All this war talk on both sides makes a primary mistake.
It is basically assumed that the United States has been attacked, and that `we' the United States have to do something about it---or at least address that sentiment in some meaningful way.
But this is the primary fallacy---the identification between the `we' and the United States.
These are not the same, and neither is just about any `we' that anybody cares to choose---including the actual surviving victims of the WTC. If you make this identification, between the we and the United States government, then all the pro-war, military force arguments seem to follow. But this is what nationalism looks like from the inside.
It was the same identification used in the Vietnam era. It is that identification between the people's interest and the government's interest that had to be broken down, and it was. It was so deeply shattered that a significant number of my generation never accepted it again as a given.
The `we' (a completely arbitrary abstraction) are going after the `terrorists' (another completely arbitrary abstraction) who have been designated by the `US' as anything that moves in Afghanistan. Yet this whole equation is an absurdity.
While the current circumstances are quite different than Vietnam, Central America, the Gulf War, they share this one central feature, the assumed identification between policies cooked up behind closed doors in DC, and our own immediate and concrete interests in real, flesh and blood life.
Now I don't expect anybody to go along with this line of argument at the moment. But wait and see. Slowly but certainly, the chasm will widen between the `we' and the `US'.
Chuck Grimes