It is urgent that responses to violent acts, especially responses involving the U. S. military, be considered carefully, rationally, and with access to full information.  For many of us, there's a psychologically and emotionally understandable reaction to violence against innocent U. S. citizens:  namely, to call for further violence against people whom we blame.  Such a desire usually grows out of an instinctive, worthy desire for justice.  But such a response is extremely unjust if it lowers us to the level of the terrorists, by launching massive U. S. military violence that takes many other equally innocent lives, but does not seriously diminish the prospects of future terrorism (or worse, increases those prospects.)  The notion that two wrongs don't make a right is one that we teach children as soon as possible--as adults, we all too easily forget it in difficult times.  And a destructive, indiscriminate military response, as has been happening in Afghanistan, and as may soon be imposed on other countries as well, particularly Iraq, is certain to be counterproductive, if what we want is to reduce, rather than increase, future violence against innocent Americans and foreigners alike.

     If a U. S. military response kills many innocent people abroad, or causes famine, poverty, and chaos leading to such deaths--both of which have already happened in Afghanistan, and neither of which the U.S. government seems very interested in or troubled by--it is very likely that more, not fewer, desperate people (who sympathize with those innocent victims) will turn to terror.  This is especially true if, as is certain, the U. S. military response does not significantly reduce the number of terrorists worldwide, but does harm many civilians trapped in the countries where terrorists hide (or where they don't hide:  Al Queda has the vast majority of its members in countries other than Afghanistan, many of which are our allies.)  Despite the Administration's extremely simplistic rhetoric, few disinterested observers believe that U.S. military action, however destructive to ordinary soldiers and civilians, will put more than a minor dent in the ability of scores of small, decentralized terrorist groups scattered worldwide to continue to function, if they want to so continue. 

     And for every one of the relatively few terrorists killed, many more people, seeing the many innocent civilian deaths we cause in the process, will then naturally feel that the U. S. is no different from the terrorists.  If we, to achieve our larger purposes, respond to violent acts by uselessly causing the death and suffering of innocent people, so will these desperate people wish to respond, again, with violence to avenge such deaths and to achieve their perceived purposes.  Our military actions will then have helped perpetuate a never-ending cycle of tragedies.  And using large-scale military force is certain to kill many innocent people--all of our many wars, invasions, and attacks upon other countries since World War II have done exactly that.  I omit WWII, where--although the U. S. did kill many innocent civilians--the threat of world-wide fascism, the Nazi genocide of millions, and the war officially waged on us by the Japanese government, not just a few independent groups of kamikazes, made our participation unavoidably morally necessary.  The same is not true, however, of our military actions since WWII, nor of any massive U. S. military response to the recent attacks by a few small groups, as horrible as those attacks have been.

     Already the evidence from numerous credible sources is that the number of innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan has surpassed the death toll of the WTC attack, by at least hundreds and probably thousands.  The U. S. has denied this, claiming far fewer civilian deaths, while admitting (incredibly) that it hasn't even investigated the numerous, documented instances of such killings cited by the local and foreign press.  The early July attack on an Afghan wedding party is exceptional only in that the U.S. has been forced to admit that it happened, and to defensively seek to lay the blame on the Afghans (for wedding gunfire) or upon individual, non-systematic errors by U.S. personnel.

     Many people feel that the official U.S. moral claim about these civilian deaths is correct:  since they are not "intended" by the U.S., but rather are the "accidental" results of (presumably good and morally necessary) efforts to fight terrorism, they do not render the U.S. government morally culpable, and certainly not in the way the terrorists--who deliberately target innocent civilians--are culpable.  But this line of argument is deeply flawed, both logically and ethically, and would not be accepted by most Americans if we were the victims and someone else were doing the military killing.   While it is clear that the civilian deaths are not deliberately or directly intended by the U.S. in the short run, the larger issue remains:  when a statistically predictable level of "accidental" deaths is correctly foreseen as a result of an overall military effort, the deaths are no longer "accidental" in the overall scheme--they are the predictable results of the deliberate decision to launch the military effort.  This is particularly true when the main means of the war is long-range bombing, which simply fails--for obvious technical and human reasons--to achieve the "precision" claimed (absolutely falsely, as has been documented throughout both the Gulf War and the current one) by the government (parroted by the press) to be so compassionately sparing to civilians.  We may or may not believe that the military effort is overall a helpful or moral one, but the deaths are not in any real sense "accidental", but rather are a statistical certainty, foreseeably resulting from the effort.  Any supposed justification for them must be that the benefits (for whom?) outweigh the costs (to whom?), including the general level of statistically predictable innocent deaths.

     An analogy may help here:  Suppose that a trucking company suddenly makes a new rule that all cross-country trips must be completed in 20% less time than they used to be.  To comply with this, the company predicts that most of its truckers will drive longer between rests, and drive later into the night, than previously.  Suppose the company notices that after 6 months, fatal accidents involving its truckers (and the innocent victims in the other cars) are also up 20%:  predictably, tired, late-night drivers make more mistakes and get in more accidents.  Admittedly, each death is "accidental"--had any individual trucker by sheer chance opened his eyes at the right moment, or veered one foot less into the oncoming lane, or taken one more amphetamine pill, any individual set of deaths could have been avoided.  But in any legitimate moral sense, the trucking company's new policy caused the deaths, which were predictable given the forseeable and systematic way trucking operations function.  Had the company not made the new policy, it is predictable that many innocent people would still be alive.   The company may try to justify the policy anyway, but its claim that the deaths are just "accidents" would not carry any moral weight with those of us who don't want to innocently die at the hands of tired truckers because of a deliberate company policy change.

     Returning to Afghanistan:  to avoid holding the U.S. government morally culpable for these predictable civilian deaths, one must then argue that the moral results of not instigating the planned military effort are worse, for the innocent civilians, than doing otherwise.  Note that it is morally unacceptable, even under the notion of self-defense, to transfer the risk of death for
some innocent civilians among our own U.S. citizens (who may possibly be killed by future terrorists) to the statistically certain deaths of innocent Afghani citizens.

     Another analogy may help make this clear.  If a hitman is threatening to kill me, I may not (morally) throw a bomb at the hitman when he is standing next to an innocent bystander, even if I believe that if I don't so bomb him, the hitman may succeed in killing me.  Since it is predictable that the bystander will probably be killed by the bomb, by throwing it I am transferring my own risk of death to someone else who doesn't deserve it.   I am thus playing God, and no civilized society would fail to punish me if I did it.  The point is that sometimes we fall prey to very serious threats and dangers, but those are our problems--we may not drag in other innocent people to pay the price for them.   To see that, just imagine that the bystander was your daughter and that I (the intended victim of the hitman) am being "hit" because I reneged on a loan from the hitman's loan-shark boss--do you want a society in which people feel free to substitute your daughter for themselves when in danger that they have at least partially brought upon themselves?  Wouldn't you hope the jurors would convict me of first degree murder in the death of your daughter?  Note that the hitman is, of course, completely wrong to kill me for an unpaid loan, but it is also wrong for me to transfer that risk of death to your daughter--again, the obvious principle, that two wrongs don't make a right.

      But, many would argue, the Taliban was so bad that indeed overall the Afghanis themselves will be better off without them, even if several thousand deaths result.  To buttress this argument, it is regularly pointed out by the mainstream media that (some) Afghans do not blame the U.S. for the deaths, and are "happier" to have the overall U.S. war against the Taliban and terrorism, even with the deaths, than they would have been without such a war.  This argument fails to consider that there were other options besides A.) the destructive, largely futile U.S. war (in which Osama Bin Laden escaped easily); and B.) fostering and supporting the Taliban's rule (which the U.S. had been doing for years right up until 9/11!)  Any number of diplomatic and non-military options, even after 9/11, but more importantly from before the time the Taliban took power, could have brought pressure to bear on the Taliban (to prevent, reform or remove them) by means of encouraging progressive, democratic movements within Afghanistan.  Such diplomatic and non-military initiatives to encourage progressive democracy, precisely what the U.S. avoids when they would be most effective, are routinely discussed in the alternative and foreign press--return to the main critical thinking page for sources.  Instead, at a cost of thousands of lives, the currently installed post-Taliban Afghan "government" is almost certain to revert to murderous civil war as soon as the U.S. inevitably pulls out, leading right back to a situation like the pre-Taliban one (which the U.S. had helped create) that made most Afghanis welcome the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. 

     What is a better U.S. response to terror than military invasion?  And, especially, how can we avoid resorting to murderously counterproductive military action against other countries, particularly Iraq, which the U.S. government desperately wants to invade, against the sound advice of most of our own military strategists?  Almost all knowledgeable observers believe that international police (not military) action, if coordinated between all the countries involved--requiring a cooperative role from
the U. S., not a militarily dominant one--will apprehend just as many or more terrorists as U. S. bombing, without harming civilians, without generating resentment against the U. S., and without generating the sympathy for dead innocents that fuels future terrorism.  In fact, this sort of police action, both here and in Europe and Asia, carried out by U. S. and foreign intelligence and police agencies, has already caught (and thus, presumably, prevented the eventual crimes of) dozens of alleged terrorists since Sep. 11.  Assuming that a few of the suspects actually do turn out to be terrorists, this, rather than the war in Afghanistan, is almost certainly the reason why no significant terror has (so far) befallen the U. S. since Sep. 11, except for the U.S. domestic right-wing anthrax and mailbox-bomb terror incidents.

     For this effort to continue effectively, however, we cannot also continue to resort to the massive military violence that creates terrorists faster than the police can catch them, even aside from the indefensible deaths inflicted on innocent civilians.  And the U. S. will have to accept international legal remedies, involving trials and evidence, rather than simply waging war upon and killing anyone it wishes, based on its own (secret) claims of guilt.  The benefit, however, for the U. S. is that there will
be a far smaller chance that more innocent Americans will be killed by further terrorist actions.   And, to the extent that Americans are responsible, moral people, the added benefit is that we will also know that we have not caused the deaths of thousands of other innocent people across the globe--a tremendous benefit to those who highly value all innocent lives, as we claim to here in America.

      Finally, in order to reduce violence by future terrorists, no matter how we try to catch those responsible for the World Trade Center, the U.S. government must be induced (by us, its citizens, who supposedly have the democratic right to make our government follow our wishes) to fundamentally change its foreign policy, which plays a large (and often the largest) causal role in generating and maintaining conditions of desperation and poverty and oppression for the vast majority of the
populations of the Middle East and Central Asia.  We support corrupt, fanatic religious dictatorships (like Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women almost as badly as their friends the Taliban) that keep the vast majority of their own people in misery--and that ruthlessly crush secular progressive internal political opposition, leaving only irrational religious right-wing fundamentalist movements like the Taliban to feed on the people's unhappiness.  We support the decades-long Israeli occupation of the Palestinians' land, and refuse to put pressure (which would certainly succeed) on Israel to agree to a peaceful settlement, with fair autonomy and resources for a Palestinian state.  And we continue to be the main instigator and supporter of economic sanctions on Iraq, which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians (many of them children) from famine, disease, and pollution, while having no effect on Saddam Hussein except to make him stronger.

       If the U. S. government stops pursuing these and other similar policies that help wealthy, corrupt allied governments at the expense of their own impoverished, oppressed people, those desperate people will be far less likely to turn to terror against Americans (or Israelis, or anyone else.)