The acts of often–unquestioning subordinates are immoral if they trespass the preeminent rights of others who’ve not first enacted a similar trespass
      -This applies to the U.S. and British forces launching weapons to kill Afghans—as well as four U.N. landmine–clearing personnel—along with the suicide bombers piloting the aircraft striking the twin towers, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. That the former may have known their mission to be to destroy order of battle only possibly with inadvertent and euphemistic “collateral damage” in other human lives is no exception

A moral custodial defense requires all men within a nation–state proportionally to respond to another’s trespass of the preeminent rights of even one of its citizens first by trying to bring a perpetrator before a moral court given the probable cause to do so.
      -This means that all citizens politically involved within a “chain of command” first must morally question to reject their “orders” otherwise. Yet, most of these still only know their “orders” selectively on a so–called “need to know” basis through an immoral top–down rule of men.
      -Also that they must not first perpetrate such trespasses themselves to “retaliate” against or “preempt” other trespasses as this newest “freedom–loving” and “moral” coalition immorally combined to do. Rather, they should go after the alleged perpetrators in order to achieve justice and act in moral self–defense as a proportioned response to those who’d possibly act to prevent them from accomplishing their mission. Yet, Bush’s military has retaliated, allegedly against the Taliban, to preempt all Afghan military responses and kill some among them as a broader military objective in their targeting.

A moral right to informed choice applies to all also to include a prospective “enemy” and those who might support them.
     -This means that a moral nation–state must inform all who’d trespass its citizen’s rights so they can know the proportioned moral response—including their military’s—in advance. Yet, Bush’s military has left the objectives of their targeting unclear—and with it—many in Afghanistan can’t clearly know if they are targets at all! Legitimately therefore, many there are “terrorized” even if the responsive terrorists don’t intend it.
      -Also that every individual within foreign nation–states would know this moral purpose—that, within it, even an intrusion within their social borders won’t involve their own personal security unless they first act immorally otherwise. Yet, Bush’s government hasn’t made this clear either. They’d left room for their enemy to recruit their own new terrorists and greater public support for their side.
      -Also that this applies evenhandedly to all individuals within all nation–states. Yet, Bush otherwise has applied an immoral realpolik within his moral relativism. The Chechnyan rebels the U.S. formerly funded quickly have become “terrorists” in an alliance with Russia. A Taliban government funded with U.S. dollars now suddenly also is the enemy. Bush’s “moral coalition” again includes the other nation–states necessary to gaining NATO and U.N. support, the quid pro quos required largely to remain unpublicized within the rubric of “national defense.”
     -Also that it applies to all citizens within a moral nation–state equally. Yet, “national defense” and “security” provide Bush and those he rules as men with the pretext for ruling the rest of their citizens from top down otherwise, even as domestic civil rights erode even on a conceptual basis within our formative language. Not surprisingly, the use of a “black budgeting” to include the weapons and their delivery means—those used immorally in retaliation and preemption—also still falls within this pretext.

A Summation. President Bush essentially has offered nothing “new” within the “war” on “terrorists” he leads. He has taken some three weeks to form his so–called “moral coalition” to include the backing of NATO and the U.N. within an uneasy alliance. He’s done so much like his father, a former U.S. president also within a morally relative practice of “realpolitik.” Within this practice, former President Clinton, among others, also led terrorist attacks in response to others upon two U.S. embassies in Africa. In fact we have to go all the way back to U.S. President Carter’s attempt to free U.S. hostages in Iran to find a moral custodial response to another’s initiated immoral act. That it didn’t succeed otherwise only means that its immediate results were no more successful than his successors’ were. That—unlike his successors—he didn’t kill innocents through his orders and ultimately achieved his moral purpose is to his credit.

A Prognosis. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the present President Bush also fail in bringing bin Laden and others to trial or his military not to kill them in self–defense or by immoral design. Regardless, we can be sure in essence that others will replace them anyway—that one man’s “terrorist” still will be their “freedom fighter.” We can be sure that “moral alliances” again will shift to serve the immoral rule of men who either enact or submit to their own converging self–interests. So, around and around we’ll continue to go unless politically we truly institute the “freedom” the new Bush at least professes to be “loved” by those he’s recruited into his so–called “moral coalition.” That the Saudi and Kuwaiti rulers included, among others, aren’t even–conceptually “democratic” and even have ordered or abetted trespasses against U..S. citizens’ rights without a moral response from the U.S. but goes to the moral point itself.