R.I.P. SEALs and helo crew

Some Taliban protohuman got lucky and hit one of our helicopters.  Some say it was an with RPG, others speculate that it was a real surface-to-air missile.  Facts aren't all in yet.  But it was a chopper full of SEALs along the the helo crew and some Afghani locals.  The biggest loss of life in any one incidence in the history of the SEALs. 

** Horrible!! **

Image from wikipedia

I idealize America as rather like a beehive: basically a bunch of industrious people getting things done and not bothering anybody.  We come and go; we produce and consume.  In the course of just getting things done, we (almost inadvertently) improve things around us.  The bee, just looking for food, does the flowers great service without even knowing it.  Pollination happens and multiplication follows.  One flower becomes a field of flowers.  Americans offer the entire world a Great Marketplace where things can be exchanged.  Quality of life for both Americans and others is improved.  Like a pharmacologist who toiled making a new drug just wants to get paid his due wages, but a little kid in Africa is cured by that pharmacologist's work.  Do you see what I mean?  Just let us do our thing and we all stand to benefit. 

So the bee pollinates the plant and the birds and the deer eat the fruit that results from the bee's work.  The bee and the bird and the deer all get along fine and mostly ignore each other.  There is balance and there is abundance.  As long as nobody screws with the bee.  Screw with the bee and things change.  The bee doesn't recall its ambassadors.  The bee doesn't seek a bipartisan solution.  The bee doesn't give a half a crap about proportionate response.  Screw with the bee just a little, and now you're in a fight to the death.  Screw with the bee hive and the response is even more dramatic.  The bees will make sure that the one who molests the hive pays dearly.  The bee hive gains a reputation as "something you just don't screw with."  The bees' very ferocity means they don't have to be ferocious very often.  People and critters alike just learn not to screw with the bees.

Therefore, peaceful coexistence is the usual order of things.

That's where I'm at with the War on Terror.  I no longer give half a crap about proportionate response.  Which is just newspeak for "tit-for-tat."  I am not in favor of trading our guys for theirs.  I am in favor of Grossly Disproportionate Response.  We have the means to utterly destroy every place the Taliban might be hiding.  There is no good reason for our nation's best to be making themselves vulnerable to ground fire from wife-beating cavemen.  There is no good reason to be engaging the Taliban "at their level."  There is no good reason for this to be a battle between guys-with-guns against other guys-with-guns.  While our guys-with-guns are exceptionally well trained, well equipped and well disciplined and their guys-with-guns are morons, sometimes the morons get lucky.

Enough!

Bomb.  Bomb.  Punish.  Bomb.  Show the world what happens when the American beehive is screwed with.  What about all the non-combatants who will be killed or injured?  Isn't that totally inhumane and unjust?  Two kids are standing next to the beehive when one kid whacks it with a stick.  The bees come out and sting both.  Only one kid is truly guilty but they both feel the pain.  So it should be in dealing with terrorists.  Let the non-combatants say to themselves "We need to get these terrorists out of here before America destroys our entire village!"  The price of hanging out with kids who whack bees' nests is pain.  The price of abetting or even tolerating terrorist activity must also be pain.  If the price of tolerating terrorists is just a "friendly American presence that provides security and sometimes shoots bad guys" then the population will tolerate terrorists in their midst forever.  And our guys will continue dying forever.  Unacceptable.  Make a vicious, bloody example of these troglodytes and in the long run the will actually be less blood shed.