Ezra at Pandagon wrote a pretty good post about the Iraqi wedding bombing. It reminded me of a conversation I once had with my right-wing brother-in-law.
A little history, first. My BIL absolutely despised me when he first met me. My husband's whole family was pretty skeptical to be honest (can you imagine? they were skeptical of this 19 year old pregnant chick who wanted to marry their 27 year old son/brother!), but BIL was the most overtly hostile of the bunch. I hated him, too. But over the years, I got to know him better, and he got to know me better, and now I would say that we are pretty fond of one another.
This conversation occurred when we Bush announced the war on terror. My BIL and I, who are nearly always at odds with each other when discussing politics, both agreed that there is only one way to stop terror, and even that is only a temporary measure - genocide. Kill everyone who stands against you. Everyone who is not on your side needs to be dead. Of course memories are long and span generations, and eventually, a new group of people who hate America will come along and use the same tactics again, because what other kind of tactics can a small, poor nation use against a wealthy powerful one? Even my BIL thought that would be wrong. It would change what America is, what America stands for. Maybe the torture and the murder of children at a wedding aren't as bad as what Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot did, but it certainly doesn't make us any better.
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