Many Americans (including their leaders) seem to have some difficulty seeing any situation from the other side’s perspective. Thus, when they react with measured caution to a threat or an outrage, (or work on the ‘everything’s negotiable’ principle, as W.J. Clinton and the disastrous Jimmy Carter were both wont to do), it’s not always the case that the other side perceives that caution to be wise, as many liberal Westerners might, but weak.
It’s distressing to say this, (and I don’t want to even consider the horrible consequences for so many innocent people), but by ‘overreacting’ with a massive use of force, America might just gain some respect from many of the people who loathe it so deeply. They won’t love it any more than they do now, but they will see it react in a way they understand, as strong men in their cultures react when threatened – with terrible ferocity and utterly no mercy.
The last nation to think the Americans were weak was the Japanese. They paid a terrible price in learning that this wasn’t so. I’d like to think this will be resolved without something similarly terrible happening to many thousands of innocent people, but I fear it will not. I also fear that we’ve started out on an ever-tightening ‘horror’ ratchet. What would be seen this week as totally unacceptable will, in three week’s time, not be so, and three week’s after that…. And so on, a bit like the moral descent into wholesale carpet bombing of cities in WW2. In 1939, it was leaflets; 1940, pin point bombing of military targets; 1941, night area bombing; and by 1945, Dresden and Hiroshima.