In A.D. 1209, the Church was faced with the Cathar heresy in southern France. A Crusade was declared. Local dukes and lords donned the Cross and fought to defeat the heresy. The Cathars were attacked and harried, and reacted by going underground.
The Crusaders besieged the city of Béziers, which is still a large southern French population center. There were reportedly about 200 Cathar heretics hiding out in the city, dispersed among a much larger population of ordinary Catholics. The town fell easily to the Crusaders, and the army sacked and looted it, as was the custom of the day. Many of the women, children, and elderly residents retreated to the church, seeking sanctuary, as was also the custom. The army leaders asked the commander how they could pick out the guilty Cathars from the innocent ordinary people.
His reply has become a legend: "Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens" ("Kill them all, God will know his own.") The church was burned to the ground, together with all those in it. Those citizens not in the church were put to the sword. The commander reported to the pope: "Today your Holiness, twenty thousand citizens were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex."
Last week, the American crusade in Afghanistan targeted a leader of al-Qaida. The leader was believed to be hiding in a compound in eastern Afghanistan. Up to five "smart rockets" were launched at, and guided into, the compound. The compound included a mosque and a school. Seven children, attending the school, were killed in the attack. American military leaders at first denied knowledge that children were present in the compound. It is not yet known whether the targeted al-Qaida leader was killed.
Today, according to NBC, American officials have admitted that it was known that kids were attending school in the compound (they weren't American children, of course), but that killing the al-Qaida leader was deemed so desirable that it was worth risking the "collateral damage" of the children's deaths.
I guess we trust that God will know his own.
12 comments:
Wow, I love that Bush comment in your P.S., especially in regards to this story. It's interesting, although not surprising, that Bush & Co. find it reasonable to protect the "sanctity of life" of microscopic tadpole-like things, but not of people in the Middle East. How many Iraqi civilians have we killed? And to achieve what end?
You think his priorities are maybe just a little bit off?
I see Bush's approval rating has now dropped to 26 percent.
Priorities?
Over 200 ordinary Americans left unremarkable families, reported to work as usual on an ordinary September day, and leapt to their deaths against a cool blue sky before lunchtime.
Welcome to Al Qaeda. Of which, by the way, the terrorist identified in this post is among the leading five commanders - promoting, organizing, and orchestrating the agenda of Al Qaeda.
Collateral damage, a recap:
World Trade Center 2,603
(another 24 remain listed as missing)
American Flight 11 88
United Flight 175 59
Pentagon 125
American 77 59
United Flight 93 40
THIS is Al Qaeda. But does Al Qaeda consider these murders of innocents “collateral damage” in their war on America? No. Rather, it’s the intended damage. Their jihad targets civilians. And it will continue to do so.
What do you call it when one side tries to minimize collateral damage in an attempt to protect human life, while the other do not even recognize the existence of such a concept, in its attempt to destroy life?
You won't find any rave reviews for al Qaeda in my blog. Or for the militants, both Sunni and Shiite, whose idea of building Iraq has been to bomb it to the ground. Or for the militants in Palestine who not only refuse to knowledge that Israel in some form is in the area to stay, but who terrorize each other for the right to rule over the ruins of Gaza.
But if you were the parents of the kids killed in Afghanistan, would any of this make you feel that the death of your children was somehow justified?
Bush's essential problem -- and it's been a problem with Amerian thinking before Bush as well -- is feeling that there is a military solution to what are essentially political, religious and social problems. That's been demonstrated by his contempt for his own State Department, and for its career employees who had at least some expertise regarding Middle Eastern society and history.
There are times when military intervention may be worthwhile, holding back the warring factions long enough to let tempers cool down and give reasonable people a chance to work out a political solution. We've done that, maybe with some success, although the final results aren't in yet, in the Balkans. But we can't occupy a region for years without causing more problems for them and for ourselves than the ones we tried to control. (What did we accomplish in Vietnam, that the passage of time by itself has not accomplished, without the horrendous death toll and destruction?)
From the perspective of controlling historical rivalries, Saddam was quite effective. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, he kept a lid on the traditional rivalries -- Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds -- at an inexcusable expense to individual freedoms, but with less damage to the overall society than our own intervention has caused.
And this is NOT an attack on our military. It's a strong criticism of the political decisions that were made, often over the protests of the top military officials, that have placed everyone, including the military, in our present untenable position.
I'm not arguing with anything you say, Suzanne. But the deaths of Americans that you list doesn't justify killing Afghan children, in order to capture one leader. At least ask yourself, if this guy was hiding out in an American school, where American children were studying, would we have sent rockets into it in the hope of killing him?
P.S. -- I begged for criticism from readers, and yours was good and understandable.
I don't know everything, obviously, and it's great to get intelligent feedback from people who strongly disagree with me. Keep challenging me when you disagree with me.
Woah… you’ve really widened the scope here, but ok, I will.
Firstly, people are always preemptively defending themselves against the “troops” card – it’s become like the race card. (I’m not anti-military! Some of my best friends wear cammies!) Don’t worry about it, I never throw it down. I don’t have the extra brain cells to make the leap from political opinion to anti-militarism, anyway. I do feel that in some sort of ironically desperate pendulum swing from Vietnam, this whole country has become paranoid in its distinction between “support for the troops” and support for the administration/war in Iraq. Belaboring the distinction is patronizing. I’ll tell you what, say what you think and we’ll figure out the rest.
Secondly, you’re minimizing the necessity of military action in a general historical sense – a lot of times tempers don’t cool down, and tens of thousands of people are massacred (half a million, at low estimate, in Rwanda, when the UN abandoned ship, since we’re talking about everything). I agree with you about indefinite occupation, no arguments there. But you lost me when you said that Saddam kept a lid on things, at the admittedly inexcusable “expense of individual freedom.” Er… it was a bit more than that. You say tomato, I say genocide. To the tune of 180,000 Kurds. Yes, that was in the late 1980’s. If you want to argue the timeliness of our invasion, you’ve got ground. But let’s not whitewash the bloodshed of that regime by calling it a management of rivalries. Effective, yes, if you’re okay with the murder and genocide part.
Please allow me to clarify my point (back to Al Qaeda) because I think you’ve missed it. I didn’t bring up 3000 dead Americans to “justify” the death of innocents (of any number or creed) as some sort of retribution for our loss. The point is, in order to prevent yet another kind of terrorist action of this magnitude against our people, we need to take preemptive initiative against those planning to do us harm. Nobody ever mentions the fact that it’s been over five years since 9/11… and many, many terrorist acts planned against citizens on our soil and against our interests abroad have been prevented. Al Qaeda and those wishing us harm aren’t going to just go away if we ask nicely. Just recently a terrorist attack against American interests was thwarted here in Germany, and I'm grateful.
So I do not justify the killing of civilians, other than to note that the many (the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocents that this particular man had in his sights) must outweigh the few. It’s like the old moral dilemmas you pass around by the campfire, usually involving a boat, your family members, and a whole bunch of strangers. Those are the unsavory hypotheticals you play as a child, but this is real. I don't mean to make light of it because this isn’t a political game – it’s decisively acting in order to spare the lives of our citizens from another 9/11, and at worst case, untold horror on the kind of mass scale we’ve not yet seen.
I don’t believe I need to imagine (or “feel”) any mother’s pain to understand the military necessity of taking out a target and incurring unintended casualties. I deeply understand, and feel, that war is hell. But “feeling” is generally the liberals problem – feeling and not thinking. (Geez, I think I just heard your old roommate talking).... ;-)
Hi Suzanne,
Yikes, I asked for that, didn't I?
1. "Widened the scope." Actually, I realized that I'd gone way off-topic, and "widened the scope" when I re-read what I'd published. I almost removed it this morning and substituted something more responsive, but obviously didn't.
2. "Not anti-military." Yeah, back in Vietnam war days, no one worried that they were failing to support the troops by opposing the war -- we felt that the anti-war movement was in fact supporting them, many of whom were friends! Blame the Republicans for making supporting the troops identical to supporting the president. And it unfortunately has worked in too many elections.
3. Genocide, etc. Valid point on the Saddam comments. I did sort of gloss over his "failings." But he did keep the country together and functioning.
4. Pre-emptive strikes. I'm agin 'em. It's hard to make a rule applicable to every country as to when it's justifiable to invade another country. (And I don't believe in rules that apply to every country but the good ol' U.S. of A.) Every tinhorn dictator thinks he has just cause to pre-emptively strike his neighbor. Afghanistan may have been a special case, because we knew where the attack came from (al Quida) and we knew that the Taliban regime was harboring them. It was sort of a "hot pursuit" kind of argument, arguably valid, like chasing Mexican bandits back across the border. (But we all know how that ended up.)
5. Moral dilemmas around the campfire. I know, I know. If I had rewritten my reply, this was the problem I was going to bring up and discuss, and which seemed suggested by your original comment. "If you could bring everlasting peace to the world by torturing one small child to death, would you do it?" It's easiest to fall back on an absolute, like Bush and his stem cells, and say "never". And, surprisingly (to you, probably), that's my instinctive reaction. But when you face an actual situation with real facts, the moral lines never seem as clear. So it's a good argument for you to have made, and a problem for me to worry about, at least in the abstract. Maybe some day when I grow up, I'll be smart enough to give you a wise answer with absolute conviction.
6. "Feeling" v. "thinking." Ah, come on, Suzanne. You don't believe that. Thinking is a way of arriving at a solution that you "feel" is desirable. You can "feel" that removing the threat of terrorist attacks by warfare is necessary, but that doesn't mean that you don't "feel" the impact on the lives you kill or maim in so doing. Unless your whole philosophy is based on nothing but maximizing your own welfare without regard to anyone else's. To do that, you have to lack empathy. And people who lack empathy are called "sociopaths."
The development of civilization as we know it in the West involves first learning to empathize with members of your immediate family, then expanding the scope of your empathy to other members of your tribe, then to those of your nation, and then to all of humanity. "Liberal" and "conservative" are various political approaches to achieving maximum happiness for those you empathize with.
7. "My old roommate." Nope, dormmates but never roommates. Barton had decent roommates. My own roommates taught me all I need to know about barbarism and sociopaths. :D
It's taken me a while to respond because I'm trying to figure out whether I'm a sociopath. Are you friend or family? ;P
Either way, it's clear you know me well enough to call me out at that bit about feelings. I blame your latest post to faithful readers for goading me into that base liberal taunt. :P We're just people... who need people...
Which brings me to my most searing jab about your blog (or perhaps blogspot in general) - why can't I edit my post? I too, have been known to suffer posters' remorse. If there's a way to go back and edit, please let me know...
Anyway, I get what you're saying about protesting Vietnam and supporting your friends. And you're a good person so I know that's the way you see it. But the parallel to today isn't that overwhelming because your friends were forced to fight - the Selective Service, numbers and birthdays. I'd be pissed, too. It's wise to guard against the extremism of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, with its degradation of vets and hatemongering... but that's just not (thankfully not) America today.
But today's is an all-volunteer force. Alan voluntarily and professionally carries out his orders... nobody forced us into this life. So when people cry "bring our troops home!" there is an almost offensive edge to it that perhaps I'm admittedly hypersensitive to. I can certainly only speak for myself (or let one of my neuroses speak for me). But I do think it's more complicated than blaming Republicans for the support the troops/war confusion.
Alone, the "support" message is wonderful. It's just that too often it’s tied to a political stance, invoked as the secondary clause to someone's political message. And at the end of the day servicemembers are just doing their jobs like any other professional, and really shouldn’t be dragged into the debate as pawns. Not that you did that, just venting now. :-)
And re no. 5 - moral dilemmas...
I'm glad you see this kind of thing as worthy of discussion... because I see these questions as anything but abstract. It's at the heart of this thread.
"If you could bring everlasting peace to the world by torturing one small child to death, would you do it?"
Ouch. Impeccable rendering of the impossible dilemma. But yes. Yes I believe I would.
Failing to act in this situation (as I read it) means allowing a similar fate to befall not one, but numerous children (as children currently endure dismemberment, rape, and torture in the world's wars)... not to mention allowing the horrors of war to repeat themselves for millenia....
Is that playing God? I say no. I say it's making the best decision with the available information. But then, I'm not a very religious person. Is it just that people don't want to take decisions into their own hands? I can see that. I wouldn't want to do it, either. But if I had to, I would do it or die trying. Would I be figuratively tortured with the visceral reality of what I had done? Yes. Every day for the rest of my life. But I believe it would still be the right decision.
Of course... no genie ever comes out of a bottle to offer us such a black choice... thank God... but its something to ponder... and not just in the abstract.
I guess by "abstract" I was thinking of a cartoonish hypothetical, like the one I gave you, where I'm asking if you would commit an extreme and cruel evil to one innocent person in order to prevent other evils to the other 6 billion inhabitants of earth. Dilemmas that stark don't occur too often in my life, even as an attorney. :-) I suppose Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb was something of the sort, but it's already a more abstract evil in some sense when you're ordering someone else to drop a bomb from 2 or 3 miles above a city -- rather than actually methodically dismantling a terrified 10 year old kid piece by piece with your own hands or instruments. But perhaps I grow too graphic ....
Usually, we face decisions where the moral choices are more blurred. Will you risk killing six innocent children in order to possibly kill a terrorist leader, whose death may or may not have any effect on saving lives of others? Regardless of how we come out on the theoretical or abstract question -- i.e., of doing a definite evil in order to definitely prevent another greater evil -- we all have a harder time in weighing the costs and benefits of the fuzzier issues we are more apt to run into. I think that the decision to bomb the school comes closer to the "pure" abstract question than most decisions in life, which is why it caught my attention. Fuzzier, but some what similar, is the decision whether to attack a school where criminals or terrorists have taken hostages, where the death of many of the hostages is a given, but the death of even more is a possibility if you do nothing.
I leave the discussion of this issue for further pondering over hot mulled wine and a blazing fire in Stuttgart.
As to changing your posts, I didn't think of that when I suggested that there was no reason to sign in with Google. If you do sign in, you can delete (but not edit) any of the posts you have published while signed in. You do so by clicking a little garbage can icon at the end of the post near the date. It leaves an indication that a comment has been deleted, but does not say who the author had been. As the owner of the blog, I can further delete that last remnant if I wish.
The comment deletion procedure has proven useful on a number of occassions...for both of us. :P
A real life saver. ;o)
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