Osama bin Terror

Martin Amis of The Guardian Unlimited wrote one week after the September 11 attacks on the United States that "It will be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly." He titled his essay -- fittingly for this category -- Fear and Loathing. So if loathing begets fear, fear begets hatred and hatred begets terror, what is the solution?

In the relatively more innocent days of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, The Beatles sang "All You Need Is Love." What is needed now is hard love, discipline and just a touch of compassion. But if the United States does not recognize that its is our own long support of dictators, repression and oligarchs over the decades that has led to despondency and terror, we will have made no progress at all.

 Posted by glenn