"In and out clever" ad infinitum

Christopher Hitchens is a writer very much out of my league (even when I don't agree with him), but today I will shamelessly pillage one of his columns for my own purposes. Specifically, I will begin with the end of his piece:

Human history seems to register many more years of conflict than of tranquillity. In one sense, then, it is fatuous to whine that war is endless. We do have certain permanent enemies—the totalitarian state; the nihilist/terrorist cell—with which "peace" is neither possible nor desirable. Acknowledging this, and preparing for it, might give us some advantages in a war that seems destined to last as long as civilization is willing to defend itself.
To me, cancer seems a good metaphor for our permanent enemies; they are within civilization, sometimes society, and whatever version you end up with the results are predictable and unpleasant. Not necessarily fatal with proper treatment however; the metaphor holds this far, although it starts to break down when we talk about using radiation or chemical weapons against terrorists, but in my books whatever works is right.

"Works" is the key part to the otherwise ruthless statement, and more is not necessarily better in most of the situations we are likely to face. If it's not WW III against China or an alien invasion, mass is not your friend. Flattening villages is no longer a viable default tactic in the camera-smartphone era, but the option and ability to do so should the situation demand it should be retained.

Whatever the specific tactics, some sort of bad-ass will need a kicking pretty much forever, as there will always be those opposed to our sort of civilization, or garden variety sociopaths. This does NOT need to be front-page news (and it's best that it isn't) but some people just need to die lest they set off car bombs in the marketplaces or fly big planes into buildings.

That takes me into the current tactics the US is using. I will shed no tears for anyone affiliated with any terror group who is waxed by a Hellfire (or a JDAM, or SDB, or SF team) but some interesting questions have been raised about how one gets on the list for that sort of treatment. Nobody whose opinion I take seriously has a problem with Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan getting knocked off, but the process to become drone fodder is completely obscure.

A lot of pixels have been rearranged over that already so I won't get into it myself, but when there are no rules anything can happen, and that's not a good thing. There is a space between a free-fire zone and the legal handcuffs and leg irons our troops are typically in where what needs to be done can be done, but regular citizens need not worry that they'll randomly end up on a Proscription list. This is where we need to be to fight the "Forever War" against shadowy bad people without turning into police states.