Children and the Realities of the War on Terror

This is it. It's finally happened. The paradox of our War on Terror has finally crystallized today. For some reason it's not being reported on any of the major 'net new sites, but I just saw a report on Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC that the US launched an air strike on a "high-value" Al Qaeda target in Pakistan and destroyed the compound he was living in, KNOWING that there were at least seven innocent children inside the building.

I say it's a paradox for the following reasons: My first thought is one that I've had before. At this point, what is the difference between us and the Terrorists? If we knowingly murder innocents in the pursuit of our military goals, how are we different than they? The answer is we are not.

My second thought is that the Terrorists knowingly put children in harm's way when they have them inside of a Terrorist compound. Because the fact is that the logical conclusion of my argument means that all Osama bin Laden has to do is strap a kid onto his back, and he is invulnerable. I mean, according to my own premise, if Osama constantly has a child within a twenty foot radius of his person, we can NEVER attack him without sinking to the Terrorists' level.

Now let me say that I am all in favor of finding and killing Osama bin Laden. If I had the chance I would pull the trigger on him myself. He is a truly evil, destructive man, and the world would unequivocally better without him.

So the real paradox is not with the Terrorists, but with us. America has set itself in an impossible position of needing to fight a war, but also needing to maintain the ethos that the death of innocents is totally unacceptable. This is a paradoxical position, because the prosecution of a war always involves the death of innocents, just as it always involves the kinds of abuses we saw on display at Abu Ghraib.

We have in this country the paradigm that the ultimate good is zero deaths. Our goal is that everyone should live forever, and nobody should suffer pain for which they do not recieve compensation. That paradigm is antithetical to the concept of warfare, which involves senseless death and the infliction of pain for which there can be no compensation. That's just the way it is. And the sooner we allow ourselves to percieve this paradox, the sooner we can start making sense of our situation, and start trying to find a way to extricate ourselves, either by deciding to get out, or by deciding to do what's necessary in the service of a greater goal. Just as they did in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars, and just as we have failed to do in The Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and countless other, smaller conflicts in between.