In Defense of the War on Terrorism
Europeans, the original letter and the responses have received far more attention there than in the United States. If there is any hope of the US garnering the support of its European friends, it is important to engage in a serious dialogue. Unfortunately, the response by European intellectuals does not address the issues raised in the original letter and at best collapses into the fallacy of moral equivalency. Perhaps it is best that this dialogue has not received much attention in the US, lest Americans begin to believe that the ranting of some European elites represents a European consensus.
The original thesis, in the first American letter, was that the war against terrorism is a just war. Although they are not explicit, the European respondents do not reject this argument and embrace a principled pacifism. The European letter, originally published in Frankfurter Allgermeine, acknowledges "the United States made an outstanding contribution to the liberation of Europe from the yoke of Nazism." Hence, they unambiguously acknowledge that a just war is, in principle, possible. However, rather than directly addressing the issue as to whether the war against terrorism is just, they descend into historical revisionism. For example, rather than acknowledging the joint and remarkably peaceful victory of the West in the Cold War against a totalitarian power that divided Berlin with a wall, they suggest that "as a leading superpower during the period of East-West confrontation, [the US] was also largely responsible for grave abuses in the world."
If we are to engage in a meaningful dialogue, European intellectuals ought not be so ethically obtuse as to argue that mass murder by the attackers of September 11, does not justify "mass murder of the Afghan population." Are these intellectuals really incapable or just unwilling to recognize the evident moral distinction between attacks deliberately intended to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible and incidental and unintended civilian deaths in a war? If they wish to make the charge of "murder" ought not they at least produce some evidence of a deliberate intention to kill innocent civilians?
The canard of 4,000 innocent Afghan civilian deaths is even trotted out. This figure is based on third party reports and has largely been discredited. The Associated Press puts the number of civilian casualties in the hundreds and MSNBC reports "Afghan journalists for the official Bakhtar news
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