Referring to my chastising the neocon position of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”, an observer observed:

To “a good hoosier,”
You obviously have no concept of the enemy that we face. You fit the category of the short-term thinker. If you don’t want bombs being lobbed in your neighborhood, then don’t allow scum to train for terrorism in your front yard.

And it’s probably true. I probably haven’t the concept required for real honest thinking about the enemy. I’ve never read his books, never met his friends, never attended his religious services, never scrounged for food in his desert market places while Western empires suck the oil from out under my feet. I’ve got no clue. But, to be sure, most American hoi polloi couldn’t tell an Arab ally from an Arab enemy. So, I’m in the intellectual company of the great American unwashed, as, I suspect, is the commenter.

But does it matter? What empirical knowledge could possibly change a moral principal so rudimentary as the Golden Rule? What would it take for me to say, aye, those hundred thousand Iraqi citizens that my bombs killed, those million Iraqi citizens that my destruction plan forced to abandon their homes with nothing but what they could fit into a 1981 Datsun 210, they are worth me not having to worry about the safety of myself and my family? The innocents be damned. Never mind the expense in the moreal scheme of things, I want to live freely!

A bunch of evil fuckers attacked us here, but that doesn’t mean we have the right to wipe out scores of innocents who had nothing to do with that strike, in some inchoate attempt to create a MiddleEast battlefield. The bombs, commenter, ARE in our neighborhoods. But they aren’t hot potatoes; you don’t get to toss them into someone else’s neighborhood, someone who has problems of his own enough to deal with without our potatoes blowing off the arms of his children. It will take courage, but we need to fight righteously.