“Collateral damage sounds better than ‘we bombed and killed these people,’” Zinn said.

According to Zinn, incidents like the recent bombing of an Afghan wedding party cannot be called accidents.

“When bombing, you inevitably claim innocent lives, so innocent deaths are not accidents,” he said.

The proper response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would have been to “think very intelligently...about how to dry up the sources of terrorism,” Zinn said.

He added that defensive measures alone are not able to prevent terrorism, saying the U.S. must first change its attitude towards the rest of the world.

“America needs to get out of its machismo psychology...and become a more modest country. Sweden doesn’t worry about terror,” Zinn said.

When asked by an audience member how the U.S. should have responded to the Taliban after Sept. 11, Zinn said that U.S. foreign policy should be aimed at bringing about “situations of justice around the world,” but that we are “limited” in our ability to do so.

Zinn said America should not be isolationist but should be interventionist with “economic and social means,” rather than military force.

Zinn said that the “roots” of Arab anger are easily identified: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, economic sanctions on Iraq and American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Zinn even claimed that sometimes terrorists’ demands should be met if they are “deserving.”

Zinn said that the Palestinians’ desire to end the Israeli occupation was one of these deserving demands, and that a peace deal that included security for Israel and a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories would be acceptable to the majority of the Israeli and Palestinian population.

—Staff writer Andrew P. Winerman can be reached at winerman@fas.harvard.edu.