On CNN’s Newsnight last night, David Brooks took his favorite rhetorical trope—that there are two kinds of people in the world—to its realpolitik conclusions:

You’ve got to have a political strategy and you’ve got to have a military strategy. … You’ve got to use our Iraqis, the Iraqis who want a democratic Iraq to give them something concrete, win them over. But then you’ve got to have a military strategy too and those are the people who, like Zarqawi, who just want to spread death and destruction. So, what you do is you win over the people you can, town by town and then you kill the people you can.

Brooks was ready to fly to Iraq and lead the army from house to house in Iraq using his magic glowing finger to distinguish the Iraqis we must kill from those we must win over, he did not go on to say.