Yeah, Gareth. When you're a soldier in the middle of the action, you don't have time to decide on the niceties...usually.

My point was this. All people agree that it is basically wrong to kill other people...and they call it murder. Or do they? Depends on the circumstances, doesn't it? So maybe they don't call it murder, once they have rationalized themselves into a position of some sort where they fell they HAD to do it for some reason.

If you scratch beneath the surface of any of our chosen "moral" notions, you will find the same thing. Contradiction, confusion, and extreme rationalization...depending on the temporary conditions.

I am not taking sides in this dispute. I am merely observing that one group of people (American military personnel engaged in a "war on terrorism") and another group of people (muslim zealouts engaged in a jihad which they believe is a war on terrorism)...are busy trying to kill each other for much the same reasons. They have both decided that the other guy is a threat to their existence, that he is WRONG, that he is EVIL, and that they must defend themselves by killing him or his people when and where they can...until FINAL VICTORY!

I'm suggesting they are both caught up in the same unproductive thinking, and are missing the much larger picture. They are also failing to understand how it happened or where it came from, and totally failing to understand this: had they been born amongst the "enemy" population, their roles might very well be exactly reversed at this moment.

I don't believe what they believe. I am no threat to either one of them. Were I an Arab, I would be no threat to you, because I do not wish to force some other population to abandon their way of life in favour of mine. For the same reason, I am no threat to the Arabs. There are plenty of people like me among the Arabs or anyone else you could care to name, but the news gives them no attention, because they don't KILL people!

I'm suggesting that there is a better way. A way of avoiding imitating each other's worst behaviours and a way of overcoming fear and achieving coexistance with those who are culturally different.

That is to say: Our way is not BETTER than your way. It's just different. There is plenty of room for both our way and yours in this world, and we have much good that we can share with one another and still be different.

I chose a wide variety of incidents from World War II, just to show that ALL nations have fallen into the kind of reactive self-righteous our-way-is-best thinking and behaviour that leads nowhere but to conflict, death and despair. They call it "victory". They're wrong. Victories are temporary pauses to catch breath between the last great folly and the next, during which one righteous set of killers licks its chops and hands out medals to the survivors, while the other set plots its future vengeance.

That's what you've got happening in this war, and I don't support either side in their killing schemes.

- LH