The More We Kill, the More We Have to Kill, by Robert Gore

The previous post, “The Golden Age of Black Ops,” makes the well-supported assertion that global Islamic terrorism has increased since 9/11. Here is a conjecture that proponents of the US war on terrorism may find far-fetched, but which may strike the rest of us as plausible. Say a US special operations mission or a drone strike kills a terrorist, or perhaps an innocent bystander. Let’s assume the terrorist, or bystander, is related to someone, and has friends. Is it conceivable that those relatives and friends might be upset at the death? Is it conceivable that they might not approve of the means used to effectuate said death? Is it conceivable that they might not see the righteousness of the killers’ cause? If the answers to the above are yes, then is it not also conceivable that the deceased’s father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, other relatives, or friends might take up the deceased’s cause if the deceased was a terrorist, or find a terrorist cause to support if the deceased was an innocent bystander? In other words, in destroying one terrorist or innocent bystander, is it not conceivable that the US may create more terrorists and terrorism?

If X is the number of terrorists and bystanders killed in the average strike, Y the number of newly created terrorists from the average strike, and Y>X, then it is a mathematical certainty that the more terrorists we exterminate, the more terrorists we create. Doesn’t that aptly describe what has happened the last 14 years? Read the excerpt in the prior post. The growth of special operations forces certainly suggests that the terrorism has grown and spread. The only way the US government’s efforts to reduce terrorism can actually do so is if it carefully selects targets who have no friends or relatives. If insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result, what do you call it when someone keeps turning to the same “solution” to a problem although the supposed solution makes the problem demonstrably worse?