Editorial

There is a Moral Equivalency Between Bush and the Terrorists

Within days of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, people began to ask why the United States is so hated by the rest of the world. Answers to that question have been pouring in ever since. Most of the answers focus on the litany of crimes which successive American administrations, the U.S. military and the CIA have committed against the people of the world.

At least 50 countries have been invaded by U.S. troops since the end of the Second World War. Numerous democratically-elected governments have been overthrown by the CIA or with its assistance. In the course of these aggressions by the United States, millions of innocent people have been murdered and millions more have starved to death due to economic dislocation and economic plunder. The death of over one million Iraqi civilians since 1991 as a result of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions is just one of the latest examples.

The response of the Bush administration to these charges has been to claim that there is "no moral equivalency" between the "accidental" deaths of millions of people due to U.S. foreign policy and the deliberate flying of airplanes into office buildings. The Israeli government was quick to pick up on this line, claiming that there was also "no moral equivalency" between its assassination of Palestinian "terrorist leaders" and the retaliatory assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The fact that Ze'evi began his career as a terrorist and spent his life advocating the extermination of Palestinians was not considered relevant to the equation.

Although he did not use the same phrase, former U.S. president Richard Nixon expressed the same sentiment when commenting on the 1989 events in Tienamen Square. When a reporter pointed out that, as governor of California, Nixon had also ordered the National Guard to shoot and kill unarmed students, Nixon responded: "That was different. Those students were communists."

In other words, any atrocity, no matter how obscene, is morally justified if it advances the interests of the United States. Conversely any action against the United States or its allies, even if committed in self-defence, is morally unjustified. "America is good; its enemies are evil."

In fact, there is a high degree of moral equivalency between the Bush administration (and its predecessors) and those who attacked the World Trade Center. Both groups are terrorists who are quite prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians in pursuit of their respective causes. The fact that one set of terrorists is in charge of an economic and military superpower with access to almost unlimited weapons of mass destruction does not make it morally superior, merely more dangerous.