>>>I was only half joking. Fighting terrorism on one side while thinking that on the other side there are some good terrorists is not helping at all. And fighting whole countries just because of a bunch of terrorists is only creating more of them.
>>>
>>>The whole thing smacks of hypocrisy, IMO.
>>
>>Four years ago I would have totally disagreed with you, but now I'm not so sure. We do pick and choose who we consider our enemies. I guess the country as a whole isn't much different that an individual sometimes. Probably a whole social/psych course in there somewhere...
>
>Actually, it's just Machiavelli. The end justifies the means. We'll launch a war on terror, because all your oil are belong to us, not because we despise terrorism per se. We have a moral code that predates the calendar by several millennia so we can tell good from bad: "good is when we raid the other village and take their women; bad is when they do that to us".

The burning of British Government buildings and homes and beatings of British representatives, before the war of independence, by mobs in the Colonies that became the U.S.A., is called patriotism.