Some of the tension around this incident reminds me of a hostage situation. The kind where the hostage takers say, if the police don't handle the incident exactly so and so, then the responsibility for the hostages' deaths is on the policemen's heads. And obviously this is not true, since the person holding the gun and doing the killing is not the policeman but the criminal who took the hostage in the first place. So that's BS. They can't get off the hook that easily (any more than use some stupid toons and Western media posturing as justification for threatening lives or torching an embassy).
But OTOH, if you get an incident commander who is more interested in having a macho pissing contest with the hostage takers than in saving the hostages' lives, and he deliberately provokes the criminals and escalates the situation so that people get killed who need not have been killed, then he's not a good cop -- he is handling the situation in an irresponsible manner. And the badness of the guys he's up against doesn't get him off the hook for being careless or reckless with the lives of the hostages.
This whole "cowboy showdown mentality," whether it's Dubya with his "with us or against us" ranting, or the Euro press deciding to stick their oar into the Danish govt's better-late-than-never attempts to contain the furore, is not imho either wise or good. The guy who goes in with all guns blazing yelling "I don't negotiate with terrorists, they must be made an example of, it's the principle of the thing" -- or picks up the megaphone and starts yelling insults about their Mamas -- is not the guy I want handling the situation if I'm ever a hostage :-) I'd prefer the good negotiator who's willing to talk patiently and make concessions even to unreasonable bad people, in order to keep the peace and limit the damage... and in an increasingly angry, crowded, and running-short-on-fuel-and-water world, we're all hostages to some extent, of our own and other governments. Just another way of looking at it...
On a side note, I'd wait and see whether the US-centred global economy tanks sometime before 2010, before I would confidently describe it as "superior." It may be that a bunch of olive growers and sheep herders in the Back of Central Asian Beyond will be better positioned to maintain their lifestyle 20 years from now than the average SUV-driving accountant in a major Western metropolis, depending on how events shake out. Now that would be ironic. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
From a progressive perspective the real story that revealed the racism against Muslims in contemporary Europe this past month was that of Baden Wuertenburg instituting a special civic test for Muslims, explicitly justified by the argument that Muslims are to be considered inappropriate candidates for citizenship until proven otherwise, while for non Muslims it is the reverse (and thus no need for a test). That's a clear cut example of racism in action and if there were mass protests about it, even violent ones, I suspect they'd get a lot more sympathy here at Eurotrib and among the European secular left in general.
