An Eye for an Eye?

Since this country is apparently organizing its own jihad--its own holy war of vengeance--it is appropriate to calculate precisely how many eyes are required to compensate for an American eye, how many teeth for an American tooth.

An American life is obviously worth more than an Afghan life, right? The Afghans are not Arabs, by the way. Neither are the Iranians, but that doesn't matter. Afghans are poor, illiterate peasants. They live in caves and tents and survive by simple farming and grazing, much as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. About a quarter of them may starve to death this winter. They don't bathe very often or use deodorant. They are dirty, smelly, unkempt, and uncivilized. They don't live very long. So clearly one of their lives is not worth an American life. Nor is the death of one of their children a fit recompense for the death of an American child. Hence we must establish for our revenge an appropriate ratio of value.

Let's say for the sake of argument that we will have to kill six Afghans for every American who died in the terrorist raids. That means our righteous revenge will require the death of perhaps thirty thousand Afghans. The United States military, which desperately wants to even the score for the damaged Pentagon, can easily dispose of thirty thousand of them. We will have our revenge and the world will be a better place. Who will miss the smelly, dirty Afghans?

None of the forty thousand we kill may be terrorists. Indeed, the real terrorists have probably disappeared already. So we will have to kill a lot of the Taliban to make up for that, even if that means we create new terrorists.

However, our leaders have more in mind. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has told the world that if a country doesn't cooperate with us, we will "end" that country.

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