Well, we could fill up this space with more pictures of buildings collapsing and carnage and more teary-eyed protests that we're shocked by the horrible act of terrorism and more flag-waving chatter about how America is a great place to live and that ‘our way of life’ was attacked by some evil foreigners… But somehow that just seems like a waste of time—its already been said plenty of times before, and people just need to get over the shock and put the attack in perspective. Given all the shit the C.I.A. and their buddies have done around the world, killing probably hundreds of millions of people and generally pissing off the rest of the world, anyone who couldn't see this sort of thing coming had to have been a bit blind.

War has always been an ugly business. No matter whose interest it may be in, its always ordinary working-class people who end up dead as soldiers or victims or collateral damage. (After the first couple planes crashed, just admit you were secretly praying that the fourth one might actually find Bush. At least let them actually find someone who really deserves it, if thousands of innocent civilians were going to have to suffer.) But of course that's not the way it works. And with the U.S. bombing Afghanistan in retaliation, its not members of al-Qaida or Taliban officials who are suffering and dying either. Matter of fact, its gonna be us in the long run, cause every slaughter of innocents the U.S. government perpetrates just steels the hate of more future terrorists who will do whatever it takes to get revenge.

That's why its so crazy that our idiot of an unelected president wants to drag us into war right now. It makes perfect sense to want revenge for the thousands of people killed on September 11th, but how? No limited war in the Middle East right now is winnable for the United States. And it'd be next to impossible to mount a sustained campaign in Afghanistan without destabilizing the entire region and potentially triggering a massive world war, not to mention a massive genocide and famine killing millions of Afghans, Arabs, and Pakistanis; breeding the anger that'll cause the next generation of militants to go out for blood in a way that might make September 11th look minor in comparison. Any death is always tragic, but what makes this so much more tragic is the way Americans are sealing their own meaningless doom by rallying behind the same patriotic idiocy that's already led to mass destruction in New York, in Washington, and around the world.

People were real quick—way too quick, in our opinion—to blame Arabs and Islam for the attack, but that's not even really true. Probably a majority of people around the world hate the U.S. government for the long list of things it's done to fuck people over. The hijackers weren't in any way the most extreme in that respect. They were people who've lived in western society for a few years, had seen middle-class ‘success’ here and in Europe, and still weren't satisfied. They'd seen the emptiness of American mass culture as well as the devastation of American foreign policy—can't say as we disagree with them on either point—and decided there wasn't anything worth salvaging. It's kind of like some of the school shootings a few years back, not a real solution to anything, but a very real frustration.

Bush Senior made some comment back when he was in office about the United States being the policeman of the world. And for real, thats how people see us. Spoiled cop’s kids who really have no idea why the same people their dad fucks with all day on his beat come back and spit in his food or harass him at night. Osama himself gave an interview a few years back and said something along the lines of, “I do feel some sympathy for the American people. But if Americans really want to ensure their safety, and their children's safety, they need to do something about their government's foreign policy.”

The more time passes, the more people here in America are realizing how vulnerable we all are in the event of a major war, and how long—and how most likely unwinnable—the “war” will turn out to be. What will determine all our fates in the end is whether this fear just feeds into the patriotic idiot chorus, or whether we'll be able to turn it into a resolve to do whatever it takes to end this war. This will necessarily involve a number of things, and we're not looking for the “peace” movement to be too much help with any of them.

One, we need to first explain the causes of the war cause you know the media won't do its job. We need the moral strength of having some honest voices heard in the middle of the war-machine propaganda. We need to be in the streets to let the rest of the world know their beef is with our rulers and not with us. We need to be carrying on our own lives and our own personal struggles, because the state is using war as an excuse to take away any freedom or space we've managed to get. And we need to build all this fast, cause pretty soon it'll most likely be illegal to even say anything like this.