into a savage state of being where who they are is now tied up in blood. Both of them practice Private War, in which they exercise Natural Law to the exclusion of all else. The gunfighter, to be supreme, must keep fighting challengers or seek them out, similarly terrorists must continue to kill until they either pull down mankind or are themselves pulled down. Here is how Blackstone put it for those others in Private War, we call Pirates, but as the activity is the problem and not the excuse for it, the definition fits:
LASTLY, the crime of piracy, or robbery and depredation upon the high seas, is an offense against the universal law of society; a pirate being, according to Sir Edward Coke,10 hostis humani generis [enemy to mankind]. As therefore he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him: so that every community has a right, by the rule of self-defense, to inflict that punishment upon him, which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do, any invasion of his person or personal property.
By reducing themselves to a savage state of Nature, the outcome is the same no matter what the excuse is for doing so. Be it worldly wealth, worldly power or worldly prestige, the outcome is the same: giving up being civilized and indulging in the redness of Nature’s Law.
That is why killing bin Laden was an exercise in sanitary conditions and ridding humanity of someone who had no compunctions about killing anyone if it gave him more power. Power is a medium of exchange just as money is, and prestige, and if you lust after it to the exclusion of civilized restraint, then you become an animal once more. A sentient one, yes, but one who moves to savagery by choice, not by being brought up by animals. The poor soul raised by wolves can be civilized, the civilized man reducing himself to a Natural State must seek to actively repent and mend his ways and still will not be fully trusted ever again. That is a clean, clear and distinct dividing line in warfare which the Left has tried to obscure with moral equivocation… yet the actions taken by those reverting to savagery are savage and a threat to all mankind because of that.
As for the network penetrations involved against aQ: we have penetrated some of the most insular person-2-person networks on the planet to get these actions done. This is a full scale assault on aQ by rooting them out through any means necessary… that is Palin’s doctrine, in answer to a previous commenter… the full spectrum of attack must be utilized in all fields as war cannot be limited to any one venue once it is started. Any road to victory is acceptable so long as it is done by those selected by society to fight in defense of them. That is a stark difference between the savages and the civilized: the savages seek to bring civilization down by its own works, while the civilized find the penetrations and seek it out to remove them. Fighting isn’t done just with bullets nor bombs, and a shadow war is often far nastier, longer and harsher than dropping nuclear devices as the very fabric of what makes us civilized is at stake. This goes from simple evidence gathering all the way up to strategic deployment of troops and material… from the crime scene to the area of Grand Strategy there is now a common linkage so that the highest level of doctrine is in accord with the lowest. We did not have that before 9/11. Now this IS the normal way to fight wars, and anyone trying to fight like we did just a decade ago will lose. And lose badly. War has changed again.
