bowser, mcfly, and ER all have facts on their side, but the meaning of those facts is different because of the different context of different time scales.

ER is focusing narrowly on the here-and-now, and the tit-for-tat of how "morally" we hit back at our attackers compared to how "morally" they hit us in the first place. Good for us, we're not like Them, we're relatively less barbaric in the way we hit back. We're less bloody, anyway, those Hellfire missiles fired from drones don't leave much blood, or anything else.

But bowser and mcfly are, properly in my opinion, accounting for more than two centuries of history, and they're acknowledging the causality that's impossible to see in the narrow slice of here-and-now.

There's a definite risk here I'll go on for too many paragraphs about the history, from the colonization of the Middle East by Britain and France in the 19th Century, the post-WWI imposition of artificial boundaries that facilitated the efficient extraction of oil, the post WWII manipulation of the Arab world to keep the people focused on religious strife while puppet dictators made billions of dollars selling us trillions of dollars worth of their people's oil. The sustained covert effort to kill off any impulses to democracy that might threaten the West's energy supply, the profits of the oil companies, and the wealth of the plutocrats.

The poverty disease and starvation and desperation of hundreds of millions of Arabs.

The millions of Arabs killed at our direction, only some by our hand openly.

But the thing is, Rob, they know what we've done to them, and they resent it.

I'm not excusing ISIS or al Qaeda or any of the other barbaric and violent movements we've inspired.

But I'm not flinching at the causality that history reveals: We created the fertile ground in which ISIS is now thriving. We created the resentments that a few religious fanatics could exploit, we sowed the seeds of the hatred that they could turn back against us as a weapon. We magnified the power of ISIS by giving them so many willing, and desperate, recruits.

And now we empower ISIS with inflammatory rhetoric about carpet-bombing the Middle East, about "making the sand glow", about torturing Muslims not so much to gather vital intelligence to save lives, dubious as that proposition is, but for revenge and blood lust. Rhetoric about "purging" Muslims from American society in a way morally no different than the Nazi attempt to purge Germany of Jews. They hear all that cacophony over the background buzz and explosion of Obama's drone flights firing missiles from afar.

There are two sides to the story, Rob. I'm with the people who have the courage to tell both sides of it.

That's what I feel about it. Thanks for asking.