The glaring inconsistency lies in the fact that terrorists are not states against which one can wage war. This means that there are no regular armies fighting each other, but only one (usually vastly superior) army that arbitrarily decides which targets to attack and who to kill, which is not warfare, but the killing of arbitrary targets with arbitrary justification. This fundamentally flawed thinking was normalized during the occupation of Afghanistan under this pretext. It means nothing more than the right of the stronger party to do whatever it wants because it is supposedly fighting evil, which does not wear uniforms but hides among the civilian population, who are thus always under general suspicion of also being terrorists.

You say it’s okay when the US does it, but when anyone else does it, it’s an atrocity? You also say that the extreme disproportion between the victims of such an asymmetrical conflict would be acceptable. You do realize that Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine in the same way, right? And you really don’t see how absurd that is?

The only thing that could possibly top that is claiming that a country has weapons of mass destruction in order to destroy it, even though that country has no weapons of mass destruction at all - remember that US invasion? What I’m getting at is this: finding reasons for war that obscure the true intentions and coming up with justifications for extremely brutal actions is a specialty of the US. Another current example: the cold blooded murder of Venezuelan citizens in violation of international law – this time not on the grounds that they were allegedly terrorists, but on the grounds that they were allegedly drug dealers.