In her Sept. 17 column, Sara Marie Eichenberger paints the conflict between the United States and the terrorists who struck at this nation last Tuesday as a war of good versus evil. She describes this further as a war that has been waged since the dawn of time. Does Eichenburger realize that her rhetoric amounts to a call for a military crusade, in which she has characterized the U.S. as a divine agent of goodness?
Furthermore, has she realized that what she seems to be summoning her readers to is a Christian jihad? Military crusading for a moral, ideological, or religious purpose is just as much a phenomenon of modern times as it was before and after the medieval Christian crusades in the Middle East, or the Muslim jihads that initially spread Islam. The ancient Hebrew nation’s claim that God ordered them to commit genocide against the native inhabitants of Palestine is recorded in the Bible. Europe was torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War during the 17th century, as Protestants and Catholics fought each other with the utmost religious zeal and conviction. The United States and Great Britain bombed hundreds of thousands of civilians to death during WWII in a war to end fascism. A U.S. crusade against terrorism would take its place in history alongside events such as these.
If, as Eichenburger demands, nations which do not “extradite out enemies and support our efforts” become the enemy themselves, then civilians in those targeted countries will die. Eichenburger recognizes that countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan do not allow their people to experience the same freedoms we experience, and she may know that many Afghans, especially women, have no political control over the decisions their leaders make. When the first of those civilians is killed by a U.S. attack, will we still be able to claim that we represent good, that our war is with evil? In my mind, we will have as little right to that claim as the terrorists who killed innocents last week. War may be politically expedient, even necessary, but it can never be reduced to the simple formulation of good versus evil.
Geordie Hamilton English and aviation
