Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
"It would be meaningless to apologize now. But, I do apologize."

– Last words of Perry Smith, just before being executed for the murder of the Clutter family, "In Cold Blood"

Does America bear any responsibility for the hotel bombings in Amman? No, this isn't a political question – although one could make it so. It's a moral question that everyone, right and left, needs to reflect upon.

Like most civilized human beings, the news of this atrocity sickened me. Fifty-seven people dead, many were guests at a wedding. Over 100 were injured, many maimed for life.

New generations of victims, widows, orphans, the disabled – the war in Iraq has to date killed 2,065 U.S. troops, tens of thousands have been injured and maimed. New generations of childless parents, more widows and orphans, more permanently disabled.

One hundred thousand Iraqi civilians dead – hundreds of thousands wounded, maimed. An entire country that will spawn generations of vendetta holders, vengeance seekers, inflamed tribal and religious rivalries – the well of Iraqi society poisoned for as far as the eye can see.

Are al-Qaida and former Baathists to blame? You bet. Can the killer-Saddam skate from his damning responsibility in all of this? Not in this world or the next. And Zaraqawi? There will be a special place in hell for him and his followers.

But what about our responsibility? George Bush's, of course, but also those who voted for him and continue to support him. "Cry havoc and loose the dogs of war!" said William Shakespeare, and George Bush, in all of our names, did precisely that. How easy it was to cry havoc and issue the orders to our brave men and women in uniform – and how satisfying to many Americans who understandably sought revenge for 9-11 and who were somehow comforted in believing that the invasion of Iraq would be as clean and simple as Granada in '83 or Panama in '89.

As I write, the casualties mount and the dogs of war are loose upon the world, snarling on the Internet, killing in market places in East Baghdad, nightclubs in Bali, subways in London, pizzerias in Israel, trains in Madrid, and jungles in the Philippines. We kicked over a hornet's nest in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some foresaw it at the time; Bush did not, and now, despite the president's efforts last week to shame his critics, one still must ask: 'What is Bush's moral responsibility for having globalized the war on terror?

I ask my readers to set aside their ideology and think of the corpses. We and our enemies have been on killing sprees at least since 2001; earlier, if you count (and you should count) the attack on the USS Cole and Khobar Towers; earlier still if you count (and you should count) the '93 attack on the World Trade Center.

If you want to consider politics, then ask yourself this: Was waging a globalized American jihad the only way? From the standpoint of those who are dead and those who will die, would it not have been better, safer, less bloody, to work through international institutions? Should we have listened to the United Nations, despite its flaws, and waited for international consent before invading Iraq? And if that consent never came, for whatever the reason, wouldn't we have been better off to have been forced to consider other, less bloody ways to implement our legitimate need for an effective anti-terrorism policy?

Our mistakes are legion, whether made in good faith or not. We may have started this thing as an innocent party, but we have blood on our hands now. When I think of the dead, I know that it is probably meaningless to apologize for our share of the suffering "loosed by the dogs of war." But the American people need to think long and hard about the moral questions here.

And the best way to apologize is to vote – for a change in congressional control in '06 and the White House in '08.