Scary Thoughts

I've heard this line of thinking before and am scared by it.

The reason we are fighting this war in Iraq and Afghanistan and this effort to modernize the middle east and get them out of their defeatist and self-hating cycle is so that we don't have to kill them en masse later on. He writes - sure, Iraq or Afghanistan or terrorists, or anyone in the Middle East does not pose an existential threat to us. But we pose it to them. And if left alone, the forces of terror and hate over there will brew and brew and brew until they decide they can take the fight to us and make us feel the pain some of them would like to inflict upon us now. They would do this. They would let off dirty or nuclear or chemical weapons in multiple US cities and lots of people would die, and we would still function. And we would be so angry, so rage-filled, we would find a Sherman, a Sharon, a hard-headed killer to represent us and wreck havoc on the region. Worse, we have the capability to do as much damage as our anger would let us. And that's the truly, most scary scenario, the out of control reaction we would have to being brutally attacked, where most people in America lost a loved one, or an entire city of people were scorched.

He writes that he doesn't want to have to kill a hundred million people. Can we even fathom that? It's not as if we aren't capable - 100,000 Japanese in one night in Tokyo. And that's a war we're all proud of. Scary stuff.