"wrong to kill Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese"

[Thomas Eckhardt]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> If I rightly follow the implied logic of this tortured comparison, you seem
> to believe that hijacking a plane and flying it into a building constitutes a
> foreign policy to which the US's may be fairly compared.

No. You said the Taliban government's actions were responsible for the civilian
dead in the US-led war against Afghanistan. According to this logic - which makes
a government responsible for the killing of civilians one believes one has got to
do in order to bring it down, and this was the point of comparison - the
US-government's actions may be said to be responsible for the dead of September
11. In fact, this last statement has been made or implied much too often, at
least for my taste, during the last months, .

I am not saying this kind of reasoning is wrong. The question for me is whether
it is useful. I don't think so. Once we start thinking like this we can always go
back further. Bluntly put: The Taliban rule, it might be argued, was a
consequence of US foreign policy during the cold war. The cold war was a
consequence of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was etc.

Is Marx responsible? Eve? Ridiculous, you might say, but the problem is where to
draw the line.

I think one should draw the line as near as possible to the present. The chain of
cause and effect should be short. Responsibility is more immediate: There were
certain persons responsible for the attacks on the USA, some of them still alive,
and these persons ought to be caught and tried. They are guilty of mass murder.
But there are also certain persons responsible for the killing of Afghan
civilians. Mainly US-Politicians, generals, pilots and crew. Whether they are
guilty of a crime is a matter of one's personal opinion. Personally, I am not
sure. My opinion will be formed by the consequences of these events. As for now,
I would have preferred some other kind of action.

The September 11 attack cannot be justified. For me, it remains to be seen
whether the war on Afghanistan can be justified. Just please don't tell me the
Taliban are responsible for the victims of bombs dropped by pilots from Minnesota
or New Jersey. The Taliban are assholes, that's for sure, but they didn't drop
those bombs.

Thomas