War, slaughter and sanctions.

I don't share the view of most others in thinking that war is the worst thing that can happen in human history. The American Revolution was a necessary war. The American civil war was a necessary war. American involvement in World War II was necessary. There are two schools of thought on war---all wars are bad and some wars are better than others. There have been peace movements against every American war including WWII. Sometimes we listen to that movement sometimes we don't. At the time that I write this, NYC has not found all of its dead, much less buried them. But I have already started seeing terms like "jingoist warmongering" and "dime-store patriotism" in newspaper articles. Apparently, the flag waiving is a little too much for some people.

Without a single shot being fired by an American so far, we are already hearing how our bombs will kill women and children in Afghanistan. We know that if a single woman is killed, we will see her face on CNN more than OJ. There are things the U.S. does rather than wage war. One of those things is sanctions. Sanctions go into place in order to create hardships on countries in an effort to push them into throwing out their current leaders. We have sanctions on Iraq, because we didn't want to go house-to-house in Iraq to catch Saddam, and didn't want to create a power vacuum in that country which could be filled by religious fundamentalists. What we wanted was his overthrow by his own people, which we should have known then, was never going to happen. We have sanctions against Afghanistan, because we want the Taliban to clean their own house and kick Osama Bin Laden out. Again, this is something they were not about to do. So instead of being warmongers, we kept sanctions in place which did little but hurt poor civilians in those countries. To think that these people would blame their own leaders when the U.S. had involvement was ridiculous in the extreme. These people will fight us if we want a fight, but they will never admit that they are to blame for any of their circumstances---not even now that the blood of thousands of innocent office workers is on Bin Laden's hands.

The U.S. has a hard road ahead. No matter how we try to limit civilian casualties. Civilians will die. American soldiers will die. Americans will be targets on every inch of the globe. We will be vilified by the world's press, and by our own press. The U.S. is hated, envied and feared all over the world, to the point where even acts of self defense are labeled jingoist warmongering. What we saw at the World Trade Center was not war, it was slaughter. I prefer peace to war, but I prefer war to slaughter. Had we taken military action against the voice of peace after Bin Laden's previous attacks, the World Trade Center towers might be standing today.