More respect for life and fewer cluster bombs Many people's reactions to the atrocities of September 11th ranged from disbelief, to sadness, to anger, to silence or whatever. We often hear that we have received a declaration of war and we should respond accordingly. This essay lays out my arguments for moderation. The moral case. Morality should be universal. If attacking hostile governments by killing civilians is “evil” and “the worst thing about human nature,” then it is no better for the United States to do so than for Afghanistan. The terrorists who attacked the United States last week have not spoken out, but they would likely describe American foreign policy with "evil," "vile," "despicable" and other words used by Bush. They believe that political ends and revenge for wrongs committed by a foreign army justify the killing of enemy civilians, even if their support for the government was only indirect. Similarly, Bush's speech stated that: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Calls for a spectacularly bloody retaliatory attack against the world's billion Muslims are growing, while dissent has been muted. Mountains of historical evidence document America's tolerance for heavy “collateral” damage when attacking the infrastructure of a demonized enemy, such as Saddam or Milosevic. Tuesday's tragedy demonstrated America's astonishing physical vulnerability, but, perhaps most disturbing, our response threatens to demonstrate moral weakness. this will be much harder to justify in hindsight. The practical case. In Israel, extremists on both sides use terrorism and “random” violence for ends that are neither desperate nor irrational: they aim to derail peace efforts and provoke a violent response on the other side that will lead moderates to reject compromise and side with the extremists. . “Jew” or “Arab” loses meaning in the face of the deeper struggle between hatred and tolerance, although typically only events like the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist prompt people to remember. These crucial and often forgotten lessons of terrorism sound like Sunday school truisms: “the purpose of violence is to breed more violence” and “blood cannot be washed away with blood.” These principles must sound a little otherworldly after Tuesday's atrocities, but there is no other time when they are more important to remember. Pausing to note that we can prove very little about the motivations of