Such mob hysteria strikes us in the West as so . . . barbaric. They were only cartoons, we piously declare; Muslims need to get over it and accept the world as we see it. People insult us or our prophets, we assert, yet you don't see us torching buildings and threatening innocent people.

Well, of course not. When we in the West get upset, we outsource our violence to professionals.

This isn't going to be a defense of the very-likelyorchestrated mob attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Feb. 4 and the Danish embassy in Beirut the next day. This is a condemnation of unwarranted, unjustified violence no matter who commits it.

It's easy enough, and proper, to conclude that it's wrong when a mob burns down an embassy over a cartoon, when terrorists conspire to fly aircraft into buildings, when suicide bombers kill innocent civilians or when insurgents take and sometimes execute hostages.

It's considerably harder to see the violence we commit -- or rather, that which is committed in our names with our endorsement -- in a similar light. We don't participate in it ourselves; we leave that to our military, to government spooks or to third-country operatives. Our part of the deal is to defend our surrogates against all criticism, or resolutely downplay concerns when they go a little too far or operate a little too indiscreetly in the execution of their assignments.

Personal violence

The brutal violence of Muslim radicals is raw, personal and shocking. They blow themselves up; they plant their own improvised explosive devices; they brandish their own swords over the heads of kneeling hostages; they light their own torches to commit arson.

But we were far away when our troops used a gruesome napalm-like chemical weapon on civilians during the assault of Fallujah. The revelations about torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib seemed so distant from our daily reality that conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh compared it to a playful fraternity hazing. We shrug to learn our military has imprisoned wives as levers to flush out husbands suspected of working with the enemy. We are unmoved by ''collateral damage,'' casually excusing the deaths of uninvolved civilians as a necessary byproduct of war.

We embrace the dialogue of violence as does the enemy. Slash-and-burn columnist Ann Coulter elicited energetic cheering when she disparaged Muslims as ''ragheads'' in a speech Friday before the Conservative Political Action Conference. As any propagandist knows, it's much easier to countenance violence and death delivered against a people once they have been dehumanized to mere slurs.

It's all violence; it's all ugly. If you're inclined to excuse it by saying, ''Look, this is war,'' then, Yes, it's all war. It's what we asked for when we suspended the justified police action of crushing al Qaeda and took on as our new quest the military reformation of Arab Muslim world. Yet we cry ''foul'' when the enemy refuses to play by our rules and capitulate according to our hoped-for script.

This is why our outrage over the embassy burnings borders on fatuous: The majority in America accepted this path of unjustified war, a path with no rules or standards other than those of the jungle. We start wars because we want to. They torch embassies because they can. Tit for tat.

We as a nation have forgotten the importance of engaging in warfare only for the right reasons. There is more at stake than the military contest; there is the need to prove to the uninvolved -- and even the enemy -- that our side is indeed the righteous side. Succeed in this, and our side not only wins; it earns the authority to lead.

I'm often asked what we should have done after the unprovoked, unconscionable 9/11 attacks. What we should not have done is answer with an unprovoked, unconscionable attack of our own. The illusion that we were getting even for 9/11 felt good for a while, as if we could just win and be done with it. Instead, we now find ourselves trapped in an escalating spiral of unjustified violence. Even if we find a way to ''win'' such a contest, we will still lose. We will have lost our souls.

Perhaps that would complete the transit. We lost our minds after 9/11. For one vicious act committed against us, America threw away its centuries-long tradition of hewing to ideals -- just when we needed it most -- and replaced it with the more primitive notion of domination through violence. We're no longer campaigning for noble ideals to triumph over deplorable ones. We're campaigning for us to triumph over them.

When you're not fighting for, and in accordance with, noble principles, it's just violence.

© 2006 The Miami Herald

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