Adumbration

To the Editor of The Seattle Times:

To be unmoved by the tragedy of the recent terror is impossible for anyone who loves the liberty this country provides.  And if you do love that liberty, please think twice before advocating indiscriminate retaliatory strikes against people in countries that may or may not have harbored the criminals responsible for those acts.

If the police in our town were to spray bullets into a crowded street in the hope of stopping one criminal who might be there, we would gasp in horror.  Let us not then allow our government to do the equivalent on a international scale, by recklessly bombing cities around the world.

To predict the result of such a response, all you need to do is look at the examples of the Middle East and of Northern Ireland.  Both regions  are marked time and again not by the prosecution of violent perpetrators through the courts, but my murder of innocents, merely because of a weak association with the true criminals.  If you ever looked at events in Belfast or Palestine and wonder why they choose to keep fighting each other after so many years,  remember that it started with the killing of innocent people in reprisals for murder, when the proper recourse was to bring the original criminals to justice.

While we feel justifiable rage over the death and destruction in the East, now more than ever is the time for us to breath deeply, keep cool heads, and resolve to bring the true criminals to a well deserved prosecution. 

If you value your freedom, and your sense of security, think about what brought to pass events in which some people so hate the United States that they would take such awful steps.  Those people have no experience of the freedom we enjoy;  rather they face a US foreign policy which props up dictators, attacks, and stations troops in countries where we have no business being, the Middle East most of all.  It is not a wonder that they hate us;  it is more a wonder that it took them this long to hit back so hard.

Remember that in the last couple years Osama bin Laden offered to end his "holy war" against us if we would merely leave Saudi Arabia.  I thought then, and in retrospect feel more strongly now, that sounds like a pretty good idea.