BRUCE HILL SAYS THAT IN THIS WAR, we don’t need to hate the enemy. He’s onto something. When I see these guys’ faces I don’t feel hatred. Frankly, they tend to look like pathetic goofballs.

Yeah, they’re evil and bad, and they’re dangerous and have to be stopped. But I can’t really summon up a lot of hatred. And that probably would bother them even more.

UPDATE: Will Allen writes:

If this war is prosecuted with efficient ruthlessness now, hating the enemy will not be required. If this is not done, however, and the enemy has success in pursuing his logic, then this society may well decide to pursue a logic that WILL require hating the enemy, which will have terrible effects for this society. Much as slavery is toxic to the enslaver, massive slaughter is toxic to the slaughterer. All the more reason to prosecute this war with tremendous urgency now, so as to avoid what may be required later. There are times in which this conflict seems to have entered a “phony war” stage, in which goals seem to be muddled or put off. Hopefully, this is not the case; that our war leaders are quietly taking care of business while setting the stage for what must happen, which is a wholesale change in much of the Islamic world. One of “Rumsfeld’s rules” is that when one is faced with an intractable problem, the most effective response is to enlarge it. This problem needs to be enlarged beyond Al Queda and Iraq to include Iran (where a substantial population wishes to rid themselves of the mullahs), Syria, and most of all, our “friends” on the Arabian peninsula, who use their oil money to fund entities from Nigeria, to Pakistan, to the Phillippines, and beyond, which kill Americans with great glee. Put bluntly, the House of Saud is an enemy of the United States. It is time that we approach them as one, lest far more horrible methods become necessary later.

Indeed. I agree that not taking the situation seriously now is likely to lead to a situation where far more will be required, to everyone’s detriment.