There's immorality, then there's pathology

which are not necessarily the same thing. 

What is moral and what is legal are also not necessarily the same thing.  Some things are illegal (parking violations) but not in the least immoral.  Some things are legal (evicting a blind widow and her six crippled children) but not necessarily moral. 

Smoking cigarettes at home is legal but is it moral behavior if it damages your health or your secondhand smoke hurts your kids?  Probably not good for society in general, should we be legislating that pretty soon? 

Is driving without your seatbelt immoral as well as illegal?  Your getting injured may cause my health insurance costs to rise. 

Just wondering how far we are willing to stretch the definitions of immorality, illegality and sickness.... and how far we are willing to go to legislate behavior.

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Some of the inflammatory posts lately popping up do not appear to originate from people capable of seeing the global consequences of our country's actions (as well as Israel's).  I guess what I find most disconcerting is the general trend of thought that the only way to fight terrorism, or any group whose ideology is different, is with more killing, more bombs, more war.  I also think that this is where America is going wrong.....that by following the old methods of war/killing/bombs to quell unrest we are inciting more terrorism and more hatred.  Maybe we need to rethink the very phrase War on Terror.  Perhaps we need to entertain thoughts of a different method than war.  But it seems the trend of thought that is echoed rather eerily in some of the posts that appear here reflect the philosophy of if they don't agree with us then they deserve to die/not go to heaven/not be smiled upon by our god, etc. 

I recommend folks watch The Fog of War which features Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defencse and architect of the Vietnam War, among other roles.  I copied below his thoughts on Vietnam where one could easily substitute Iraq for Vietnam as McNamara also points out.  On war in general as well as WWII he states:

Proportionality should be a guideline in war, which refers to McNamara's role, with General Curtis LeMay, in the 1945 firebombings of 67 Japanese cities — before the bombs were ever dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. McNamara wrote the report on the inefficiency of conventional bombing campaigns that may have inspired LeMay to take his B-29 bombers down to under 5,000 feet and rain fire on cities built of wood, killing nearly 1 million Japanese. In the film, McNamara says, In a single night we burned to death 100,000 civilians — men, women, and children — in Tokyo. I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it. He goes on to recount how LeMay admitted, 'If we lost the war, we'd all be prosecuted as war criminals.' He — and I — were behaving as war criminals … What makes it immoral if you lose but not if you win?

Robert McNamara's 11 lessons from Vietnam
• We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
• We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
• We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
• Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
• We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
• We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
• We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
• After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
• We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
• We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
• We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
• Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.