More Respect for Life and Fewer Cluster Bombs :: September 11 Terrorism Essays

More Respect for Life and Fewer Cluster Bombs    Many people's reactions to the atrocities of September 11 have gone from disbelief, to sadness, to anger, quiet or otherwise. We commonly hear that we have received a declaration of war, and should respond accordingly. This essay outlines my arguments for restraint.    The moral case. Morality should be universal. If attacking hostile governments by killing civilians is "evil" and "the very worst of human nature," then it is no better for the U.S. to do so than for Afghanistan to.    The terrorists who attacked the U.S. last week haven't spoken up, but probably would describe U.S. foreign policy with "evil," "cowardly," "despicable," and other words that Bush used. They believe that political ends and avenging wrongs from a foreign military justifies killing enemy civilians, even if their support for the government was only indirect. Analogously, Bush's speech stated that: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Calls for a spectacularly bloody retaliatory strike aimed loosely towards the billion Muslims in the world are increasing, while dissent has been muted. Mountains of historical evidence document America's tolerance for heavy "collateral" damage when attacking the infrastructure of a demonized enemy, such as Saddam or Milosevic.    Tuesday's tragedy demonstrated America's surprising physical vulnerability, but, perhaps more disturbing, our response threatens to show a moral weakness that will be much harder to justify in hindsight.    The practical case. In Israel, extremists on both sides use terrorism and "random" violence for ends which are neither desperate nor irrational -- they aim to derail peace efforts and provoke a violent response on the other side that will cause moderates to reject compromise and side with extremists. "Jew" or "Arab" loses meaning in the face of the deeper struggle between hatred and tolerance, though typically only events such as Yitzhak Rabin's assassination by an extremist Israeli shock people into remembering. These oft-forgotten and crucial lessons from terror sound like Sunday school truisms: "the aim of violence is to beget further violence" and "blood cannot be washed away with blood."    These principles must sound a little other-worldly after Tuesday's atrocities, but there is no other time when it is more important that we remember them. Pausing to note that we can prove very little about the motivations of