We know evil when we see it, right? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said that “killing innocent people is evil.” So no wonder everyone is horrified by Syrian President Assad’s brutal murder by poison gas of some 80 Syrian civilians, including infants. Evil, no doubt.
But wait. Ever since our taxes started funding the war on terror, hundreds of thousands of our bombs and missiles, sent by our own military or by our proxies, such as the Saudis, have blown apart tens of thousands of civilians and created millions of refugees. These victims are designated “collateral damage” because the weapons were intended strictly for terrorists. However, explosive devices by their nature do not discriminate. They throw shrapnel and shock waves in every direction.
If you detonate an explosion near human beings, you may or may not kill your terrorist target, but you are almost certain to blow nearby women and children to bloody pieces. That’s not “collateral,” that’s intentional. You know innocents will die.
Fifteen years of explosions have been extraordinarily successful: instead of a few thousand terrorists in Afghanistan we are fighting many thousands in seven Muslim countries.
Do we really recognize evil when we see it?
