First thing's first: J-Pod and his neocon buddies are not talking about "genocide." They are talking about the mass extermination of civilians during wartime. What's the difference? Simple: Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima. It is killing to exterminate a race versus exterminating a large group of civilians to achieve a military goal. It's an important distinction. J-Pod doesn't want to be Hitler. He wants to be Truman.

Besides that, you have a point here. But don't ignore the fact that war is pornography for J-Pod and the Cornerites. J-Pod is free to fantasize about what would happen if the “gloves came off” while ensconced in the safety of his mom’s air-conditioned basement. Like most connoisseurs of extreme pornography, he’ll tell you that it’s just fantasy – he respects women (or Arabs) and would never give life to his extreme depravations in the real world. Trust him, he likes the real world just the way it is. It’s All Just Fantasy.

Besides, the neocons have a new song: they are no longer the idealist liberators of the Middle East, bent on freeing Muslims everywhere from the authoritarian yoke of dictators and tyrants. That was so, like, 2004. No, today’s neocons are a different, harder breed. In fact, they are the hardest of hardcore realists – the few and the proud who understand that the barbarians can only be defeated through extreme means; means that western civilization is unwilling to employ at this time. They’ll admit it, they were wrong to idealize democracy before. But being wrong taught them hard lessons. Now they are prepared to make the tough decisions to save humanity from the existential threat of IslamoFascism™.

It’s a convenient and clever shift. With the snap of the fingers, sunny optimism has become the gloomiest pessimism. The absolute belief in democracy’s transformative powers has been replaced with a dark, manly pessimism that says that victory can only be achieved through means we’re not willing to employ. Means like the mass extermination of civilians. Means that we have not considered since the last time we faced an existential threat. In Japan. At Hiroshima. In Nagasaki. They acknowledge the nastiness of this calculation and accept that the West is not yet prepared to do what it takes to win. J-Pod is happy we are civilized. He wishes, he really really wishes, things could stay this way forever.

Now all J-Pod and company have to do is wait. The worse things get, the worse the world gets, the more the old neocon experiment explodes – the more we, as Westerners, will be forced to reevaluate what we are willing to do in the face of the existential threat of IslamoFascism™. The neocons have joined the Rapture Club. They know their next marketing line won’t be ready for the masses until things get really bleak, so be prepared: the former optimists at the corner will soon be just as dour as John Derbyshire with jock itch. Only they know the truth: the West needs to bleed in Iraq, bleed in Israel, before it understands what needs to be done. Each slip further into chaos will be met with public expression of neocon resolve and private giggles of perverse excitement. A watch is right at least twice a day...if they wait long enough, they know their time will come again.

Having botched, ever so slightly, their last attempt at changing the world, the neocons will have to wait. But with the next 9/11 or monumentally brutal Middle Eastern atrocity, they will crawl out from under their rock and announce: the world has changed. The threat IslamoFascism™ poses to the West is now finally, officially, unquestionably “existential.” Our choice is mass killing or death. We are forced to employ means that we would not have considered under the “old ways.” Don’t get us wrong: we miss the old ways; we long for that brief slice of the late twentieth century when we thought the mass extermination of civilians would never be necessary again. But the threat we face now is different. It is kill or be killed. Which is how it has always been, really, other than that brief, post-WWII slice of heaven. Now prepare to slaughter…

The fact that they created the situation that led to the world changing will be dutifully ignored. And Wolf Blitzer will finally ask, “Do we need another Hiroshima to win?”

The neocons will nod, sagely. “Indeed,” Instapundit will remark. After all, even in WWII, at the absolute apex of Western moral superiority, we had to exterminate civilians with atomic bombs. The threat is the same now. Or greater.

Right?