Replies

My bishop is hardly "whacked-out". Bishop Basil of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese comes from a family whose ancestors lived in a part of Syria whose Arabic name means "The Valley of the Christians". The valley has been holding out against the Jihad since it began. His sermon included a reminder that we as Orthodox Christians will bless our soldiers as they go into battle, but that should sad necessity involve any of them in actual killing, their spiritual fathers will give them an epitemia (penance).

Our goal should not be vengance, but victory. We must fight a righteous war (the notion of a "holy" war is a Muslim lie), but how?

Two thoughts have come to me since I repented of my wish to see Kabul (and Baghdad--I am still convinced Saddam Hussein is in on this) obliterated:

The first is to prosecute the war as follows: move troops into proximity with an objective, but beyond the effective kill range of a nuclear device large enough to obliterate the objective, then demand complete surrender within a specified time (by radio, leaflet, and by loudspeaker from drone aircraft). If the inhabitants do not come out unarmed as per surrender terms, or if they do, but resistance is met upon entering the area, in which case our troops retreat immediately, we obliterate it with a nuclear strike.

The second is a recollection of Basil II: he left every 100 prisoners from the Bulgar army with one eye among them, and sent them home. (Note: blinding as a substitute for execution in circumstances where other medieval nations would have killed the enemy or malefactor was an Eastern Christian form of mercy--the blind can still live out their lives "in peace and repentence" and die Christian deaths.) The Bulgar Khan died of horror. Due to the Geneva Convention we cannot emulate Basil. But with lasers, we can blind our enemies while they are still combattants.

Besides the humaneness of giving them time to repent, the blinded adversary is more militarily desirable than the dead: he needs care. Thousands of blind Taliban dependent upon their womenfolk would be a wonderful form of justice. (Quite frankly, I think blinding bin Laden and keeping him in prison, alone, except for visits some Christian soul who would volunteer to read him the Psalms in Arabic and discuss theology with him, would be bettern than bin Laden dead.)