Younger Brother: You say these people at the football game are innocent. They are less innocent than the Pakistanis killed by American drones.
60 Minutes: Just how do you figure that?
Younger Brother: Because your country is a vigorous democracy in which people can protest, write their representatives, and have a voice in policy. So they are ultimately responsible for that policy. In my country? Yes, we have a vote now and then, but there is a gap like your Grand Canyon between me and the Pakistani Army, which basically runs our country. These people in the football stadium, they are responsible. They are making war against us, so they are soldiers. They are as responsible as those men who sit in air-conditioned trailers in Nevada and drop bombs on us.
Older Brother: Here in this prison, we are condemned to death. I don't care. My family was the stalk that sustained the flower of my life. My family has disappeared. So will I.
Of course, 60 Minutes would never air an interview like that: nothing is ever to be said to Americans that might make them see the terrorists' point of view. That's not how you run a war -- against terror or another nation.
But I can't help feeling that after more attacks and the inevitable follow-up profiles of terrorists that Americans, who are a fair-minded people, will finally begin to see the answer to President George W. Bush's puerile question, "Why do they hate us?" They'll see that it's not for "our freedoms." It's for something far more tangible.
And then maybe, at long last, as during those healthy few years of scepticism at the end of the Vietnam War, disgusted Americans will demand a foreign policy that agrees with American values. For Obama was right: they do indeed "define us as a country."
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