Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to be executed May 16, has solidified his position as the poster-boy of cold-blooded villainy. The Oklahoma City bomber has once again outraged the American public when he described the 19 dead children among his 168 victims as "collateral damage" in an interview.

Although it scarcely seemed possible, this appalling comment has made McVeigh an even more despised figure in American society. It produced widespread and justified expressions of revulsion and anger at his lack of regard for even the most innocent of his victims.

There is no doubt that McVeigh is an exceptionally malevolent and brutal criminal. Yet the rest of us may not be as distant from his propensity to rationalize the killing of innocents as we prefer to believe. All too often, good people allow themselves to believe that the end justifies the means, that "war is hell." Or they find some other means to dismiss the deaths of those who did nothing to deserve being killed.

It is worth recalling where McVeigh got this chillingly antiseptic phrase "collateral damage." It was coined by the Pentagon during the Gulf War to describe the deaths of innocent Iraqis during the massive bombing campaign of 1991 and was an attempt to obscure and rationalize these deaths with Orwellian jargon.

"Collateral damage" during the Gulf War included, in only one instance, 313 people incinerated at the Amiriya bomb shelter in western Baghdad, which was deliberately attacked. When asked about the extent of the Iraqi casualties toward the end of the Gulf War, then-military Chief of Staff Colin Powell blandly remarked: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in."

Indeed, it is not a matter that has ever seemed to concern too many Americans. The same applies to the effects of santions on innocent Iraqi civilians over the past decade. Asked by an interviewer if the deaths of 500,000, not 19, children because of santions could possibly be justified, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did not dispute the figure or the causality, but instead simply remarked: "We think the price is worth it."

McVeigh was a gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle during the Gulf War and told his relatives that "after the first time, it got easy" to kill Iraqis. Is it possible that by invoking the awful phrase "collateral damage," McVeigh is not only repeating a rhetorical device for denial he learned in the military service, but is actually taunting the government, and even society at large, for its own propensity for callous indifference.

"Collateral damage" also was invoked to describe the effects of attacks on civilian passenger trains, refugee convoys and the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia during the war in Kosovo. And who remembers, or even cared about, the night watchman killed during the missile attack on the Shifa factory in Sudan, a facility no one now denies was simply making badly needed medicines, not chemical weapons?

Of course, these psychological defenses are not confined to U.S. society. They approach a depressing universality. To take another example, the process of rationalizing the deaths of innocents is clearly evident on both sides of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Objections from Americans that the Gulf and Kosovo wars were "just," from Palestinians that liberation must be achieved "by any means necessary" or from Israelis that they must ensure their security "at all costs" merely illustrate how the process of rationalization actually works. Once we begin to accept the pernicious notion that the end justifies the means, a callous moral blindness is the inevitable result.

In our tendency to rationalize and accept the killing of innocents, there may be more of McVeigh in most of us than we would care to admit.

SOURCE: Reprinted from the March, Los Angeles Times, Orange Co. Edition. By Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

The execution of McVeigh is not going to solve his crime. It is not going to rectify his wrong. It will merely indulge those people who were directly hurt by his actions by invoking an act of revenge against him. The society will lower itself to the same level as McVeigh, as a murderer, under the leadership of the republic. McVeigh is not a psychopath; he is not someone who is mentally ill, or unbalanced, he cold-bloodedly carried out an act of war against the United States Government, and the use of the phrase "collateral damage" by him is indicative of the fact that he regards himself as at war with the Federal republic. He is not alone. Upon his execution, other radical extremists will not celebrate his death, they will celebrate McVeigh as a martyr. The government of the republic will give him glory after death that will only emphasize the worse characteristics of republican, untraditional society. It would have been a far more effective deterrent to future acts of political violence if McVeigh had been imprisoned for life, left to reflect on all the destruction he caused. Alone with his own conscience, he might have eventually recognized that what he did was morally wrong. But now we will never know, and we can count on thousands of extremist radicals raising their childrens imagining that this man was not a criminal, but a hero, and perhaps a thousand new political terrorists will grow up to take his place. The republic is death. It is a corrupt system of government that not one day in its existence has served a good purpose. As a police and prison state, it is little more than a yoke on the neck of the American people. That is what the Founding Fathers intended it to be. Until Americans recognize that they have been duped, that their elections are frauds, and that their leaders are tyrants, only more and increasing acts of resistance, and increasingly violent resistance will be in our future. In Ireland men threw bombs and were hanged by the hundreds, but it did not stop the bombings. Executing McVeigh will not put this sorry episode behind us, no matter how many memorials the republic builds to its phoney legacy. Until traditional government is restored in the United States, where the common law rights of individuals are recognized by a legitimate government, the only thing in our future is blood and more blood. Think about that on the day McVeigh is executed, and all the militiamen, extremists and radicals drink a toast to their new martyr. )