The dumbest political episode of this past year was the torrents of fake outrage and abuse hurled at the Bush Administration over the Abu Ghraib prisoner “abuse” “scandal.” So far as I’m concerned, the real wrong committed at Abu Ghraib was committed not by the US Army and not by the Bush Administration, but by CBS News and others who reported on something which, in wartime, ought to have been covered up and dumped deep into a file for some mid-level scholar to discover and write a journal article about in thirty or forty years.

Oh, sure, the soldiers involved should have been punished. Their actions showed a total lack of discipline and, much worse, threatened to create a political problem for the Administration both and home and abroad. For that alone they should have been punished. But, beyond the distastefulness of a bunch of National Guardsmen behaving like High School football players during a particularly degenerate hazing season, I can’t summon up any real moral outrage over the things they did.

We need to get the thing straight once and for all: terrorists are not regular foes. Anti-American terrorists, their supporters, and their sympathizers are not just “enemies” in the conventional sense of the word. They are enemies of the human race and deserve to be treated as such. Terrorists, their supporters, and their sympathizers aren’t honourable foes to be met on the battlefield, worthy both of our respect, they’re sub-human monsters deserving of our deepest scorn and hatred. They’re useless beasts that need to be exterminated.

The real problem I have with complaints about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is that they start from the basic premise that terrorists have “human rights” which are deserving of respect. To treat terrorists with even the most basic level of respect is an insult to the dignity of all other people. They’re monsters, not people.

To the extent that we keep terrorists alive at all, it should be for some necessary purpose. If we need information from them, we should extract it by the best and quickest means open to us and then dispose of them. Perhaps those terrorists who grovel for their lives and possess a great quantity of useful information might be allowed to live in exchange for cooperation, but that should be about it.

By worrying about “abuse” and the “human rights” of terrorists we are, to a great extent, treating them like they’re ordinary criminals. By housing them in clean cells at Guantanamo and taking care to abide by the absurd standards of various international human rights conventions, we are according them a status that they do not deserve and we are twisting our own perceptions.

To be ultimately successful the Global War on Terrorism must be a war of extermination.

What is required for victory in such a war is a program of de-humanization. By worrying about the “rights” of terrorists and showcasing them as “victims”, we help to make them seem more like humans in the eyes of the public.

Where an acknowledgement of humanity exists the seeds of empathy are sown. Empathy leads inexorably to sympathy, at least at a personal level, which will eventually erode the support necessary for the sort of all-out war which must be waged if we are to ever attain the final victory we so desperately require.

President Bush has laid out, and I support, a two-track plan for dealing with the terrorists. We will work to reform the Islamic world, to de-fang it if you will, by spreading democracy outwards from the islands of freedom that have been created in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That solves (or, eventually will solve) much of the problem. It still leaves us, however, with the problem of what to do with that small percentage of the Islamic world who is actively engaged in acts of support for al-Qaeda.

For these alleged “people” there is, as I’ve said, only one workable option: annihilation. They’re too far-gone to cure. Like a cancer they cannot be healed, only destruction will end the threat they pose.

Such a campaign must, I think, ultimately move beyond what we’ve already seen. I think that the core of any campaign to truly wipe out the Islamists would be a well-planned and swiftly-executed set of strikes designed to kill those who truly help sustain the Islamist tide.

Part of this must be a campaign of assassinations directed at two groups of people: the preachers and the pushers. There’s a widespread belief that killing leaders and public figures “only makes martyrs.” I am not an adherent of this belief. Perhaps the killing of a single leader only makes a martyr: the killing of a hundred just makes corpses.

We need to breach the artificial wall that now seems to separate the military and “civilian” side of Islamism, for it is the civil side: the radical Imams, the shops which sell Islamist propaganda and the web sites which store Islamist videos which feed the military side. The shelf-life of people in the military wing of Islamism is short.

In order to truly destroy Islamism, we need to start blowing up the Mosques which are used to preach hate and recruit. We need to shoot in the streets the supposedly “peaceful” Imams and Professors who, from all over the Islamic world, recruit men for Jihad.

Remember: cash goes a long way in the Moslem world. It wouldn’t be at all hard for a few dozen operatives, with access to hundreds of millions of dollars in clean American $20 bills, to do a lot of damage.

I don’t imagine it would be at all hard to find a gang of Pakistani thugs willing to burn down Madrassas in the dead of the night in exchange for a few hundred dollars each. I don’t know what the going rate it: but I’ll bet that a million dollars will buy at least twenty-five murders in most of the Moslem world.

Ultimately, one of the best ways to take the fight to the Islamists is to turn their tactics back against them. For example: one of the ways that they generate the money to fund their terrorist enterprises is through a variety of front businesses. There’s no real reason why these businesses or people who work for them should be immune from attack.

What’s needed is a program of counter-terrorism designed to wipe these malevolent creatures out.