Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Redux

John Podhoretz, according to his Fox News bio, is a "FOX News Channel contributor, a twice-weekly columnist for the New York Post, a weekly columnist for National Review Online, a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard magazine and a consulting editor at ReganBooks.

He was co-founder and deputy editor of the Weekly Standard from 1995-1997 before joining the New York Post as its editorial page editor. Later, he also served as the paper's arts and features editor before becoming a full-time columnist.

Podhoretz has worked at Time, The Washington Times, Insight and U.S. News & World Report."

This guy's Republican/conservative credentials are pretty solid.

He also thinks the problem with the Middle East is that we haven't killed enough civilians .

Ignore the disingenuous use of rhetorical "questions," which are artfully designed to make it seem as if this guy is just a rational seeker after truth, and feast your eyes on these gems:

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

So much for our goal being to bring peace and democracy to Iraq. What this Republican pundit thinks we really should have done to secure victory is to exterminate an entire generation of Iraqis.

And, of course, by this logic, what the Israelis need to consider is eradicating all the Palestenians, and one supposes, the remaining Lebanese:

Where do these questions lead us?

What if Israel's caution about casualties among its own soldiers and Lebanese civilians has demonstrated to Hezbollah and Hamas that as long as they can duck and cover when the missiles fly and the bombs fall, they can survive and possibly even thrive?

Since we seem to be fond of the rhetorical question, well then allow me to retort in the same manner: If the only way for our civilization to survive is to become as psychotic as the terrorists, what's the point?