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Bomb them all to hell and let Allah sort it out? No, that’s the humanitarian disaster we’re trying to avoid.

Go “full Roman”, as Lileks put it, and “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them all to Christianity”, as Coulter would have it? As appealing as that option seems at times, and while, in theory, we have the power, we lack the will. What government would be willing to draft the millions of young men that it would take for such an operation, and put forth the trillions of dollars that it would cost?

The U.S. Government and it’s military is as much an obsolete dinosaur in this conflict as its European counterpart; Iraq, as I expected, has proved this much. Our high-tech, professional, volunteer-mercenary (I do not use the term as a pejorative; fighting for a wage for a legitimate political actor like the U.S. is a highly honorable occupation in my eyes) army is amazing at kicking the snot out of other professional forces, but it can’t hold territory worth a damn. For that you need boots on the ground, in large numbers… this is what universal conscription provides. You can never wage the sort of war it will take to pacify the entire middle east on the terms in which our military fights. Period. In the meantime, what strength our army does have will be sapped by the realities of our domestic political landscape; you can complain about it all you want, but it will never change it. I was opposed to this war from the beginning, not because it was morally wrong (we were clearly in the right), but because I knew we lacked the moral fortitude to finish the job, and a half-finished war, wasting half a trillion dollars and god knows how much diplomatic capital, would be worse than no war at all. I’ve been vindicated, but it’s a bitter vindication; I’d rather I’d been dead wrong.

We can continue to wage the “secret war” against Al-Qaeda and other such networks; we’ve been doing such for years, and such a conflict will continue, invisible to the eyes of the international media and, for that matter, to anyone in the US outside of Langley or the Pentagon. But will it work? And how will we know? Indeed, we will not.

We’re stuck in a conflict we cannot win on our own terms, and all the wishing in the world won’t make it happen. Robert Kaplan’s famous article, “The Coming Anarchy”, a decade later, is looking more and more scarily prescient.

Political modernism, “liberal” or “conservative”, is obsolete.