Earlier today the United States attacked two nations accused of harboring the terrorist team responsible for the recent bombings in East Africa. Telling the world that “our target was terror,” U.S. naval ships fired seventy-five to one hundred cruise missiles into a busy urban neighborhood of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, a city of 2.3 million people, and at a lightly-populated target in Afghanistan.

It is a solid principle of both international diplomacy and nonviolent action that the more peaceful options are exhausted first. No significant diplomatic efforts have been made with the Taliban government in Afghanistan to extradite reputed ringleader Osama bin Laden. No United Nations resolutions have been passed for inspection of the reputed chemical weapons factory in Sudan (local officials say it’s a factory for medical drugs).

If the chemical plant had been in a European capital, it is all but certain that the U.S. would not have fired dozens of cruise missiles with scant evidence and no preliminary diplomatic effort. But Khartoum is the capital of a militarily weak African nation. While Clinton claims to be saddened at all the African lives lost in the bombing at the embassy in Kenya, yet he has little regard for the lives of Africans in the neighboring Sudan.

Justice takes time. It needs the careful weighing of evidence by neutral parties. It took over a year for investigators to collect the evidence surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing and for Timothy McVeigh to be convicted of the crime. But while justice might take time, politics requires immediacy, drama. Clinton is a politician and he knows that tough military adventures against pip-squeak countries is the fastest way to rally bipartisan domestic support in times of trouble. Conservative politicians have stopped the ever-louder calls for his impeachment over the sex and perjury scandal to rally behind him and mutter the familiar imperialistic clichés about politics stopping at the water’s edge. But it is time to stop playing politics with Third World lives.

“Our target was terror” said President Clinton, but so was his solution. The only way America knows to respond to two bombs is to set off seventy-five bombs. The only way it know to avenge the death of hundreds of innocent Africans is by threatening the lives of hundreds of other Africans. Terrorist bombing by any other delivery method is just as deadly and it is just as disruptive to international world order.

As citizens, Americans have grown too complacent about these missile launches against unarmed cities. These attacks have become too familiar a part of U.S. policy. Too few questions are asked, either immediately following the bombing or in the years afterward. Terrorist missiles are not effective means of apprehending criminals or serving justice. Early reports from Afghanistan are that bin Laden is safe and continuing to plan further attacks against Americans. In the last decade, missile attacks have been used against Libya, Lebanon and Iraq but in no case have they damaged the enemy and have in fact only strengthened the anger and the resolve of their supporters.

As before, the missiles were launched by computer from ships hundreds of miles away. We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children. Children whose nightmares will now featured screaming missiles from unseen terrorists known only as Americans. Children whose dreams will be the taste of revenge.

Osama bin Laden has won. He won by provoking the U.S. to shun it’s ideals of democracy and justice to wallow with him in the mud of organized international terror. Two hundred and fifty million Americans have now joined bin Laden’s crusade to avenge terrorist violence with more terrrorist violence. It is time to stop all terror, it is time to speak out against all violence.

Yousef traveled to Afghanistan to join the Mujahedeen rebels in their fight against Soviet occupiers, and there learned the guerrilla techniques he would later employ in New York. Who supported the Mujahedeen and paid for Yousef’s training in terrorism? The United States Central Intelligence Agency, who funneled the Afghan rebels millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars.

It would seem a simple case of U.S. militarism coming home to roost, but it is not so simple and it is not uncommon. Follow most trails of terrorism and you’ll find United States government funding somewhere in the recent past.

Timothy McVeigh was another angry young man, one who had to drop out of college, couldn’t find a steady job, and moved from trailer park to trailer park as an adult, wondering if the American Dream included him. He did what a lot of economically-disadvantaged young kids do, and enlisted in the U.S. Army (this has been described by some as “the poverty draft”).

In 1988, he met Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols at the U.S. Army base at Ft. Benning, Georgia (coincidentally home of the infamous School of the Americas). There he was taught how to turn his anger into killing and was quickly promoted, getting good reviews and being awarded with the Bronze Star and Combat Infantry Badge for his service in the Gulf War.

Later he came back to the U.S. with his Ft. Benning friends and turned his anger against the U.S. government. He used his military skills to build a bomb (allegedly with Nichols, now at trial, with the knowledge of Fortier, who turned state’s witness). On a spring day in 1995, he drove the bomb to Oklahoma City’s federal building and set it off, killing 168 people. McVeigh’s mother said, “It was like he traded one Army for another one.” (Washington Post, 7/2/95)

Another terrorist trained by the United States government.

But it doesn’t end there either. This same dynamic happens on the nation-state level as well. Today’s headlines also include stories about the standoff between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and United Nations arms inspectors, a situation which threatens to renew military fighting in the region. Who funded Hussein and gave him millions of dollars worth of weapons to fight the Iranians during the 80s? Why, it’s the U.S. government again.How come the United States is directly involved in training some of the biggest terrorists of the decade? Haven’t we learned that militarism only leads to more militarism? Would Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Timothy McVeigh just be political unknowns if the United States hadn’t taught them to kill with their anger? Would Saddam Hussein be just another ex-dictator if the U.S. hadn’t funded his military during the 1980s?

We can never know these answers. But we can stop training the next generation of terrorists. Let’s stop funding war, let’s stop solving problems with guns and explosives. Let today’s angry twenty year olds cut people off in traffic and do no more. Let’s stop these undeclared wars.