It really depends on your point of view doesn't it? Think of it from the Muslim point of view. In Afghanistan the civilian death toll directly attributed to Coalition forces is around 6000. In Iraq it's hard to get a hard number but it is in the tens of thousands. That's Christians killing innocent Muslims. Many in the Muslim world call this terrorism. We sanitize it and call it "collateral damage" but when it happens to us we call it terrorism. All the victims in terrorist attacks as well as the civilian victims in Iraq and Afghanistan are innocent civilians and they are dead. What's the difference? Is it that their lives are not as valuable as ours? Or because we cloak it in some legal veneer called war and somehow it's justifiable. But innocent is still innocent and dead is dead. I am not trying to justify or condone terrorism and I am as disgusted with it as the next person but I have to say that our hands are little cleaner.
Well, yes and no. Firstly, the attack on America on September the 11th 2001 which killed thousands of innocent people was definitely a terrorist attack, perpetrated by radical muslim terrorists who deliberately targeted innocent civilians on American soil, and this should not be forgotten when you analyze the current situation. Those innocent people weren't "collateral damage", they were all targets, and at the time, one of the terrorist leaders publicly stated that he was disappointed that more Americans weren't killed in those attacks.
While most thinking people would agree that the invasion of Iraq that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was totally unnecessary, this is more than just Muslims vs Christians fighting some kind of holy war. George Bush Snr refused to invade Iraq and depose Saddam in 1991 because he feared that breaking up the Muslim controlled government would throw Iraq into a civil war, between the minority Sunni Muslims, and the majority Shiites. A huge chunk of the innocent civilian casualties were a result of this "in fighting" between the two religious sects, and were not "collateral damage", or victims of the coalition forces. It's a pity that GW didn't listen to his pappy.
What has pisssed off the majority of moderate Iraqi Muslims who at first welcomed the occupying coalition forces and later soured their relationship with the US (predominately) is the damage that was done to the infrastructure in major cities like Baghdad, and the ridiculously slow progress in restoring basic services like water and power, hospitals, police, employment, etc. Also, the Sunni Muslims were disgusted with the way that the US handled Saddam, regardless of what you think about him personally, just like anyone else, he should have been entitled to a fair trial, so the US's decision to hand him over to his enemies, the Shiites, was seen by thousands of Sunni's as the US taking sides with their enemies.
Afghanistan is a different situation again. The US was justified, I believe, in invading Afghanistan, because there was strong evidence (no, not the Iraq WMD bullsh1t that GW and Tony Blair cooked up to convince the free world that invading Iraq was the honorable thing to do) that Afghanistan was being used as a training ground for terrorists, the Taliban government was making life a misery for the Afghani people, (particularly Afghani women who were virtually slaves under the Taliban's version of Islam) and were heavily involved in the manufacture and distribution of huge amounts of Heroin, to exchange for weapons to wage a holy war against the US and Israel, and other moderate Muslim countries in the region. This heroin was finding it's way to just about every country in the world, so once again, the coalition had to act, to reduce the flow of drugs into their countries.
There was no bullsh1t there, in the 1980's under Ronnie Raygun, the CIA installed Osama Bin Laden as spritual leader of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (now more commonly known as the Taliban and Al Queda) to kill Russians, providing these "freedom fighters" with millions of US tax payers dollars in cash and weapons, including hundreds of Stinger missiles, but even then the Afghanis had another agenda for after the Russians left, so they kept the majority of the stingers for a "rainy day". It's certainly raining now...........
Sadly the coalition forces in Afghanistan have occasionally killed innocent civilians, just like they did in every other war that they've participated in over the last 100 years or so, in the heat of battle, mistakes happen. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected, and the coalition still has support from the vast majority of moderate Afghani's who just want to get on with their lives. The soldiers coming back from Afghanistan that I've spoken to tell me that while the Taliban fighters hate them with with a passion bordering on psychosis, the Afghani "civilians" are happy they are there, because the Taliban gave them such a bad time when they were in power.
The forced incarceration of Japanese and German civilians living in allied countries during WW2 was necessary, (after all, it was Japanese civilians who provided the intelligence for the raid on Pearl Harbor that forced the US into participating in WW2) and certainly more "humane" than the axis countries treated foreigners. (not to mention several million residents who were the "wrong" religions) And while I wouldn't advocate detaining all Muslims living here or in the US, Britain etc, you'd have to be stupid to believe that there aren't active terrorist cells operating in every coalition country at the moment, planning to kill more innocent civilians. Our respective governments and intelligence services have done a remarkable job in curtailing their activities, but the methods that our governments are using, that some Muslim spokespersons are complaining about as being "Rascist", or "discriminatory" are certainly necessary, and effective. Cheers, Terry.
