Drone strike kills Al Qaeda's No 2 in command

It seems like we get these number two guys a lot, but in fairness, we did get that number one guy some time back. Even so, the more dead Al Qaeda the better. So nice job, America, and no apologies for the use of the drone.

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The objective of war is not to die for your country, as Gen. Patton is rumored to have said. It's to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his - not a country, in this case, but an entire outfit of bastards:

Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen confirmed early Tuesday that a CIA drone strike killed its leader last week in a blow to the terror group as its militants appear to be benefiting from the widening unrest in the Arabian Peninsula country. Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who pushed the group to engineer repeated terror plots against the United States, was targeted in the strike last week, according to U.S. officials who had said on Monday that it was too early to be certain he had been killed. Wuhayshi’s death represents a substantial setback to an al-Qaeda affiliate that is regarded as the terrorist organization’s most dangerous franchise, with ties to several near-miss plots, including the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner in December 2009. “Our Muslim nation, a hero of your heroes and a master of your masters departed steadfastly to God,” Khaled Batrafi, a senior al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, said in a video announcing the death.

There's been some talk that Al Qaeda is losing relevance as ISIS ascends. There may be some truth to that, but as far as the war on terror is concerned (and yes, some of us still want to fight that), it should be a distinction without a difference. George W. Bush said we were going after every major terrorist organization of global reach. They have different tactics, and perhaps they struggle with each other for regional dominance, but ISIS and Al Qaeda should be viewed as interchangable insofar as they are both radical Islamic terror organizations who seek to gain power and influence by the murder and intimidation of innocents. A lot of people will argue that we only make ISIS stronger by weakening Al Qaeda. I would counter that this is only true if we take a milquetoast approach to fighting ISIS. And yes, I know, that's exactly what we're doing. The solution to that is not to let Nasir al-Wuhayshi live so he can wreak more havoc on the African Peninsula. It's to send in the American ground forces necessary to destroy ISIS as well. Of course, that requires delusional Americans who lost their nerve years ago to accept the reality that the only the United States can do this, and that the United States must do this, and that the United States will never be able to stop doing this. We used to relish our role as the leading force for goodness in the world. Then we started listening to Democrats and the media whining about how much it was costing, and how mean we were being to the bad guys, and we started believing them. In spite of all that foolishness, we dealt a blow to Al Qaeda last week. I guess that's proof there's hope for America, although I still haven't seen convincing evidence that there's much.