Being Held Accountable for Actions of One, Actions of All - Who Ultimately Pays

Submitted by M. Tovey (United States), May 2, 2011 at 17:26

Let us first make something clear: no one has the actual figures as to whom the blame for the most deaths by a national entity is identified: Even as the numbers of those who dies in WW II were in the millions upon millions, many of those were already dead before the United States even entered that war. By a conservative estimate, Stalin appears to be the lead for that period of time. And if one is going to play tit for tat, motives are to be examined before manslaughter is called murder. Otherwise how would one call the difference of the deaths of a Shiites by a Sunni and vice versa? How many deaths by Saddam Hussein versus the Iranian Government in their eight year altercation were recorded before the United States entered into that fray in the nineties?

Now, to be sure, the United States has been involved in bloodshed for quite some time, and even to the extent that the motives of certain actions can be called into question. It is expected and inevitable from the minimum standpoint that the individual humanity of participants in those instances revealed a lesser acknowledged qualification, that of the sin nature in all of humanity. The Holy Bible has a verse that carries that point home, in James (the half brother of Jesus Christ). [4:1) Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 4:2) You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask.]

Now the United States is a mere couple hundred years or so in national identity; but even as there are more industrious ways developed to slaughter in these modern times, the U.S has a long ways to go before catching up to the truly murderous regimes of the former Soviet Union, former Nationalist Socialist Germany, or the several hundreds of years of domination in the Asian continent.

Now it is strange that as this is being written, the world is in wonder that the United States has finally caught up with the single most defined enemy of the United States in a long time, and he is dead. It was by most accounts a long time in coming, and strange by virtue of the fact that the laugh has been on the U.S. for not being able to get through Islamic secrecy to find that the leader of al-Qaeda was under the military cover of Pakistan. We are in war in Afghanistan under what I believed to be the presumption that was where bin Laden could be found. Should we have been in war against Pakistan instead of being in Afghanistan? More to the point, I am quite certain the prevailing sentiment of most of the Asian Muslim world is that he is a martyr and should be avenged, while it is believed here in American this is in answer to the call for justice for the lives of civilians lost September 11, 2011.

Bin Laden chose his targets poorly; for targeting civilians and trying to legitimize them militarily did not bode well for the Germans in World War 2, and it did not bode well for bin Laden now. Lives lost in the calamity of war will never be acceptable to a civilized management of society, but it is well written that those to whom war is a first choice to press an issue had better make sure they can make it to the end. This is even true of the United States. The caution is that Islam will be held just as accountable; and even at an uncountable billion or so lives of Muslims in the world today, one wonders how many of those will be lost because some lost sight of what peace truly means. One cannot have peace while planning and going to war all the time. This is a lesson that bin Laden apparently did not learn.

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