Victims Turning Perpetrators
The war in Iraq is immoral. You wouldn't shoot an innocent child in order to catch a bad guy would you? You wouldn't shoot an innocent child to get 5 bad guys right? In prosecuting the so-called "war on terrorism" we have done just that. We have killed thousands of innocents in order to get Saddam Hussein. We have killed thousands of innocents to get Osama bin Laden. George Soros tells it best.
It is not a popular thing to say, but the fact is that we are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The terrorist attacks on September 11 claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for us as the victims of an atrocity. Then the President declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Since then, the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks on September 11. This fact is not recognized at home because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world does not draw the same distinction and world opinion has turned against us. So, a tremendous gap in perceptions has opened up between us and the rest of the world. The majority of the American public does not realize that we have turned from victims into perpetrators. That is why those gruesome pictures were so shocking. Even today, most people don't recognize their full import.
Soros is also keyed in to something that I have warned about over and over on my previous blog. Soros said, "Declaring war on terrorism was understandable, perhaps even appropriate, as a figure of speech. But the President meant it literally and that is when things started going seriously wrong." Wars are between nation states. Terrorism is stateless. Terrorism is perpetrated by criminals, not nations. Terrorism is a matter for law enforcement, not a military designed for battle with our old cold war enemies. Using the military to fight terrorism is like using a chainsaw to perform a heart transplant. A literal war on terrorism is a never-ending war.
By succumbing to fear, we are doing the terrorists' bidding: We are unleashing a vicious circle of violence. If we go on like this, we may find ourselves in a permanent state of war. The war on terror need never end because the terrorists are invisible, therefore they will never disappear. And if we are in a permanent state of war, we cannot remain an open society.
Soros also recognizes that it is not just Bush and his cronies who are responsible for this immoral war. The American people's ignorance is to blame as well.
I would dearly love to pin all the blame on President Bush and his team. But that would be too easy. It would ignore the fact that he was playing to a receptive audience and even today, after all that has happened, a majority of the electorate continues to have confidence in President Bush on national security matters. If this continues and President Bush gets reelected, we must ask ourselves the question: "What is wrong with us?"
Indeed, what is wrong with half of this country? What is wrong with Bush supporters?
Comments
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A rule which often is forgotten in war, but is in even more danger in the war on terror is proportionality. It is a key element of just war theory--the means of war must be proportionate to the ends if war is to be justifed. And yet proportionality is also a very good strategy when you are trying to win over the innocent people who are suffering as a result of reckless, disproportionate military actions. Pro-war people may declare in the abstract "to achieve good you must do evil"--but even if this is true (I don't know if it makes sense to me) you must employ clear principles to ensure that your evildoing does not destroy the very good you are after. Warmongers rarely admit even the possibility that the destruction can result in a net loss of good--it's as if they think that the more blood is spilled, the more sacrifices that are made, the more favorably the war god will look upon us. Even if the Iraq war was wrongheaded, based on lies, and unrelated to the real war on terrorism, 'we've got to win'--we can't stop killing and dying, so matter how senseless it is, because that will be a moral failure, so the wicked, deranged idea goes.