It is now nearly a month since the July 22 attacks on innocent Norwegians by the rightwing anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, and aftershocks from those mass murders are still reverberating around the world. Yet massacres of innocents are everyday occurrences in wartime.
Nowadays, however, it often seems that those leaders who are ever-ready to inflict shock-and-awe "hits" on perceived enemies — thereby glorifying to themselves and their gung-ho followers the righteousness of their own causes — have forgotten that "collateral damage" is a euphemism for gratuitous slaughter.
Collateral damage underlies Breivik's perverse logic, too, since he claims his killings were "necessary" to further his cause. Is that so different from the logic of the belligerent leader of a country?