"The Islamic State terrorist group says it has executed British hostage Alan Henning.
The group posted a video late Friday showing the purported beheading. The video was released in the same manner as those depicting the beheadings of three other Western captives.
The footage ended with an Islamic State militant threatening another hostage who the militant identified as an American named Peter Kassig. U.S. officials confirm that Kassig is being held by the terrorist group."
This bothers me more than the other beheadings; as he was just someone who wanted to help Syrians–a humanitarian.
I honestly don’t know my preferences on this situation. As a libertarian, I realize that it is just a strategic move by ISIS to get the U.S. and the UK to launch a token amount of troops so that more can be killed on their turf. It is huge money waster overall that won’t accomplish any real end-goals because the Middle East is FUBAR and always will be until long after I am dead. OTOH, we are still the U.S. and can bomb them back into the stone age or turn desert in glass if we really wanted to.
My major opinion with any such war, official or otherwise, is never do it half-assed. It is just like any assailant threatening you. You either shoot to kill everyone involved or just pull everyone out and get to a safe place. A middle position accomplishes nothing.
I have thought about it and the best thing the U.S. can do is to locate the executioners and execute them back immediately either through drone strikes or a special operations group. It is only a few people that are carrying out these orders. Get rid of them and then promise that anyone that even attempts to do anything remotely similar will be targeted and killed. There will be others that step up to fulfill their mission but you just kill them too in a targeted series of strikes. The U.S. has the technology to do it and they are begging to be targeted. Let’s show them how effective extreme technology and targeted tactics can be.
There is no reason that can’t be done. The U.S. took out Osama Bin Laden with good technology. They already know who the executioner for some of them. Put a sniper rifle on him and pull the trigger. Destroy any other insurgents in the general vicinity with smart bombs.
The worst enemy to winning a conflict when you have the clear upper-hand is timidness. Obama is not that timid but he isn’t very good either. Let the U.S. military design the strategy and execute it. They could wipe out that whole tribe by tomorrow if they had the freedom to do it.