POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S PETER FOSTER
The logic of American bombing - as well as its associated emotional attitudes - is revealed starkly in the following thought-experiment.
America has the highest murder and violent crime rates of any advanced society. This is a statistic, not a judgment.
Imagine, in an effort to get at the violent criminals, the American armed forces started bombing certain portions of American cities. After all, there are areas of extremely high violence, ten times the national averages.
The view, of course, would be taken that the deaths of innocent mothers, old men, and young children were 'collateral damage.'
This seems at first thought extreme, but it actually is very close to what America does abroad.
It is only laws and traditions at home that prevent this happening there, plus the shame of international criticism.
That's why the confusion over torturing people illegaly arrested abroad - even if it's only in nearby Cuba - as opposed to doing it at home.
Actually, the nation has on a number of occasions indulged its tendencies this way at home.
There have been a number of official 'massacres,' as the one at Waco Texas, a bunch of kooks who did not deserve their horrible deaths, or the mass killings in Oklahoma and Florida when entire black communities were exterminated and buried in mass graves, their property stolen (the 1920s).
America is a violent society, and I doubt it will fully join the community of civilized societies for a century or so.
