A Vicious Cycle
Hate vs. Hate

By Shane Collins

(Page 4 of 5)

On the world scale, we need not look too hard to see many examples of how this reasoning only perpetuates and escalates hate. The ‘War on Terror’ by the U.S. is a current well-documented example. The September 11, 2001, attacks in New York sparked a pattern of violence that continues to this day. In those attacks, 2973 people lost their lives. In quick response, Afghanistan and Iraq were attacked and their governments were toppled, in just over a year and a half. Since then, many lives have been lost, and not just the soldiers’ lives. The number of innocents killed or injured in the conflicts is huge.

According to one organization which keeps track of media-reported civilian deaths, it is now estimated that 80,000 innocent civilians in Iraq have died from violence directly related to the war, and that is a very conservative number. It does not include deaths which are unreported by news media or deaths attributed to the effects of war, such as increased violent crime/lawlessness, disease and famine. The friends and family of those victims seldom passively accept the needless deaths of their loved ones, but instead, often look upon the U.S. and its occupying soldiers with much hatred. The result of waging ‘war on terror’ is an increase of the same poisonous emotion which fuels terrorism in the first place.

A New York Times article in April of 2007, addressed the issue of accidental deaths caused by American soldiers. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU, the U.S. Army disclosed roughly 500 claims submitted by Iraqi and Afghani civilians seeking payment for non-combat killings, injuries or property damage American forces inflicted on them or their relatives. That number was considered a small fraction of the actual number of claims. The military had paid more than $32 million to Iraqi and Afghani civilians for non-combat-related killings, injuries and property damage. That figure did not include condolence payments. One example given for instances which led to claims was: “...in 2005, an American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy’s uncle $500.” Generally, compensation for these deadly mistakes is very meager. “For (combat-related) cases, including the boy’s, the Army may offer a condolence payment as a gesture of regret with no admission of fault, of usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed.”

In the minds of people intensely focused on revenge, responsibility for one’s actions often becomes irrelevant. It’s a characteristic of the blinding nature of hatred. This was demonstrated in the Army’s response to the issue: “The Army does not target civilians. Sadly, however, the enemy’s tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan unnecessarily endanger innocent civilians.” The aggressor dismisses responsibility for his actions by putting the blame on “the enemy’s tactics.” Consider the logic of this reasoning. If a man swings a stick at an opponent, and hits 10 bystanders, he dismisses responsibility for his actions because the opponent won’t stand still. There is no logic there, only blind reason.

Lest people think that civilian deaths amidst warfare are not that common, consider two other prominent historical examples of warfare which, like these current ones, also involved a lot of urban combat: In World War I, of 15-20 million deaths, 43% of them were civilian, and in World War II, of approximately 55 million deaths, more than half of the total was civilian casualties, millions of them coming from disease and famine directly related to the war.

As a result, hatred toward Americans within those countries has dramatically increased. Iraq has now become a recruiting grounds by terrorist groups who use the abundance of new-found hatred to further their warfare. Suicide bombings have become very common in Iraq and very often, the casualties are innocent bystanders. In 2005, Time magazine wrote an article, Inside the Mind of an Iraqi Suicide Bomber, interviewing a 20-year-old man who said that after witnessing American soldiers open fire on a crowd of demonstrators at a school, killing and wounding many, he became determined to join the armed resistance, and eventually implored his superiors to become a suicide bomber.

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