Backstage w/Supak: organic, progressive, environmentalist

NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Where are the voices for peace? I want justice, not war. Justice cannot be done with collateral damage. Collateral damage, as our military calls it, means innocent civilians who get killed for being too poor to get the hell out of the way. In every discussion I've had on this, even with my fellow Democrats, I say we shouldn't just go in there and bomb the hell out of innocent civilians - namely, women and children - and people say, well, they're all leaving anyway. Well, they're not. Many of them are too poor, old, or feeble to walk across one of the most inhospitable places on earth. I'm beginning to think that it doesn't matter now. We're going to kill innocent people. And that is going to make the Muslim world hate us even more.

I heard a good report on the World Round-up on CBS news radio this morning (apparently, they don't have a web site). A Muslim cleric was saying that the Koran doesn't say anyhting about this kind of horror being allowed. These freaks who call themselves Muslims are actually going against the teachings of Islam. Then, this same cleric went on to say that retaliation is allowed in the Koran, but only if it's retaliation against the individual who did you wrong. So, if the US goes over there and kills innocent people, then we will also be in violation of the Koran, which would further piss-off the Muslims who would then actually have a religious right to retaliate.

Can you say quagmire? Sure, I knew you could. How to stay out of this quagmire and still bring justice to the people who did this? Very carefully. First of all, Shrub needs to get himself a Muslim specialist to make sure he doesn't say things like Crusade any more. He needs to apologize for using that word, instead of having Colin Powel do it.

Next, we need to make damn sure we don't have any collateral damage. None. Because one glimpse of dead Muslim babies killed by US bombers and we're doomed over there. Justice will never be done because the whole thing will spiral out of control. We need to search the world for the people who did this. We need to arrest them. If they resist arrest, we can kill them in self deffense and try them later. Either way we must prove in a courtroom that these are the people responsible. We should extradite them to the US and make them stand trial, like every other criminal we've hunted down and captured, from Manuel Noriega to Ramzi Yousef.

That is how a civilized society responds to crime. In this case, we certainly need our military to go get these people, because they are a military outfit in a remote country on the other side of the world. But our military needs to be told, by the man in charge (who was AWOL in the last big war), that this is justice, not genocide. We're not over there to wipe out the entire country, like some of my red-neck neighbors would have us do. We should not go to the middle east intent on killing the infidels in some huge crusade against the people of these screwed up countries, as some of the more "religious" people here would have us do. Amazing how the religious fanatics come out on both sides when the shit hits the fan. While we're bringing the religious fanatic Bin Laden to justice, maybe we should arrest Jerry Falwell while we're at it. It's been proven he's a lying slanderer before. I'll stop short of saying we should round up all the religious fanatics in this country. That would be un-American, and far too Falwellesque.