@oralloy,
oralloy wrote: " The Muslims of today are reacting to an unprovoked and horrendous attack that was perpetrated by Muslims. In other words, in your comparison to Pearl Harbor, the Muslims should be playing the role of WWII Japanese. America's reaction "bomb them to the stone age" is entirely rational and moral, both in the case of WWII and in the case of today's dronestrikes."
The Japanese didn't attack Pearl Harbor (which in any case was a purely military target); the Japanese military government attacked Pearl Harbor. So how were popular calls to bomb the Japs back to the Stone Age reasonable or moral?
As for what the Muslims are reacting to (and by "Muslims of today" you presumably refer to groups like al Qaeda which the majority of Muslims regard as impious murderers), consider what Osama bin Laden cited in his 1996 "Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans":
"More than six hundred thousand Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine as a result of your unjustifiable and aggressive sanctions imposed on Iraq. and its nation. Iraqi children are our children. You (America), together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children."
UNICEF seems to agree about the numbers and cause:
"Ms. Bellamy noted that if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998. As a partial explanation, she pointed to a March statement of the Security Council Panel on Humanitarian Issues which states: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war." "
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm
Now of course, to this it should be added that two wrongs don't make a right, that you can't do good by doing evil, that there are several important distinctions between sanctions targeting the regime of Saddam Hussein and the actions of (for example) the 9/11 attackers. One might also question the sincerity of this concern as expressed by bin Laden.
But there are several important observations to be had from all this.
First, blanket references to the sins of "Muslims" are just as morally undiscriminating as references to the sins of "Americans".
Second, the willingness to blithely dismiss the deaths of civilians as acceptable "collateral damage" of military operations (that are largely cosmetic anyway) is disturbingly similar to the arguments used by terrorists in attacking civilians as military targets as the Paris attackers did (much like the British in the Second World War in their use of terror bombing to undermine German morale). Bombs are bombs, and dead civilians are just as dead either way.
Third, at some point it becomes more important to break the cycle of violence than to argue about who started it. I would hate to have to argue against Native American terrorists attempting to regain their land and arguing that Europeans started it.
Terrorist incidents have skyrocketed since the so-called war on terror was declared and since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now you and others like you are talking about invading Syria, and Iraq again too.
As long as U.S. military actions are seen through the prism of geopolitics or war game strategies, and as long as all those civilian casualties are written off as statistics on a collateral damage chart, I don't see how this is possible. Somebody has to break the cycle of violence by being BETTER than the other side. If the United States can't see its way to being better for moral reasons, it might at least do so for practical reasons.
But I'm afraid that the habit of demonizing entire peoples in response to the actions of their governments or of groups unilaterally claiming to act for them, is not a habit of Muslims alone. We often speak of the Judeo-Christian tradition, though it's difficult to imagine Jesus approving of the callously inflicted deaths of innocents carried out in the name of a civilization representing this tradition. One also wonders whether those who bombed the King David Hotel that killed 91 were acting within this tradition. Among the psalms popularly attributed to King David, there is one that shocks the modern reader:
"...happy the one who repays you as you have served us! Happy the one who dashes your little ones against the rocks."
Perhaps it is time to try something truly radical now that militarism has failed yet again: follow the Golden Rule and treat the noncombatant inhabitants of foreign cities as we would be treated. Stop trying to minimize, justify, and euphemise reflexive military responses that are known in advance will kill many civilians and are not even effective in accomplishing strategic goals. Stop invading other countries, treating their citizens like potential terrorists and little brown monkeys, then asking why anti-American attitudes are so prevalent among them.
