But what if that was YOUR little brother being raped?

Your child is murdered. What you want to happen to the murderer is vital and undeniable but also is very little to do with what actually happens to him/her, which relies on the due process of the law. This is the neccessary cruelty at the heart of justice and a principle at the centre of civilisation - that it is not the victim's right to decide on the criminal's identity and punishment.

But the thing is, does this apply internationally, and if it should as part of international justice then surely that lies beneath the Western non-US discomfort with the - emotionally totally sympathetic - desire for vengeance and retaliation.

Is that part of the reason why this is an "act of war" and not a "crime"?

And actually I think this is the best argument for other countries being involved as closely as possible in this coalition, offering troops, or intelligence or airspace or any other resources (standard ground troops being prob. the least valuable): to ensure that the response is as legal and just as can be while still being effective. And after all the politician in the world right now most genuinely risking his own neck against terrorism is Gen. Musharraf - he and Giuliani are the two political figures to have come out of the last 2 weeks looking most impressive I think.

It would make perfect sense. I'm starting to think that all the big buildup we're cryptically hearing about -- all the planes moving and all that -- is actually an astounding feint. This is more a hunch than anything else, but it'd be interesting if it were true.

This reminds of the police inspector in Les Miserables.

It's funny how this idea works within a nation but runs into trouble beyond it. From the little I know, international law hasn't been very successful, and it seems like the EU only gained momentum after the US became the single superpower. Also, the difficulty of agreeing to and enforcing environmental policies...

Does this mean that nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism are stronger than personal ties, or is it because of organizational and logistical problems (i.e. it's just a matter of time - as contact between peoples increases, so will the need for international bodies but also the means for coming up with them)?

I think a large part of Mark's argument was that all of these things actually are personal ties, just abstracted a step further.

I don't have much to say about this, because I think it's quite completely true and very relevant to recent events. And I do think that's a defining element of liberalism, this thing that conservatives somehow love to link to "moral relativism," but which is actually just a realization that no one thing can be truly argued to be more valuable than another, whether it's a life or a lifestyle or a form of speech or what have you.

My theory, which I'm still mentally developing, is that this has something to do with one's interactions with culture, as opposed to politics. Conservatives do not seem to make this division very readily, as evidenced by their interactions with the NEA and obscene art and the moral agendas of entertainment. Part of that sort of liberal "relativism," to me, is the understanding that while I cannot put forth some sort of inviolable political argument that the New Yorker is, in absolute terms, "better" than Hustler, I can certainly make the argument on a social and cultural level (a judgement I wouldn't try to apply to realm of political decision), and I can try to steer things in the direction I approve of through social communication.

And yes, as this applies to recent events, this truly is something that has bothered me. What bothered me most was Rumsfeld (I think) making some comment about "forget about collateral damage," which was revolting because (a) a few months ago, as McVeigh was being executed, "collateral damage" was being kicked around as the most despicable term ever, and here we have it coming back with everyone's approval simply because we're on the other end of it, and (b) well, there's the obvious fact that this makes us every bit as awful as we're claiming bin Laden is. This is our great double-standard -- the U.S. values the lives of its citizens more than the citizens of other (poorer) nations. This would at least be logically consisent if we claimed that it was every government's responsibility to protect its citizens exclusively, and therefore it was fine for other nations to sacrifice our citizens for their ends (essentially "every country for itself, terrorism on-limits") -- but obviously we don't do that. We just have the double standard.

No, Nitsuh: youn is is wondering whether, while an in-nation system of justice can operate because "we" can set aside personal feelings and accept law-given judgments, International Justice perhaps fails as a system because "we" can't set aside ethnocentric or national feelings. I don't in fact believe this *is* the reason IJ doesn't currently function, but youn didn't misunderstand my argument.

Very stupid on a rhetorical note, yes. The government shouldn't be saying anything like that, that cuts their moral ground completely from under them. Is there an exact source of the quote? If it was, say, Helms mouthing off, it can be ignored, but someone in the executive branch saying that renders everything suspect (or rather, more so than before).

I was talking in theory, not necessarily about bin Laden. Although I suppose the proposition could be taken most generally to mean "It is acceptable to kill civilians for political reasons." And I'm not sure bin Laden's aims could be reduced to merely wanting to kill -- I assume he'd argue that that killing is in the service of some larger goal of undermining the power of western culture and making Islam the defining force in the world.

mark s --

Sorry, I guess I misunderstood. I guess, though, that *I* would offer the argument that those traits are the same as the family- protection impulse working on a far larger scale, and that their strength may actually derive from having been abstracted and inflated to such a large level. (These impulses tend to get very self-reinforcing when the "enemy" or wrongdoer is foreign or alien or different or not-identifiable-with.)

Frank --

Quite right, I don't remember who made the statement, so I'm not blaming anyone specifically. I just found it an interesting turn- around of the general rhetorical position around that word in the U.S. But even if it was meant in the (2) way that you describe, it still strikes a morally iffy tone, doesn't it? By that logic, the plane that went into the Pentagon would be almost acceptable -- it could be claimed as a specific strike against a military installation, with all civilian casualties being a case of "Well, if we sat around worrying about every last civilian, we'd never accomplish anything ..."

2. Mark S is Correct re. the reasons why IJ doesn't work (as far as I can tell what he's saying). At least: he's right that ethnocentrism is not really the obstructive issue. For me the issue is Massive Structures of Power blah blah; perhaps he disagrees.

V. early on in all of this I read something about bin Laden's long term dream/goal - a unified Islamic superpower/world-state. Such a state would as per Islamic tradition be united under the rule of the 'Caliph', and the article alleged that no less than this was OBL's goal.

Can this actually be the case, i.e. serial-villain ruling-the-world style ambitions? This article was not incidentally in a particularly belligerent paper, quite possibly in fact in the Guardian.

-- Tom (ebro...), September 23rd, 2001.

International justice doesn't work because there's no one to decide what's 'right'.

OBL'sdeath to the west' is just as right as anything we'd consider more reasonable. We have no more right to say he's wrong than he does to say we are.

That bit about treating yr sisters rapist with compassionand all that is so dud it's hard to know where to begn, apart from to say "You know not!" (Not that I have been in the position, but..) Of course, your first responsibility is to your family. How would your sister feel if you were being all "Jesus like" forgiving to someone she would quite possibly like dead? Which brings me to...

Laws are there to protect the people in general from 'crime' and the 'retaliation' also. Calls for the death penalty usually arise when papers report a combination of:
A) A man
Murders
1) child
2) woman
a) in cold blood
b) for sexual reasons
c) with a gun while the victim runs away.

Conversely, it 'doesn't matter' if the person was say, an old hobo without family, as there is no-one to get angry on their behalf.

The extreme of this is to repeal all laws against murder, as then the victims family could take the justice they feel they deserve by tracking down the killer and killing them.

(just some jumbled up thinking folks. Pick it to pieces by all means, but don't go mad!)