If we don't set and abide by a standard for collateral damage, what's the alternative? Never use force? Intentionally use proganda and misinformation to try to distract people from the collateral damage?

It's a new idea to me that there could be a standard for collateral damage. Can there also be a friendly fire standard? Love to be on that Pentagon committee that tries to present the issue of friendly fire casualties within the overall 'noise' framework of how many of our own eggs is okay to break when making the omlet of mass destruction. War tends to thrust issues at us which are impossible to deal with ethically while still courting unrealistic public opinion.

People/societies tolerate the inhumanity and injustice of war because they believe it will serve a higher purpose in the longer run, like abolition - though when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced in New York City there were riots and mobs of whites going out lynching blacks as a result!

The world has become such a small place, that the rage of the masses of third world muslims in reaction to the brutalization of their fellow Palestinians or the collateral incidental (unfortunate) deaths of Afghan civilians now is felt at least a little all the way over here in white, fat, happy, ignorant, and arrogant territory.

When these slobs have it pointed out to them that poor people are being killed in their name without them understanding the reasons why, they react by attacking the 'liberal' messengers. It's all our fault for hating America! These are the intellectual descendants of the mobs that tore into black people in New York for 'forcing' them to die to free their relatives. One of the most cynical and influential of their rabble-rousers just went deaf because he spent so long spouting hate that he forgot how to use his ears to listen.

I don't have a good answer because there isn't a good answer. I know that polling third worlders on their attitudes toward the US and our government feels wrong to me in my guts. I'm upset right now at the impending losses of civil rights and especially disgusted by the short-sighted lust for vengeance in the name of justice that is covering up the simple fact of another war to make the world safe for oil profiteers.

If we were really going to get involved and use that oil profit to improve the lives of our citizens at home and the Afghan people also, it would mollify my disgust and anger. But I sure don't believe that social justice is part of the agenda of compassionate conservatism.

I never trusted the eyes and the evil laugh of that ineloquent, unelegant, fake folksy son of a bitch - and now he's the great hero? I just know there is something truly foul and stinking going on here, I mean beyond billionaires becoming gazillionaires by sacrificing lives that would have been short hard and brutal anyway. It makes me nuts to witness how my fellow Americans are unwilling to see through the creeps.

Well, let's be philosophical at least: out of the worst, something better has the potential to be born. It's just that the worst is so wretchedly sickening.