NEW PERSPECTIVE COLUMN: U.S. forced to kill the innocent
By Adam Holmberg
Mahatma Gandhi once said "You must be the change you wish to see." Another man might use that simple phrase to condemn the War Against Terror of which the first battle is currently being fought in Afghanistan. I recalled the phrase after watching Richard Attenborough's excellent 1982 biopic Gandhi (an excellent way to escape the tripe currently at the box office), and I've been pondering it ever since. To use it to condemn our current efforts against the Taliban is really missing the point about what's great about America and what we've already brought to the people of Afghanistan.
I know that to some of you I must come across like a warmongering Republican or a blind patriot. I must be irrational - how can I support war? How can I write off the deaths of "innocent" civilians - and again, I use the term innocent with much skepticism - with the simple cliché "war is hell?" How can I support an administration that is proposing military action that, if carried out properly, will take us from country to country, training camp to training camp, battlefield to battlefield with the vague mission to wipe out terrorism.
The fact is, folks, I can do that because this is the real world. We do not live in a bubble of democracy, safe from harm as long as we don't get involved. We live in, as the entrepreneurs of the dead "Internet Revolution" liked to say, in a Global Community and an Information Age. We live in the world of the Internet and the atomic bomb and the CIA where the most valuable resource isn't gold or land but information.
We worship at the altar of technology, where anyone can build a weapon of mass destruction, as our enemies wanted to with information downloaded from the Internet. The only thing that hasn't changed is that the guy who wins is the one with the biggest gun. The only reason the Cold War never turned hot was because everyone was terrified of the atomic bomb.
And now we fight an enemy who isn't afraid of that bomb. He worships at the altar of fear, and he is an invisible soldier who will not stop until he is dead. I point out Mohammed Atta as one of those soldiers - well-educated, highly trained, invisible. It took the north tower of the World Trade Center to stop him after he helped ram Flight 11 into it. That is the enemy we fight.
And there are plenty more of him out there. That is who we fight; the enemy who brought fear to our nation, and those countries that support him. We are the nation whose eyes were opened. It's a dangerous world - we know that now. We have therefore made it our mission to wipe fear from the Earth. That is the change we wish to be.
This is the real world. Sometimes to fight evil we must choose the lesser evil, and always to fight this enemy - this new soldier in this New War - we must kill. Many have compared the civilian losses incurred to those produced by Fat Man and Little Boy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What we did during August of 1945 was horrible - millions of civilians suffered to scare Japan into surrender and therefore save American and Allied lives. But tell me we weren't justified - tell me you would have rather been those thousands or even millions of American lives lost in an invasion.
And that is why we must kill. These terrorists force us into these choices, and they're horrible choices, but it is, in this case, the means to the end. And that end is the eradication of fear. Remember what it was like to step on a plane and not worry about if you will die when some madman plows it into a building? Remember when names such as Anthrax and biological warfare were foreign? Remember when "That doesn't happen in America" meant something. It seems like a lifetime ago.
We are, ladies and gentlemen, the change we wish to see. In Rod Lurie’s excellent film The Contender, Joan Allen’s character, Senator Laine Hansen, is asked if she is religious, and she responds that she worships in the Chapel Of Democracy – the same institution that freed the slaves and gave women their rights.
America is not perfect – we’re still racist and sexist, and we discriminate, and we have conquered more than the Romans could have ever dreamed through our culture. But we are free, and I challenge you to find a better place to live in all the world. I challenge you to find a place where you can worship God or Allah or Budda or not at all. I challenge you to find a place which gives women the choice to abort a fetus or to not marry, the choice to work instead of having children or wearing a veil. I challenge you to find a place that allows you to excel.
We are the change we wish to see. We are spreading freedom in nations where people are afraid to go to school or paint a picture or speak their mind. We are finding the cancer of hate and ripping it from the world. Our choices are hard, even undesirable, and our tools are sometimes unsubtle, but we get the job done. We do it because it is right. And yes, we do it for our survival. But most of all, we do it to make sure that Sept. 11 never happens again to anyone.