This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Matthew Yglesias' site:

American forces press into the heart of Falluja with mercifully few US casualties and discover "that many of the senior rebel leaders, including the Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had fled before the city was sealed off." Boy -- guerilla force flees rather than stand and be slaughtered by better-armed foe. Who could have predicted that except every goddamn person on the face of the earth. In a couple of days, things should settle down, the civilian population will return to their now-wrecked homes and places of business, no doubt extraordinarily grateful to the foreign army that got them wrecked. American forces will be reduced somewhat in number. US and Iraqi forces will come under sporadic insurgent attack. US and Iraqi forces will prove unable to provide day-to-day security to the local population. At best, Falluja will be like Baghdad. More likely, it will look like what Samarra looks like today within three or four weeks. Zarqawi will be somewhere else. Someday we'll capture him and it'll turn out that, just as with Saddam, capturing him doesn't actually solve any problems.

Boy, I wish General Yglesias was in charge over there.

See, this is emblematic of much of the criticism from the Left.

Now might be a good time to put in a gentle reminder of why we want to either capture or kill our enemies:

Because they're our enemies.

Catching Zarqawi won't solve anything? Huh? Implicit in the logic behind this is either a) That Zarqawi will actually give up terrorism for needlepoint, or b) That there are a jillion other terrorists just as effective at what he does who would seamlessly fall into his role and take over.

I'm assuming that Yglesias is thinking of "b". But even if we assume that he's right about this (and that's questionable), might we want to capture or kill someone who has personally cut the heads off of innocent people, videotaped it, and broadcast it to the world? Hmm?

Won't solve anything? How about a little fucking justice?

The implication is that we should really just leave those terrorists alone (Does this apply to bin Laden as well? What would capturing him solve?), because bringing them to justice will only spawn more terrorism.

And that attitude is frankly why a lot of people don't take many on the Left seriously on the war on terror.